While reading the Wikipedia article on hothousing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothousing I saw Gordon Brown (the U.K. prime minister before David Cameron) mentioned as someone who was "hothoused" and a reference to an article
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1811255.ece�Cruel� experiment that left its mark on a very precocious boy:
The Chancellor resents having been a guinea-pig in a pilot project that put him on a fast track to university
Ben Macintyre
The Sunday Times
May 19, 2007
At the age of 10 Gordon Brown became, in his own words, a guinea-pig. On the basis of an IQ test, he was plucked from his primary school in Fife to join a select group of intellectually gifted children at Kirkcaldy High School, one of the best secondary schools in Scotland.
For the next six years, the young Brown and 35 fellow members of the so-called E-stream (standing for early) were nurtured in an academic hothouse, taught in separate classes, expected to excel despite being one or two years younger than their peers, and rigorously prepared for university.
Some thrived on the pressure. Some floundered. A few suffered. Mr Brown was the most precocious product of the E-stream, sailing on to Edinburgh at the age of 16 and then becoming the youngest ever rector of that university. Yet he loathed and resented what he described as a ludicrous experiment on young lives.
Much has been written about the Scottish roots of this �son of the manse� with �psychological flaws�, according to his enemies, and a granite sense of purpose, according to his friends. Yet little attention has been paid to this crucial aspect of his childhood, the years he spent being fast-tracked through school as part of an artificial intellectual elite.
The experiment was abandoned in 1967 but may have marked Mr Brown in various ways. He will be the most avowedly intellectual Prime Minister since Churchill, an avid reader and writer who declared this week: �Education is my passion.� Yet his past as a child prodigy, selected for greatness and schooled to be special, may also explain the weight of expectation and the sense of entitlement that surround him, and what some see as a controlling personality and an intensely serious cast of mind.
The Old Etonian David Cameron is often seen as a product of a very particular sort of education, but the old school influence may weigh just as heavily on Mr Brown. Transferred to the E-stream, leapfrogging two years, he was expected to take control of his academic life at a time when most schoolchildren are still mastering joined-up writing. By 12 he was specialising in history; by 14, he was taking his School Leaving Certificate.
The E-Stream project was the invention of Douglas Mackintosh, the chief education officer of Fife County Council, as a way of pushing more state school students on to university. Pupils with an IQ above 130 were informed that they were being moved to secondary school a year early, and not just any secondary school. Kirkcaldy High School celebrates its 425th birthday next month (Mr Brown, inevitably, will unveil a plaque), and there are few schools in the country with a more impressive academic record. Its alumni include the economist Adam Smith and the architect Robert Adam. Thomas Carlyle was once a teacher. Even the school motto seems to echo Mr Brown�s driven personality: Usque Conabor, always strive hard.
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This article puzzles me. What it describes as a "cruel experiment" sounds like a place I would WANT to send my gifted son.
