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By Lloyd Albritton

Columnist

Hungarian chess teacher, educational psychologist and pioneer theorist in child-rearing, Laszlo Polgar (b. 11 May 1946), who raised his three daughters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia) and Judit (Judith), to be chess prodigies and world champion chess players, believes geniuses are made, not born. Polgar began studying intelligence when he was a college student. He later said, “when I looked at the stories of geniuses, I found that they all started at a very young age and studied intensively.” Polgar prepared for fatherhood before marriage by studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein. He concluded that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn any healthy newborn into a genius. Polgar’s formula for happiness is work, love, freedom and luck, in that order (Wikipedia.com).
I thought about Laszlo Polgar recently as I watched a White House press conference with Elon Musk and President Donald Trump in the president’s office with Elon’s 4-year-old son, “X Æ A-Xii” (pronounced X Ash A Twelve), sitting on his father’s neck. Can anyone doubt that Elon is educating his little boy to be a political prodigy? I was amused by the thought that X might be the nation’s Secretary of State by the time he is in the seventh grade? I mean…I’m just saying!
While Laszlo Polgar advocates that geniuses-in-the-making should begin early and intensive specialization in a particular subject by the time they are 3 years old, world renowned psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, believed that the human personality, unarguably the most reliable predictor of human behavior, is fully developed by the time we are 3 years old. I do not argue that either of these theories precludes the other from being true. In fact, one thing they hold in common is that maximal human intellectual development begins at a very early age, perhaps even at birth, and is advanced by a lifetime of study and work.
One of the topics discussed in the Trump/Musk press conference was the failing education system in America and what we ought to do about it. There is a growing sentiment among conservative voters in the U.S. that the federal government should get completely out of the education business and leave our childrens’ education up to the states and local school boards. And, of course, to the parents. There is good reason for this sentiment, considering the embarrassingly low test scores in many subjects, including reading, math, science and history, in U.S. K-12 schools.
Just how bad is it? The 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) recently reported that the U.S. ranks 24th out of 45 in eighth-grade math and 15th out of 63 in fourth-grade science. Additionally, the 2024 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed U.S. 15-year-olds ranking 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading among 27 countries. That sounds pretty bad to me.
Old people like me are notorious for advancing our unscientific notions by observing, “back in my day this is how we did it…,” or “it seems to me,” but the fact is, it is human nature for young and old alike to give weight to our own observations and personal impressions, scientific or not. For example, seeing a young father bring his 4-year-old son into a televised Presidential press conference naturally prompted me to think, “that little boy might be a genius one day!” Laszlo Polgar used to take his infant daughters on walks through the local zoo or the streets of crowded Budapest and explain all the sights and sounds to them in adult language. Likewise, when I ask a tenth-grade student who Abraham Lincoln was and he does not know, I am likely to leap to the judgement that this student is not learning much about American history at his school. I do this because I tend to trust my own eyes and ears and judgements.
To be sure, what my eyes and ears and judgments are telling me these days is that too many of our K-12 students are not getting a very good education. Many of them, according to my observations, do not know the fundamentals of the common core academic subjects. I base my opinion not just on what I read, but on what I see. I have taught in our K-12 schools and in our community college system in past years and I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears and perceived with my own brain that their reading and writing and critical thinking skills are deficient. I also talk to my grandchildren occasionally about their school experience and I am quite convinced from their responses that their school days include an abundance of wasted time and unproductive foolishness. It should be noted before we go any further that Laszlo Polgar’s educational experiment with his own three children precluded any public or private school tutoring. His curriculum featured only home schooling with all instruction performed only by himself. No even his wife was allowed to instruct them.
Now, just supposing our American school system should suddenly change, that we should stop wasting so much time at school each day trying to get students to settle down and behave and that teachers should begin to implement the professional teaching skills and techniques they have been trained in. Let’s just say, for one thing, that we dump the iPads and start asking our teachers to teach from the front of the classroom, to interface and engage with their students, lecturing and writing on the chalkboard, like teachers used to do. I’m just saying!
And further, just supposing we could find a way to get parents nationwide converted to the old-fashioned idea that they have an important role to play in their childrens’ education, like checking their report cards to make sure they are not lying to us and making sure they put aside their iPhones for awhile every night and do their homework. Like the billions* of dollars of wasteful spending DOGE is finding in government budgets lately, one can only imagine how much wasted time is going on in our federally run K-12 classrooms all over the nation these days. Can we fix that? Is it possible that we could transform a nation of failing students into a generation of geniuses with bodacious name handles like “X” and “Big Balls” who are smart enough to solve all the world’s problems? If we start right now, in a generation or two the President might be able to search for his cabinet at one of the local junior high schools.
Even if Laszlo Polgar was wrong about geniuses being made and not born, and Little X turns out to be the only one of Elon’s 10 children to be born a genius, the paradigm of starting young and studying and working hard throughout life is still, I think, a valid one. Our born geniuses can be polished to shine like the sun and our children who are born less than genius can still be educated to do ingenious things. By changing our education system in America to accommodate the intellectual demands of future advanced civilizations maybe we can make, not just America, but perhaps the whole world, not just great again, but perhaps better than it ever has been. I mean…I’m just saying!

*According to reports, a total amount of wasteful spending hasn’t been released by DOGE officials.