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.

Thanks to a helpful comment that was posted here recently, I’ve made my first rule for blogging: Don’t introduce a topic until you’re ready to expand on it. My view of the blog as a chain of related ideas isn’t necessarily what others see. Readers, especially new ones, see the current post and whatever others they may choose at random, and the relationships, even when they exist, aren’t exactly shouting their presence. So, the post on acceleration was left hanging out by itself, waiting for me to come back and carry on with the theme it started.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that until I was ready to introduce the idea of high cognitives, which I’ve now done. The article is here. Reading it first will give you the necessary background for this post.

The high cognitive concept is vital to determining whether acceleration is advisable, and what form it should take. In general, acceleration carries forward what we might call the philosophy of education: that children are learners who have to guided along a predetermined curriculum. In complete opposition to this, we have high cognitives who are thinkers as well as learners. Their interests generally include a wide range of subjects about which they are forming opinions and tentative theories. They are also noticing and critiquing errors in what they read or are told by adults, not merely factual errors, but errors in logic and sense.

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A subject that I’ve been pondering from many angles is acceleration for highly gifted students. I’m not sure when I became interested in it, but it may have been with my first reading of Accidental Genius. The book is written by Kevin and Cassidy Kearney, the parents of Michael Kearney, an extraordinary prodigy who caught the attention of the media in the 90s. It’s an account of Michael’s accomplishments and his parents’ philosophy, if you can call it that, of raising an enormously gifted child. For me, the book was an appalling illustration of how not to do it. I doubt that Michael’s experiences were typical, but they’ve probably been in the background of my mind every time I’ve read an article on the pros and cons of acceleration.

What I’ve come to believe over the years is that acceleration is an inadequate response to a real need. Its support is rooted in the inadequacy of traditional schooling, but basically follows the same path. As long as acceleration merely means getting through school as quickly as possible, even if it includes the addition of advanced courses, then the ultimate result isn’t going to be significantly different than following the normal curriculum at the normal rate.

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