However much I might doubt the value of the SAT test, there seemed no other way for me to demonstrate my intelligence, either its current extant or its aptitudes. Thus I found myself in the fortunate position of being a National Merit scholar, with a scholarship that itself represented more money than I’d ever seen in one place, and at the same time expressing my interest in schools that offered radical critiques of the conventional educational models. To put it bluntly, I presented myself to Johnston as a young prodigy, just as I had done all through junior high and high school, ever since learning the fantastic advantages of being just a year ahead of all my classmates in math class, back in the seventh grade.
And Johnston, at least the Johnston with which I had to do on my visit, seemed quite willing to encourage my self-presentation and to market itself likewise directly to it. I use the term “market” not to evoke Madison Avenue, but simply to cast the visit as a transactional exchange of information.
Darwinian aside: I've been speculating recently that prodigies, true prodigies, may be evolutionary dead ends, or even throwbacks to earlier patterns of primate development. Any child whose intelligence appears to mature to adult levels in a small fraction of the time required by other humans might in fact be following a template of maturation closer to that of our chimpanzee cousins, that is to say our common ancestors, than the one that has proven successful so far for modern humans, which requires a maturation period as long as twenty years to perfect certain mental faculties required for life in society. Clearly, some of what has to be involved in the development of a prodigy is closely related to metabolic imbalance, even if it isn't that strictly speaking: energies that are budgeted for certain developmental purposes are in the prodigy focused to an unbearable intensity of purpose. The sociobiological question might still be asked: does the occasional outlier focusing energies in this way provide something that would be useful to a population? (I would be inclined to define "population" as a fairly small group, in terms of what we've evolved into within the past hundred thousand years: i.e., could a prodigy with some more or less random exaggeration of mental abilities, occurring very occasionally, be of assistance to a group of forty or fifty hunters and gatherers, say?)
