OPINION (CP) – There is something magical about child prodigies. There is something fragilely and miraculously Edenic about little souls who exhibit precocity at an early age. Be they gifted linguists and analysts like John Stuart Mill, who studied Greek at age three; accomplished violinists like Yehudi Menuhin, who at the age of thirteen wowed the Albert Einstein with his exquisite playing; musical geniuses like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was composing at the age of five; or people exhibiting incredible precocity of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the mathematician from India; somehow, we think, these little human beings have gifts from Heaven.
But there is a twisted and corrupt imitation of innocent and true prodigiousness found in the worlds created by ideologues, secular and pseudo-religious, where the appearance of a so-called child prodigy is welcomed as a sign and seal of dark thoughts and deeds. Many cults produce such children, be they the frenetic kid preachers who, supposedly divinely inspired from within, rant repetitively on and on; the precocious communist or Hitler youth who has memorized the Little Red Book or Mein Kampf or the radical child feminist who mindlessly repeats all the lines she has memorized. For ideologues of every conviction, there is no substitute for youthful certainty and ardor, coming as it does from supposedly uncorrupted souls whose precocity ratifies the cause by sheer passionate emoting. READ MORE
