— From the Misconception That “High IQ Means Top Student” to a New Understanding of Talent, the School System, and What Children Really Need from Education

By Jane Sonnenschein
First draft: January 15, 2026 · First revision: May 23, 2026 · Second revision: July 21, 2026

“The secret of education lies in respecting the student.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

01 | Before We Begin: Where This Essay Came From

This essay did not begin directly with the classical Chinese text Shāng Zhòngyǒng. Before writing it, I had already written two essays about children with high IQs: I Used to Think Gifted Children Were Supposed to Be Top Students. Then I Realized I Was Wrong and Why Are High-IQ Children Also Called Lazy? It Took Me Time to Understand That Intelligence Comes in More Than One Form.

It began when I happened to join a Facebook group for parents of highly gifted children in Germany. There, I read many parents’ stories about their children’s learning, emotions, and development. At the same time, I began looking again at my husband, my daughter, and several people around me.

It was through this process that I slowly realized that, like many people, I had almost instinctively equated “high IQ” with being a top student.

But after actually encountering these families, I began to understand that having a high IQ and fitting well into the school system are not the same thing at all.

A child can be highly intelligent and still be unable to tolerate repetitive exercises. A child may have unusually sensitive senses, a mind that jumps quickly from one idea to another, intense emotions, or abilities that are very unevenly distributed. In a standardized school environment, such a child may seem completely out of place.

That led me to another question: why are some children who understand things very quickly still described by adults as lazy, unwilling to work, or disobedient?

Gradually, I began to realize that what we usually recognize as “intelligence” is only one form of intelligence among many.

A comment under my previous essay gave me a very concrete example of this change in perspective.

One mother told me that both of her children had very high IQs: one scored 137, while the other scored above 155. The child with the comparatively lower score fit extremely well into the school system. The child had excellent grades, did well in almost every area, and required very little help from her.

The other child, whose IQ was extraordinarily high, was constantly on the verge of being left behind by the school system. Every day, the mother struggled to understand how she could help.

From the outside, hearing that a family has two highly gifted children might sound like an extraordinary blessing. But only the parents living inside that reality know how complicated life can become when a child has remarkable abilities but cannot fit into the system that is supposed to educate them.

Later, some readers asked whether I could recommend books on the subject, or what parents should actually do when they have a child like this.

I cannot offer one answer that applies to everyone. I am not an expert in this field, and I have not systematically read enough specialist literature. More importantly, every child has a different pattern of abilities and a different set of difficulties.

All I can do is use the familiar story of Shāng Zhòngyǒng as a shadow that gives us another way to think.

Instead of rushing to make a child fit one particular definition of success, perhaps adults should first observe and understand the child. What are they genuinely good at? What kind of environment and support do they need for that ability to keep growing?

02 | Perhaps We Have Only Understood Half the Story

Sometimes, what is truly wasted in a child is not their talent.

It is that no one ever truly sees them, and no one seriously tries to understand what kind of child they actually are.

In China, almost everyone has heard the story of Shāng Zhòngyǒng.

Fang Zhongyong was only five when he showed an extraordinary ability to compose poems on whatever subject he was given. People in his village quickly began calling him a prodigy. Once his father realized how unusual his son was, he did not continue the boy’s education or seriously consider how this ability might be developed. Instead, he took his son from place to place, displaying his talent in exchange for immediate benefits.

Years later, when people saw Fang Zhongyong again, there was nothing particularly remarkable about him anymore. The line mǐn rán zhòng rén yǐ（泯然众人矣）— roughly, “he had become indistinguishable from ordinary people” — became one of the most familiar warnings in the childhood education of generations of Chinese students.[2]

The explanation most of us were given as children was simple: no matter how intelligent a person is, if they stop learning, they may eventually become ordinary. And if parents only show off a talented child instead of providing proper education, they may destroy a gift that could otherwise have developed.

There is nothing wrong with that interpretation.

But when I return to the story now, I increasingly feel that it only tells half of it.

What makes Shāng Zhòngyǒng so sad may not simply be that “a genius failed to keep working hard.”

At a deeper level, it seems that no one truly understood this child from beginning to end.

No one seriously asked what kind of talent he was showing. No one thought carefully about how that talent could be protected, trained, and sustained. And no one truly treated him as a child who still needed years of guidance, companionship, and development.

Fang Zhongyong was certainly seen by many people.

