Helping clever children

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 17

Helping clever children

Advice to Clever Children. By Celia Green. Institute of Psychophysical Research, Oxford, 1981. 187 pp. $19.95. (Reviewed by Alison Neale) What happens to a clever child who finds her most intense living in study and research, but who is denied access to these because of her age? Celia Green was such a child who. after years of marking time in school, began to really use her ability in preparation for School Certificate at the age of 13. only to be denied at the last moment the opportunity to sit the examination. She writes that her life henceforward was a nightmare as teachers and others tried to turn her into an “ordinary person." The book describes her early life and the author distills from this experience a psychology which makes sense for her. A psychology of centralisation. (Advice to clever children: “Think hard about the motivation of those who have power over you. They are not going to understand you; you had better understand them.") Her psychology discards the notion of

living life according to the social view of one's own position and asserts the possibility of an individual being in total opposition to social agreement. This centralisation is. she claims, more likely to occur for men in our society than for women. Along with most male psychologists Celia Green values “masculine" autonomy more highly than “feminine” interdependence within relationships. The book provokes thought on human beliefs about reality and the basis on which any individual makes decisions and acts in life. It is easy to read in one sense for the language is clear and straightforward, but difficult in another because Celia Green is putting forward thoughts which are not in the main stream of Western psychological thinking. One of her many aphorisms states: “The idea of an individual standing alone against the world was a very dangerous one; the human race is quite right to regard it so." Celia Green founded and is director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research which has published this unusual book and others by the same author.