Nurturing the Moral and Ethical Lives of Gifted Children
By Clint Von Gundy
In Terry Gilliam’s 1981 classic Time Bandits, David Warner plays a character named “Evil Genius.” He is a stand-in for the devil, and spends most of his time locked in a damp subterranean lair, fuming against the beauty of creation and plotting to take control of it for himself. What will he do with this newfound power? He tells us:
“If I were creating the world, I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers! Eight o’clock! Day one!”
The movie is largely forgotten; I count myself a fan and I haven’t seen it in many years, but the figure of Evil Genius sticks with me. He reminds me of a heartbreaking lyric from the song “Living a Lie” by Aimee Mann: “No one bears a grudge like a boy genius / Just past his prime / Gilding his cage / One bar at a time / For every open arm there’s a cold shoulder / Waiting to turn / People to blame / Bridges to burn”.
So, I’ve made two pop culture references in about as many paragraphs. Where am I going with this? Simply put, I’ve been looking around at the world lately and I see a lot of brilliance adrift, or, even worse, brilliance aimed in a bad direction. I have often said that gifted children are our last best hope for a better future, but they may also hold the keys to our collective sorrow. There is great peril in being (or at least believing you are) the smartest kid in the room. Giftedness, when not tempered by a commitment to justice, compassion, and the collective good, can be a blight, both for the individual and anybody who happens to cross their path. There are so many bright kids in the world who seem intent on using their abilities exclusively to prove their superiority, often at the expense of others. For many, the world and the people in it have become a thought experiment, an abstraction that can be manipulated and toyed with for personal amusement or profit without a thought for the flesh and blood consequences.
Take the example of Sam Bankman-Fried, a so-called “crypto bro” who graduated from MIT and then proceeded in short order to commit 8 billion (with a B) dollars worth of fraud. To put that in perspective, that’s enough money to run Dallas ISD (a school district serving almost 150,000 students) for four solid years. Bankman-Fried was just shy of his thirty-first birthday when he was arrested. The story of Bankman-Fried and his cohort of fellow wunderkind is too long, and frankly too bizarre, to recount further in the space I have.
We might also consider the case of Marko Elez, a 25 year-old computer engineer who resigned from Elon Musk’s DOGE after Elez’s racist tweets surfaced. Elez was subsequently rehired by DOGE, for what it’s worth. We might also ponder the deeply strange story of Ziz Lasota, the leader of an extremely online tech cult comprising people so convinced they were the only ones smart enough to avert the coming AI apocalypse that they ended up murdering six people.
What do all of these stories have in common? They are all the tales of well-educated, bright young people with a gift for computing who also seem to have completely broken, or at least badly-calibrated, moral compasses. Poke around the internet for any length of time and you’ll not find yourself poor for more examples. Budding evil geniuses are the hot new thing. And that’s a problem for everybody. The once-quaint “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley has escaped its once-insular cage and now has seemingly free rein in all corners of private and public life. The bull has entered the china shop. These attitudes and actions are not necessarily bound by traditional political categories. The ideology at play here is neither liberal nor conservative, but more akin to a tech-savvy Nietzschean (or Randian) will to power: (Intellectual) might makes right. Rules are for average people. Humility is for suckers.
So what caused this?
It’s not a new phenomenon. The history books are home to all manner of brilliant people who did bad things for the sake of money, power, or simply to expand their own minds. Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles as a BOGO deal, after all. The young people I’ve mentioned by way of example above are simply a new generation of familiar stock characters pasted together from a schematic we can all recognize. They are people possessed of immense intelligence and aptitude who embrace radical individualism as a cardinal virtue, who would nominate themselves for the position of philosopher king or queen. I often wonder how many kids miss the real point of that classic of middle school literature, Harrison Bergeron. Kurt Vonnegut was trying to tell us that a world ruled by an Übermensch like Harrison was no more desirable than one under the authority of radical egalitarian Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General. Missing the point of Fight Club was practically a competitive sport among young men when I was in college.
The physicist Freeman Dyson warned of the seductive power of intellect many years ago when reflecting on the building of the first nuclear bombs at Los Alamos: “I have felt it myself… It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”
There are plenty of people who wholeheartedly believe that the problem can be fixed by intentionally reviving the humanities in our schools, that a well-balanced curriculum that honors both philosophy and physics, civics and computer science, is the solution to the problem of all this weaponized, indifferent intelligence. I really hate to tell you this, but that simply isn’t the case. There is a long tradition of beautiful music, art, literature, historiography, philosophy, and even fashion that paved the way for or went hand-in-hand with political movements that created a great deal of human suffering and environmental degradation. Mao, I remind you, was a librarian, and Goebbels had a PhD in linguistics. OverSTEMphasis in our schools isn’t the whole problem, and a turn back toward the humanities isn’t the whole solution. Yes, a solid foundation in ethics is an essential piece of a good Liberal education, but a true resurgence of Enlightenment values will not necessarily follow from reading more philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is a favorite of the tech titan set, even as I find myself doubting that all their nightstand copies of Meditations have actually been read. Technology itself is also not the problem. Technology is morally value-neutral. Another young DOGE acolyte once used his skills to decipher ancient scrolls from Vesuvius, an activity we can all probably agree is pretty cool.
As a society, we have a minor obsession with what might be called “Great Men of History” (and they are mostly men), individuals who harnessed their intellects to achieve dubiously grand results (we shot Katy Perry into space, y’all!), but who also prioritized ends over means to the tangible detriment of everyone else. The problem is not a matter of the weight we give to certain subjects in schooling, but how they are framed. I’m not sure when exactly “College and Career Readiness” (CCR) came on the scene as the driving force in how we think about the purpose of school, but I think it has done a lot of damage. The message we give to young people in classrooms is that education, at whatever level, has as its endpoint financial gain, for both you and your employer. Education has become a series of transactions for which you will be given a receipt, your diploma, approximating your economic worth to the world.
I don’t necessarily think that CCR is irredeemable on principle, but we do need to add some more Cs to the mix. There is no magic pill for Evil Genius Syndrome, but there is a kind of therapy for it, one based in an education that attaches self-examination to the accumulation of knowledge and skills. It’s also worth pointing out that this is a way forward, not a way out. We will be dealing with the consequences of our current batch of evil geniuses for the foreseeable future.
So, let’s talk about CCCCR. And let’s pose our exploration of it as a series of questions. We already know the first two Cs: College and Career.
College
What kind of education do I want to pursue after high school? What interests me? What am I good at? What kind of college do I want to go to? Do I have a specific college in mind? How will I pay for it? Do I even need to go to college?
Career
What could I see myself doing for the next thirty to forty years? What can I make money doing? What is the bar for entry to the career that interests me?
Now let’s add the other two Cs. It’s actually 3 Cs: Community/Citizenship and Contentment. Here are the questions we should be helping kids ask and answer relative to these:
Community/Citizenship
What do I owe to my fellow human beings and what do they owe to me? What about other species? What can I contribute to my community to make it a better place for both myself and others? What rights and responsibilities do I have within my community? What do I owe to people I have never and probably never will meet? What problems can I fix with the knowledge and skills that I have? How will I react to people with whom I have disagreements or conflicts? What is my place in the world and what place do I want in it?
Contentment
What brings me joy? What kind of life do I want to live? What do I stand for, and what will I stand up for? What do I want others to say about me when I am gone? What is my full potential, and how will I know when I have met it? When will I know that I have enough? How can I make who I like to think I am and who I actually am the same person?
And Finally…
How will I know that I have lived a good life?
Gifted Education Family Network 