But he was mainly seen as a “prodigy,” not patiently understood as a particular child.

Many years ago, when I first read this story, I accepted the standard interpretation without much question: Zhongyong’s tragedy was that his later education failed to keep up.

Now, however, I increasingly think that the issue is far more complicated than whether he continued going to school.

The problem begins with the fact that we often think about “talent” itself in overly general terms.

03 | Talent Is Not a Universal Pass

We seem to assume very easily that if a child is intelligent, they should be good at everything.

If a child shows unusual ability in one area at an early age, we expect them to become a top student all the way through school.

And if a child seems exceptional when young, we often assume that they should naturally grow into a conventionally successful adult.

But talent is never a universal pass.

It is more like a key with a very particular shape. Whether that key can eventually open a door depends not only on whether it is placed in front of the right door, but also on whether, once that door opens, someone is willing to keep walking through it with the child.

A child may be holding a key for language, poetic expression, visual thinking, or some unusual form of perception.

But if the adults around them insist that they use it to open a completely different door, the key may eventually appear useless.

The problem is not that the key has no value.

The problem is that the wrong door was chosen from the beginning.

This is something else I gradually came to understand: many children are not unintelligent, nor do they lack abilities worth developing.

They simply do not fit well with the system we have given them.

We often equate “good grades” directly with “being intelligent.” But in a highly standardized examination system, intelligence is not the only thing being rewarded.

The system also rewards an ability to follow rules, emotional and behavioral stability, tolerance for repetition, patience, and the capacity to endure mechanical training for long periods.

Can a child sit still?

Can they complete assignments exactly as the teacher asks?

Can they tolerate doing similar exercises again and again?

Can they continually adjust themselves to match a standard answer?

All of these are important abilities. But they do not represent the whole structure of a child’s talent.

Some children may have intelligence that is simply somewhat above average, yet be extremely well suited to the way schools and examinations operate.

They know how to prepare for class, how to listen, how to review what they have learned, and how to move forward step by step within a set of rules.

That is also an ability worth recognizing.

The problem is that we often mistake this particular ability — the ability to fit very well into the system — for the only form of intelligence worth recognizing.

Children whose abilities are distributed differently are then easily misunderstood.

04 | When Intelligence and the School System Do Not Fit

Some children think very quickly but cannot tolerate repetition.

Some understand things easily but struggle to spend long periods doing exercises they see no meaning in.

Others are extremely sensitive to light, sound, or pressure, reacting much more intensely than the average person.

They may understand something almost instantly in one area, yet perform only moderately at school or even seem completely out of step with everyone around them.

If we explain all of this simply by calling them “lazy,” “unwilling to work,” or “disobedient,” we may completely miss the real issue that needs to be understood.

My husband is one very concrete example.

He once took an intelligence test and scored in the high-IQ range. But his childhood and school years were nothing like the traditional story of a gifted child effortlessly moving from one success to another.

He was bullied at school. He is extremely sensitive to light and sound, and he strongly disliked repetitive exercises whose purpose he could not understand.

In an environment that emphasized obedience, uniform standards, and repeated practice, he felt deeply constrained for years and also felt that no one truly understood him.

Later, there was a period when he became deeply absorbed in video games.

From the outside, this would be easy to interpret as laziness, escaping from reality, or a lack of self-control.

But once he said something to me that I still remember clearly.

“I don’t actually like games,” he told me. “I just need a way to make my brain stop.”

That sentence affected me deeply.

For some people, gaming may not be only entertainment. It may also be a way of forcing a constantly racing mind to focus on one thing for a while.

Otherwise, their minds keep making noise. They keep thinking. They simply cannot stop.

Someone who has never experienced such a state may find it very difficult to understand. From the outside, they may simply ask: Why don’t you work harder? Why don’t you study properly? Why do you have to waste so much time playing games?

But perhaps the more useful question is whether this person has ever been placed in an environment that truly suits them.

My husband also has a British friend who helped me understand even more clearly that a person’s abilities are not evenly distributed across every area of life.

This friend is exceptionally strong in mathematics and logic, and his abstract thinking is remarkable. But when it comes to social interaction, “disastrous” would almost be an accurate description.

When speaking with him, you cannot rely on hints or expect him to infer emotions from indirect language. You have to say exactly what you mean in very clear words, otherwise he genuinely may not understand.

He is not a bad person, nor is he deliberately cold.

