I read it in high school, and the opinion then was mostly “kids shoot aliens, fun”. Didn’t glom on to the genius loner übermensch protagonist like I was apparently supposed to. I did get the impression that the Wiggin kids had to be some kind of genetics experiment, since they didn’t really make sense as baseline human kids, but I’m not sure if the book was ever clear on this. They were acknowledged as some kind of special deal, but the idea might have been to just try to pitch them as precocious natural talent.
To be more precise, what was your opinion of the book’s portrayal of gifted children?
(I thought that the book made it clear that the Wiggin children were the beneficiary of, at most, selective breeding over a couple of generations—they represented the extreme end of the bell curve, but nothing beyond that, nothing actually superhuman.)
In the introduction to the book, Card writes:
For some people, however, the loathing for Ender’s Game transcended mere artistic argument … the criticism that left me most flabbergasted her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don’t talk like that, she said. They don’t think like that. … Yet I knew—I knew—that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game … Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along—the same person I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective—the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adults. … [T]he book does ring true with the children who read it.
To be more precise, what was your opinion of the book’s portrayal of gifted children?
It’s been too long since I read the book for me to have a very detailed impression, but I think it has pretty much the same problem I described earlier. It shows the gifted children being brilliant and deep all the time. Talented children can have frequent flashes of brilliance, but I’d expect realistic children to have a pretty wide variance in just how well they respond to a given situation that requires talented improvisation and to exhibit poor judgment, metacognition and situation awareness on just how they make use of their brilliant moments.
I haven’t interacted with talented children as an adult, so I’m not able to comment on how the actual ones act in the real world. I’m working from the cognitive science references I linked earlier and imagining what would happen if you’d take a regular kid and overclocked their CPU.
I’m not convinced by Card’s introduction though. It’s very hard to perceive and remember how your cognitive faculties were less developed in childhood. Once you learn something or become capable of thinking something, it’s hard to recall the mindset where you didn’t know the thing. Mostly you need to think around corners and try to think of the way you actually acted and reacted in the past. Are there people who don’t feel like they were persons with real emotions and desires as children, even if they were objectively pretty dumb as kids? And when do kids ever think of themselves as speaking childishly?
I read it in high school, and the opinion then was mostly “kids shoot aliens, fun”. Didn’t glom on to the genius loner übermensch protagonist like I was apparently supposed to. I did get the impression that the Wiggin kids had to be some kind of genetics experiment, since they didn’t really make sense as baseline human kids, but I’m not sure if the book was ever clear on this. They were acknowledged as some kind of special deal, but the idea might have been to just try to pitch them as precocious natural talent.
To be more precise, what was your opinion of the book’s portrayal of gifted children?
(I thought that the book made it clear that the Wiggin children were the beneficiary of, at most, selective breeding over a couple of generations—they represented the extreme end of the bell curve, but nothing beyond that, nothing actually superhuman.)
In the introduction to the book, Card writes:
It’s been too long since I read the book for me to have a very detailed impression, but I think it has pretty much the same problem I described earlier. It shows the gifted children being brilliant and deep all the time. Talented children can have frequent flashes of brilliance, but I’d expect realistic children to have a pretty wide variance in just how well they respond to a given situation that requires talented improvisation and to exhibit poor judgment, metacognition and situation awareness on just how they make use of their brilliant moments.
I haven’t interacted with talented children as an adult, so I’m not able to comment on how the actual ones act in the real world. I’m working from the cognitive science references I linked earlier and imagining what would happen if you’d take a regular kid and overclocked their CPU.
I’m not convinced by Card’s introduction though. It’s very hard to perceive and remember how your cognitive faculties were less developed in childhood. Once you learn something or become capable of thinking something, it’s hard to recall the mindset where you didn’t know the thing. Mostly you need to think around corners and try to think of the way you actually acted and reacted in the past. Are there people who don’t feel like they were persons with real emotions and desires as children, even if they were objectively pretty dumb as kids? And when do kids ever think of themselves as speaking childishly?