HOTHOUSING

noun Also written hot-housing (Lifestyle and Leisure) (People and Society) The policy or practice of artificially accelerating the intellectual development of a child by intensive teaching from babyhood. Etymology: A figurative use of the verbal noun hothousing. Literally, the verb means 'to cultivate in a hothouse'; in educational hothousing the children are treated as hothouse plants which can be 'brought on' by intensive education. History and Usage: The idea of hothousing in education is not especially new: in the early sixties A. S. Neill lamented the fact 'every child has been hothoused into an adult long before he has reached adulthood', and schools for gifted children which concentrated their education in the child's area of excellence were known as hothouse schools before the idea of intensively educating babies had been tried. The type of hothousing defined above, though, became fashionable in the US in the late seventies and eighties. The underlying principle was that any child could develop into a genius if only all the available time were used for education; using all the available time meant starting intensive training with flash-cards long before the child could talk or understand in the conventional sense what was being taught. The children subjected to this approach were called hothouse children. Their father...wanted to test the hot-housing theory; that if you subject a normally intelligent child to intensive, specialised training in a particular discipline at a very early age, you will produce excellence. Observer 30 Oct. 1988, p. 4