His abilities are simply extremely uneven. Some dimensions are astonishingly strong; others are weak in ways that an average person may find difficult to imagine.

Over time, I began to understand that many so-called “intelligent people” are not the all-round personalities we imagine.

They may not be good at every subject.

They may not adapt well to every environment.

They may not handle every relationship with ease.

They can be exceptionally strong in some areas while appearing clumsy, vulnerable, or in need of extra understanding and support in others.

Perhaps what a mature education system should really do is not force every child onto the same track and then measure them with the same ruler.

It should try, as early as possible, to discover what a particular child is genuinely good at, what kind of environment suits them, and how their strengths can be protected, trained, and expanded rather than slowly worn away by demands that do not fit them.

05 | The “Prodigy” Everyone Saw, and the Child No One Truly Saw

When we bring this question back to Shāng Zhòngyǒng, the story becomes even more painful.

At the age of five, Fang Zhongyong could compose poems on a subject immediately after it was given to him. That was clearly a form of remarkable early ability.

But what exactly did that ability mean?

Perhaps he had an unusually strong sense of language, a natural sensitivity to words, rhythm, and imagery. Perhaps he had developed a special intuition for poetic expression at a very young age.

But none of this meant that he would automatically be outstanding in every area.

It did not mean that standardized education would necessarily suit him.

And it certainly did not mean that he was destined to become some kind of universally talented genius.

Yet the adults and society around him never really tried to understand the nature of his talent.

They were simply amazed by it.

His father did not make sure he continued studying in a systematic way. He did not find a suitable teacher for him. He did not give him room to keep growing through reading, writing, poetry, ideas, and a richer inner world.

Instead, he took him around and displayed him.

In the end, Fang Zhongyong’s talent was never slowly transformed into a stable ability.

It was consumed almost as soon as it appeared.

What a child needed was long-term nourishment.

What he received was immediate reward.

He needed to be understood, trained, and protected.

Instead, he received attention, praise, display, and exploitation.

Perhaps this is the truly cruel part of Shāng Zhòngyǒng.

It is not that a genius later refused to work hard.

It is that when a child was first noticed by the world, the world was not really interested in helping him grow. It quickly discovered instead that his talent could be used.

06 | When Parents Recognize Only One Kind of Success

This also makes me think of the conflicts between parents and children that keep escalating in real life.

Some parents do not lack love for their children.

Quite the opposite.

They are often so anxious, and want so badly for their children to “make something of themselves,” that they concentrate all their expectations on the one path they believe to be safest.

In their minds, however, “making something of yourself” often has only one acceptable form: you must get good grades, you must go to university, you must have a respectable job, and your life must move forward along a path recognized and approved by the people around you.

I once read a story online about a single mother living in Shenzhen.

She desperately insisted that her son had to get into university. But he was addicted to gaming and refused to study. Their relationship became increasingly tense, and eventually their conflict even became physical.

The mother became depressed from the anxiety surrounding the situation, while the boy grew increasingly distressed and resistant under years of pressure.

Later, someone asked the mother:

“If you already own a home in Shenzhen, and your son does not go to university but instead learns a practical trade and later works in a blue-collar job, will he really be unable to survive?”

It sounds like a harsh question.

But it cuts straight through to the heart of many family conflicts.

Often, it is not that the child has no possible road forward.

The problem is that the parents recognize only one road.

If the child does not take it, the parents begin to believe that the child’s entire life has already been ruined.

But is that really true?

A child who is not suited to university does not necessarily have no future.

A child who is not good at exams is not without value.

And a child who repeatedly fails within the school system has not therefore failed as a human being.

What destroys many children is not the loss of their original abilities.

It is being told again and again, inside a system that does not suit them, that they are not good enough.

If a child grows up repeatedly hearing:

“Why are you so stupid?”

“Why are you so lazy?”

“Why won’t you work harder?”

“Everyone else can do it. Why can’t you?”

then the child is not merely becoming aware that they have failed to meet the standards around them.

Day after day, those outside judgments gradually become part of the child’s own judgment of themselves.

Eventually, they may genuinely come to believe that they are simply a person who cannot do anything well.

That is what worries me most.

When someone no longer believes that there is anything inside them worth developing or hoping for, it is not only their grades that suffer.

Their whole sense of vitality can slowly begin to collapse.

