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nius simply emerges unbidden is related to our mixed feelings about intelligence: we know Alex Rodriguez had to practice to bee a great baseball player, and we don39。 t think of special schools for gymnasts or tennis prodigies as 233。 litista charge already leveled against the Davidson Academy. But giftedness on the playing field and giftedness in, say, a lab aren39。 t so different. As Columbia education professor Abraham Tannenbaum has written, Giftedness requires social context that enables it. Like a muscle, raw intelligence can39。 t build if it39。 s not exercised. People often wonder how to tell if their child is gifted. Truly gifted kids are almost always autodidacts. Take Max OswaldSelis. He moved to Reno from Sydney with his mother Gael Oswald so that he could attend Davidson. Max is 12. The first time I saw him at the academy, he was reading an article about the Supreme Court. He likes to fence. He loves Latin because it39。 s a very regimented language ... There39。 s probably at least 28 different endings for any given verb, because there39。 s first, second and thirdperson singular and plural for each tense ... He went on like this for some time. Max didn39。 t get along especially well with classmates in Sydney and later Kent, England, where his mother first moved him in search of an appropriate schooland where she says he was beaten on the playground. Max is Gael39。 s only child, so when he taught himself to read at 3she says she hadn39。 t even taught him the alphabetshe wasn39。 t sure it was so unusual. Then around age 4, he read aloud from a medical book in the doctor39。 s office, and the doctor remended intelligence testing. At 4, Max had the verbal skills of a 13yearold. He skipped kindergarten, but he was still bored, and his mother despaired. No system is going to be able to keep up, she thought. Gael, a math teacher, began to research giftedness and found that highIQ kids can bee isolated adults. They end up often as depressed adults ... who don39。 t have friends or who find it difficult to function, she says. Actually, research shows that gifted kids given appropriately challenging environmentseven when that means being placed in classes of much older studentsusually turn out fine. At the University of New South Wales, Gross conducted a longitudinal study of 60 Australians who scored at least 160 on IQ tests beginning in the late 39。 80s. Today most of the 33 students who were not allowed to skip grades have jaded views of education, and at least three are dropouts. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because, having been to a large extent socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice ... in developing and maintaining social relationships, Gross has written. A number have had counseling. Two have been treated for severe depression. By contrast, the 17 kids who were able to skip at least three grades have mostly received , and all have good friends. At the Davidson Academy, all the kids are skipping ahead quicklyin some cases they pleted more than two years of material last year. There39。 s no sixth grade or ninth grade or any grade at the academy, just three tracks (core, college prep and college prep with research). The curriculums are individualized and fluidsome students take collegeprep English but corelevel math. I sat in on the Algebra II class one day, but it wasn39。 t so much a traditional class as a study session guided by the teacher, Darren Ripley. Kids worked from different parts of the textbook. (One 11yearold was already halfway through。 most Americans who take Algebra II do so at 15 or 16.) Occasionally Ripley would show a small group how to solve a problem on the whiteboard, but there was no lecture. THE FOUNDERS ULTIMATELY THE ACADEMY39。 S MOST important gift to its students is social, not academic. One of the main reasons Jan and Bob Davidson founded the school was to provide a nurturing social setting for the highly gifted. Through another project of theirs, the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, each year the Davidsons assist 1,200 highly gifted students around the . who need help persuading their schools to let them skip a grade or who want to meet other kids like them. Often the kids are wasting away in average classes, something that drives Bob Davidson crazy: I mean, that39。 s criminal to send a kid [who already reads well] to kindergarten ... Somebody should go to jail for that! That is emotional torture! Davidson, 64, carries an air of peremptory selfassurance. He unselfconsciously enjoys his place in the plutocracy. During a tour of the Lake Tahoe manse he and Jan, 63, call Glen Eagle, he showed me his red Ferrari, his private theater and the two 32ft. totem poles just inside the entry. They are made from cedar at least 750 years old and feature carvings of the Davidsons and their three kids, who are now grown. Bob sees his work for the gifted as akin to the patronage that sustained the artists and inventors of the Renaissance. His view of giftedness is expressed through simple analogies: Educators often want people to have equal results. But that39。 s not likely in our world. You know, I would love to be equal to Michael Jordan in my basketball talents, but somehow I never will be. But such an unplicated view of intelligenceone that esteems IQ scores and raw mental powerhas had at least one awkward consequence for the Davidson Academy: it doesn39。 t mirror America. Twentysix of the 45 students are boys。 only two are black. (A total of 16 are minorities.) The school is unlikely ever to represent girls and African Americans proportionately because of a reality about IQ tests: more boys score at the high end of the IQ scale (and, it should be said, more score at the low end。 girls39。 IQ variance is smaller). And for reasons that no one understands, African A。