Cormac Canales

Both an inspiration and a caution

Revisado: 08-01-20

The story was simultaneously interesting, inspirational, and sad.

It starts with a brief introduction to Sarah and Boris Sidis, William's parents, who were both 19th century Russian-Jewish immigrants. As a teen in czarist Russia, Boris had been arrested & placed in solitary confinement for teaching peasants to read; this ultimately led to him emigrating to America under a "plea bargain" of sorts. Sarah was a victim of the pogroms; during one brutal instance of mob violence when she was just 8, her house was ransacked and she was forced to hide in an old chimney after being separated from her family. Her family thus decided to flee Russia for America. Sarah & Boris independently settled in Boston for the same reason: they had heard it was a part of America where education was highly valued.

A reader can thereby easily see the origins of their love of education, their pacifism, egalitarianism, and concern for the downtrodden; qualities which William would keenly absorb in his upbringing. For instance, when he is one year old and barely able to speak, William tells his parents that his favorite thing in the world is the front door, because when it opens he meets new people.

Sarah and Boris together raise William using "the Sidis method". On paper it seems sound: teach children to understand the fundamentals of a subject so well that they can derive more complex things in that subject without memorizing. Supposedly, this enabled William to learn any language in a matter of weeks and master non-Euclidean geometry by age 10. He later entered Harvard at age 11, and his record as being the University's youngest entrant still stands to this day. Sarah and Boris saw his success as proof their method could work on any child, and might lead to a quasi-utopia if mass-implemented in early education. Sarah had planned to publish a "how-to" guide on implementing the Sidis method, but never did so, and only a few pages of the first draft survive to this day.

Reading between the lines, there are some hints of emotional abuse, or at least manipulation, in Sidis' upbringing. The accounts that Sarah would put guests--and even the children of guests--to work on her property when they would visit leads me to wonder if she saw everyone around her as expendable. She even at one point tried to impose the Sidis method on her nieces and nephews (including a young Clifton Fadiman), to the chagrin of their parents. Needless to say, people tended to avoid her company. There is also the disturbing tale of how William's parents threatened to institutionalize him for participating in a May Day parade that turned violent, even though William's arrest amounted to little more than a misdemeanor charge that only saw him spend a few nights in jail. This strikes me as being the moment where William decided to distance himself from them and almost everything they taught him permanently, including the love of education (he worked as a mere bookkeeper for the rest of his life).

In a particularly sad tangential chapter, the author recounts the lives of child prodigies from earlier centuries, many of whom either died before adulthood or amounted to little (the most notable exception being John Stuart Mill, who seems an intellectual forebear of Sidis).

The audiobook narration was OK. A few times a sentence was repeated in its entirety, but I don’t know if that was because of a misprint in the book itself, or clumsy narration. But it wasn’t too bothersome.

Sidis’s story is recommended for those who hope to one day raise an exceptional or above average child through “nurture”: both as a partial guide (some of the “Sidis Method” remains good advice for a child’s intellectual growth), and a cautionary tale. I would be very interested in knowing if there exists a "right" way to do the Sidis method or if it was doomed from the start. But that is a future project for an intrepid Doctor of Education or Psychologist.

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