That is why, when I read Shāng Zhòngyǒng today, I no longer hear only the simple warning I heard as a child.

Back then, I thought the story was mainly telling us that no matter how intelligent a person is, they cannot stop learning.

Now, I am more inclined to understand it this way: even a child with extraordinary talent can still have that talent wasted if they are not properly understood, protected, and guided.

The difference between these two interpretations may seem small on the surface.

But they place responsibility in very different places.

The first interpretation easily turns failure into the child’s fault:

You did not work hard enough, so you failed.

The second forces us to look at adults, families, and the education system.

Did we ever truly see this child?

Did we understand the structure of their abilities?

Did we provide a path that suited the way they could grow?

Did we treat them as a human being who needed companionship and development, rather than as a tool for proving the parents’ judgment or preserving family pride?

Fang Zhongyong’s father was, of course, an important part of the tragedy.

But if we stop at blaming his father, that is also too simple.

Similar things still happen around us today. They simply take different forms.

Some children are no longer taken from house to house to perform poems for money. Instead, they are pushed into competition after competition, constantly made to display their talents, sometimes even turned into carefully managed public personas.

Some are no longer surrounded by curious villagers. Instead, they appear continuously in short-form videos, exposed to the gaze and comments of strangers.

Others may no longer be called “prodigies,” but are given labels such as “top student,” “exceptionally accomplished child,” or “the child every other parent wishes they had.”

The times have changed, but the underlying question has not disappeared.

Are we truly seeing the child?

Or are we seeing only the value the child can bring to the family?

Are we patiently helping that child develop?

Or are we rapidly consuming what makes them special?

Are we helping them discover a path that belongs to them, or forcing them onto the path adults consider safest and most respectable?

07 | What Children Need Is Not Applause, but Soil

Perhaps real education is not about training every child into the same model of success.

Perhaps it begins by discovering, as early as possible, what a child is genuinely good at and then, through long-term training, gradually turning that strength into a stable ability.

Talent alone is not enough.

Talent is only a starting point.

Without long-term training, it may remain forever at the stage of one impressive early performance.

Without a suitable environment, talent can even become painful.

And if it is misunderstood for long enough, it may turn into an ever-deepening gap between the child and the world around them.

So discovering talent is only the first step.

What matters more is what happens afterward.

Turning talent into ability does not simply mean forcing a child to work harder.

Nor does it mean telling them:

“Since you are talented, you must become more successful than everyone else.”

The process should begin by understanding what the child is actually good at.

Then that strength needs to be protected so that it is not worn away in an unsuitable environment.

And from there, the child needs long-term, systematic, and serious training in the direction where that ability can genuinely develop.

If Fang Zhongyong’s gift for language had been treated as something that needed years of cultivation, perhaps he would have had a very different life.

What he needed was not a father taking him from place to place to display him.

He needed reading, writing, teachers, intellectual nourishment, and someone who genuinely understood how to accompany a gifted child as he grew.

He did not need brief applause.

He needed soil in which he could grow.

Many children today are not so different.

What they lack may not be another person repeating, “You need to work harder.”

They may need someone willing to seriously help them find the soil that suits them.

Of course, none of this means that school is unimportant.

It does not mean that grades have no value.

And it certainly does not mean that if a child temporarily struggles within the school system, they should simply stop trying.

Training matters.

Effort matters too.

But effort has to be directed along a path that is at least reasonably well matched to the child.

Otherwise, even a child who has already used all their strength may simply be running into the same wall again and again on a road that was never really theirs.

We cannot place a child in the wrong system and then blame them for failing to bloom.

Nor can we ignore who they really are and then demand that they eventually become the person adults had imagined in advance.

Some children may be suited to academic research.

Some may be better suited to technical work and hands-on practice.

Some may be more sensitive to art.

And some may look completely ordinary at school while possessing strong powers of observation, empathy, creativity, or practical problem-solving in real life.

Examinations may not immediately recognize these abilities.

That does not make them worthless.

Perhaps what we truly need to let go of is the idea that success has only one shape.

Not every form of intelligence has to lead to the same kind of life.

Not every child needs to prove themselves on the same road.

And not every talent can be accurately measured by a report card.

What makes Shāng Zhòngyǒng so painful is not simply that a genius eventually became ordinary.

It is that a child who could have been understood, guided, and slowly nurtured was misunderstood, consumed, and delayed at precisely the time when he most needed adults to help him.

