Gifted Education Benefits all of Us



Students with special gifts merit special attention.  If you do not believe that is true, why do we build football stadiums for our high school students when that money could just as easily build science, math and engineering labs?  We are rewarding (properly so, I might add) their special gifts for athletics.  Yet, the collective “we” of the general population frequently hesitate to provide or even reject the same special attention (…facilities, instruction, paraphernalia…) when the recipients are the intellectually gifted.  There is also an assumption that intellectual giftedness can only express itself in STEM classes.  Wrong.  It can also show itself in mechanical advantages, entrepreneurial advantages and artistic advantages.  We do not want a nation of people who know how to get a rocket off the ground but nobody who knows how to build one! 

            The magazine Scientific American published an article “How to Raise a Genius: Lessons From a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children.”  I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in education and the future of this country.  What it did not discuss was the fact that our gifted children are an at risk group.  They have a dropout rate equal to all other students (about 5%) but when we lose a gifted student we lose a statistically rarer resource.  Yet there is precious little sympathy for the needs of gifted students and no legislation to make sure that none of them are left behind.  Worst, there is an assumption in the educational “triage” which occurs on an hourly basis in America’s classrooms that smart kids will always land on their feet.  That assumption is wrong.

            It is time to boldly say that all students are not created equal, nor should they be treated that way.  An educational system designed to homogenize will regress toward the mean at the expense of the entire society.  Those who are more interested in equality than excellence will start grinding their molars when they hear this, but if we get more educational bang for the buck by providing an exceptional education for exceptional students than what is lost by doing that?   Let me make this clear, I am NOT in favor of taking one penny or an iota of respect away from other school programs.  I want something much more revolutionary.  I want a bold conceptual change that would mandate schools to provide our gifted students with extra effort, extra time, special instruction and unique facilities.  I want new money, dedicated in proportionately larger amounts to these students.  If the only way to make this palatable is to provide more money for all education, then we all win.

There is a residual jealousy and suspicion of people with intellectual advantage.  The same exceptional talent, expressed in sports, music or the arts is lauded.   But exceptional intelligence is considered suspect.  Part of this is due to the American attitude that physical acumen is inherently more meritorious than its mental counterpart.  It is a carryover from our frontier past when worth was measured in physical evidence of production.  Evidently if you can’t see what is being done, nothing of importance is happening. 

            Studies of productivity and its correlation to intelligence show that this perception is wrong, but changing 200 years of enculturation is no job for the faint of heart.  So is arguing against a socialistic attitude of commonality that seeps into modern education like the choking roots of a weeping willow into the sewer lines.  There is an insidious belief in education that gifted intelligence is to be discouraged and disparaged but disadvantaged is to be encouraged and elevated.  Victim mentality makes people so much easier to control, just feed their paranoia and you have them where you can manipulate them. 

            Support the gifted and keep the faith.

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