Originally published on the blog of Connecting Brains.

We know we should not judge others based on preconceived criteria. It is political correctness. Apply our prejudices to others is a theoretical highly reprehensible practice, but to which all of us express an unequivocal trend … right?

But, why are we supposed not to do it? Why even many educators warn against putting labels that affect children? Simply because in doing so we are preventing the proper development of a series of latent capacities, and this implies a serious risk to thwart the personalities and talents of losing valuable.

A revealing model: Did you know…?

• Did you know that Thomas Edison, inventor of the electricity and with over 1,000 patents to his credits studied at home with his mother help, because he had been dropout from school?
• Did you know what John Gurdon’s (recently Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded) teachers said, at the elitist school of Eton?: «You do not have any chance to study a specialty. It would be a waste of time for him and for his teachers as well».
• Did you know that Evariste Galois, modern algebra father, suspended twice the entrance exam to the Polytechnic School of Paris?
• Did you know that the «Encyclopedia of bad boys and rebels reached geniuses» by Jean -Bernard Pouy, Serge Bloch and Anne Blanchard, just includes a female name?: Agatha Christie, the queen of crime fiction.
• Did you know that physicist Stephen Hawking did not learn to read until age eight?

Yet another example: we read a few weeks ago in El Confidencial an article entitled «“Smarter than Einstein, a child seen by his mother”. This is the case of an autistic child who was said he would never learn to read and hopefully would be “capable of tying shoelaces at 16″. Thanks to the perseverance of his mother, who decided to enhance the natural inclination that observed in children towards mathematics, today, at 14, is considered one of the great geniuses of this century.

Surely you’ve heard any other curious case. Potential Geniuses that once have been considered duffer or incompetent. Would you like to share cases with us?