So when I read Shāng Zhòngyǒng today, I no longer want to see it only as a story telling us that “even geniuses must work hard.”

I would rather read it as a reminder:

Do not define a child too early by a single standard.

Do not decide that a child has no future simply because they do not fit one particular system.

And do not exchange the most precious part of a child for a brief moment of applause.

Most of all, we should not allow a child to spend years growing up while the people around them repeatedly prove to them:

“You are not good enough.”

Many children do not lack talent.

They simply never meet someone who truly knows how to see them.

Perhaps one of the greatest forms of luck a child can have is not being born with some astonishing gift.

It is having an adult nearby, before the child fully understands themselves, who is willing to stop and look carefully.

Who is this child?

What are they really good at?

What kind of soil do they need in order to grow?

If there is still something new we can take from Shāng Zhòngyǒng today, perhaps it is this:

What a child truly needs is not to be declared a genius too early.

They need to be understood seriously, and then patiently allowed to grow up.

08 | In Closing: See the Child First, Then Help Them Find a Direction

Late one night while revising this essay, I opened that Facebook group for parents of highly gifted children again.

A mother was looking for learning resources for her secondary-school-aged child.

She had noticed that the child was very interested in physics, especially quantum physics, so she asked the other parents whether there were schools, university programs, or other institutions where a young student could explore the subject further.

Other parents gradually offered suggestions. Some recommended contacting universities to ask whether they offered courses or activities suitable for secondary-school students.

I know almost nothing about quantum physics. In fact, when I first saw the German term, I did not even immediately realize exactly which branch of physics it referred to.

But the mother’s question still made me stop and think for a long time.

She was not rushing to ask what kind of university this ability might eventually get her child into.

She was not immediately trying to convert the interest into grades, rankings, or some achievement that could be displayed.

She had simply noticed what her child genuinely liked.

Then she began looking for a door through which that child might be able to keep moving forward.

For children whose abilities are structured in unusual ways, families may find it very difficult to discover a ready-made method.

Even among children who are all described as highly gifted, their strengths, difficulties, interests, and degree of fit with the school system may be completely different.

Parents may never fully understand exactly how their child’s mind works.

Nor can they possibly plan every road in advance.

But at the very least, they can observe more carefully and talk more openly in everyday life.

They can slowly learn where their child shows lasting interest and where they need extra help.

This is not easy for parents either.

As a child’s understanding of the world grows, the parents’ understanding has to keep growing too.

We have to resist the urge to convert every ability immediately into grades and university admissions.

We also have to accept that some talents will not appear on a report card for a long time, yet in the right environment, with the right resources and sustained development, they may gradually become stable and genuinely valuable abilities.

When I saw that mother’s post, I suddenly felt that this small and ordinary story gave the essay exactly the real-life ending it needed.

Perhaps truly seeing a child does not mean immediately deciding what that child should become in the future.

Perhaps it means that when a child becomes interested in a particular world, an adult is willing to ask seriously:

What is it that you really like about this?

Can we look together and see whether there is somewhere that gives you the right soil to keep growing?

What a child truly needs is never to be defined as a genius too early.

When they do not yet fully understand which way they should go, they need an adult beside them who is willing to notice their interests, understand the ways in which they are different, and then slowly accompany them as they search for the door that is truly theirs.

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Notes

[1] Shāng Zhòngyǒng（伤仲永） — A famous prose essay by the Northern Song statesman and writer Wang Anshi (1021–1086). It tells the story of Fang Zhongyong, a boy who showed extraordinary poetic ability at a very young age but whose father failed to provide him with continued education and instead used his talent for immediate gain. The essay has long been included in Chinese education and is widely remembered as a warning about talent that is not properly developed. Because generations of Chinese students have encountered the story in school, its cultural familiarity is much greater in China than a direct English translation of the title would suggest.

[2] mǐn rán zhòng rén yǐ（泯然众人矣） — A classical Chinese phrase from Shāng Zhòngyǒng, meaning roughly that Fang Zhongyong eventually became indistinguishable from ordinary people. For many Chinese readers, the line carries more than its literal meaning: it is strongly associated with the childhood lesson that exceptional natural ability can disappear if it is not followed by education and development.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 我们是不是一直读错了《伤仲永》？

German version: Haben wir Shāng Zhòngyǒng die ganze Zeit falsch gelesen?