Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. It is a fact that must be taken in connection with the peculiarly human character of the youthful anthropoid apes and the more degraded morphological characters of the adults.’ The same writer cites from Lord Wolseley the following d propos of the Fantis, an African tribe: ‘The Ijoy is far brighter, quicker, and cleverer than the man. You can apparently teach the boy anything until he reaches puberty; then he becomes duller and more stupid, more lazy and more useless every day’; and Leclere has said something similar of the Cambodians. But over against these statements we can set the corresponding (though less marked) phenomena of puberty in our own races—‘the silly years,’ for an arrest of mental development actually seems to take place—and the law of retardation which apparently governs the achievements of the human being outside the bounds of childhood. The child grows fast, learns fast, lives fast, in a sense, at least.