High Cognitive Minds

I’ve discussed my reasons for believing that while limited acceleration has its benefits, it isn’t the answer to fulfilling highly gifted students’ needs for mental stimulation and challenge.  Is there a useful and viable alternative to simply shooting through the educational system like a greased pig? I would like to say that there is, but I can’t. What I offer is a very rough and fragmentary start toward developing such an alternative. Parents who are themselves gifted can use it a jumping off place for working with their gifted child. Teachers whose knowledge extends outside the course textbook can also use it as a source of ideas. I present it as a set of guideline, not a curriculum.

At the moment, the guidelines are divided into four categories: cognitive traits, thinking skills, psychology, and knowledge base. Cognitive traits are biological, and are the substrate on which everything else rests. They include memory, temperament, predisposition to thinking styles: verbal or visual, contextual or linear. Thinking skills include analysis/synthesis, pattern-seeking, problem-finding, theorizing/testing. Psychology is about normal thinking and emotional responses, and how the gifted differ, with the aim of adapting to and living comfortably with the non-gifted. Knowledge base: Identifying personal interests, tracking them over time, and making connections between them. Cross disciplinary expansion of interests, making the knowledge base as broad and rich as possible.

Some of the overall goals are to develop mental flexibility and openness, and the ability to think clearly; to encourage and enhance creativity; to discover the pleasures of intellectual exploration; to shape the environment in a way that’s appropriate for the individual, and to create a rich and satisfying life. Modern education rarely supports or even acknowledges these goals, but for high cognitives they are as essential as learning subject matter. They also take time, not the hour to hour schedules of schooling, but the developmental time of the individual. Brains have to mature, understanding and insight have to develop with increasing age and knowledge. Schools do not and cannot support these needs.

Normal schooling actually serves as an impediment to individual development to the extent that it fills the student’s time and restricts learning to defined paths. Carried to extremes, acceleration merely continues that pattern, consuming ever more time and energy that should be used in more productive ways. Rather than provide new options, it just speeds the student toward those that society has already defined and approved. There must be some reason why “…creative achievers tend to discontinue their education when they feel that they have learned enough to continue on their own. They may simply become bored with formal instruction, or disenchanted with what formal institutions have to offer.” Personal and intellectual growth can’t flourish when education is simply a race to the goal line.