Tormented life of the little genius who wasn't

The experts claimed Justin Chapman was a prodigy. ROGER FRANKLIN looks at how they got it so wrong.

NEW YORK - Consider what we mean by intelligence - or, more particularly, ponder the notion that a tally of correctly ticked boxes is the measure of a child's potential.

IQ tests, we call them, the "Q" standing for quotient, a term from mathematics for the result when one number is divided by another. It's as if there are only so many smarts to go around, and the experts' computations are the only way to decide who is blessed with how much.

Now contemplate 8-year-old Justin Chapman, whose recent attempt to end his short and miserable life is an indictment of the conceit that it is possible to calibrate intelligence with the oracular accuracy the experts claim.

More than that, what happened to Justin poses a grave question about the experts. How could so many intelligent people be so stupid?

America first heard of Justin almost six years ago when, at least according to his mother, he picked up a violin and began to play. At 3 he had mastered chess, and by 4 he was enrolled in a Stanford University correspondence course.

At 6, an IQ test made it official: with a score of 298, Justin was "the greatest genius ever to grace the Earth", said Denver psychologist Linda Silverman, who graded it.

There were talk-show appearances and speaker's fees. Grants and scholarships flowed in. Eager publishers offered six-figure contracts for books that Justin was to write all by himself - a piece of cake for a 6-year-old who had aced a college course on Babylonian history and read the Iliad at bedtime.

A foundation was established to help ensure the prodigy would some day make an immense contribution to the world.

And now? Well, if one takes the word of the Colorado child-welfare authorities who removed Justin from his mother's care, the alleged genius is nothing but an average kid.

The only thing that makes him stand out from the pack, they say, is a pronounced learning disability. "His recent suicidal gesture," states a psychological appraisal submitted as evidence in the ongoing custody case, "exemplifies his inability to continue the existence that has been assigned by his mother, the gifted community and, most likely, by himself".

His mother, Elizabeth Chapman, insists it is all a conspiracy on the part of small-minded meddlers.

If the official view is correct, however, what has been done to Justin in the name of enlightened education begins with fraud and ends with gross abuse.

Chapman says Justin's unusual abilities came to light when she began taking her toddler to classes at the community college she was attending in upstate New York. One day he filled in a spare copy of a test sheet and, just for fun, she decided to submit it along with her own. It earned a better grade than hers.

"He was obsessed with reading," she would say later. "I read him my college textbooks. The only way to keep him quiet and calm him down was to make things really complicated."

A normal school was out of the question, she decided. Soon, she was bombarding experts who specialise in gifted children with glowing reports about his progress.

A favoured few received astonishingly lucid emails that Justin was said to have typed himself. None seemed to notice - or to care - that they were penned in the wee hours of the morning, when a little boy should have been in bed.

The Malone Family Foundation, a charity bankrolled by cable-TV tycoon John Malone, put up the cash to cover his expenses at a school for prodigies in Denver. As his fame grew, he gave lectures at which he expounded on physics, chemistry and quoted great philosophers.

The fact that he couldn't answer questions from the audience - even simple ones, like naming his favourite colour - was dismissed as a quirk of a great mind. So, too, was Justin's joyless style. If those speeches had been delivered by a "normal" child, his manner might have been taken as evidence of rote learning.

He was a shy kid, explained his mother, who added that Justin suffered from a slight learning defect that made it difficult for his prodigious intellect to process the spoken word. The experts took her word for it. Put the questions in an email, she would say, and he will provide the answers in due course.

Then the neighbour blew the whistle on what she had witnessed over the back fence. Chapman was forever riding her son, she wrote, hectoring him to master lessons that went on long into the night. The authorities took note but declined to conduct a comprehensive investigation. With all those experts assuring them Justin was different, welfare officials decided normal rules of child-rearing did not apply.

Then, one night in November, Justin was rushed to hospital after his mother found an empty medicine bottle in his room. That was when the world's brightest boy began to seem anything but.

Officials investigated Chapman's claims, as did Rocky Mountain News reporter Julie Poppen, who turned up a host of anomalies, starting with the IQ tests the mother cited as proof of her boy's genius. In most instances, Poppen found, the mother had graded the tests herself. On those rare occasions when they were taken under supervision, Justin had sat on her knee while filling in the answers.

So how to explain the extraordinary scores? After all, if the answers were provided by the mother, then she must be a genius, too. Not so fast, Poppen cautioned. In every case, Chapman knew which test was to be administered - knowledge that would have allowed her to find the answers on the internet.

Justin is now living with a foster family, where officials say he is doing well, no longer hiding in the corners of dark rooms.

Meanwhile, the true believers clamour to have him returned to his mother. Tracy Neal of the Malone Foundation says history demonstrates that societies always fear the things they cannot comprehend.

If what the welfare authorities claim is true, Neal's is an ironic observation, given that IQ tests are designed to measure connective reasoning and the ability to identify hidden patterns.

In Justin's case, it may be that those who wanted so desperately to believe blinded themselves to a simple pattern of deception. They just couldn't see it - even when they bent down and stared straight into its tormented face.