High Cognitive Minds

It’s a subject that comes up over and over again. Should we tell Johnny that he’s gifted, and if so, when? Anyone who knows my opinion of giftedness as a concept won’t be surprised that my answer is “No, don’t tell Johnny he’s gifted—ever. If the term ever had any meaning, its death knell has been sounded by the increasingly shrill cries of the parents of the swarms of average kids: “Every child is gifted!” I’m sorry to drag brute reality into such a sensitive issue, but not every child is gifted, and we aren’t all geniuses from birth.

So, what should you tell Johnny, and when? That’s more easily answered if we make some important distinctions. Schools want children to learn facts, and it wants them to learn those facts as quickly and thoroughly as possible. The student who learns quickly and has a good memory has a distinct advantage, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a special gift. “Continuum” is a useful way of thinking about this. Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan has remarked on the preference of psychologists for “characteristics like intelligence that fall on a continuum...” Learning capacity, which is dependent on memory, and memory itself, can be measured on a continuum. So the only thing special about the average academically gifted child is that he has more of what everybody has.

Schools have difficulty with children who don’t fit conveniently along the continuum, whose abilities are what we could call “breakaway.” That could be anything from unique ways of incorporating knowledge to advanced talents that simply don’t fit into the curriculum, the scheduling, or the teacher’s experience and training. The time for discussion is when the child is starting to recognize those aspects of himself, and has suffered the first bumps and bruises of running headlong into expectations and rules that he is unwittingly violating. It’s time for the parents to put two and two together and help the child make sense of his experiences.

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Practically everybody wants to be smart. That’s a bit strange since being smart is the easiest path to being disliked and resented. “Smart” as a kind of wish fulfillment, and embodied “smart” are different things altogether, and the disconnect is rarely noticed. Most people want to be normal, but being smart isn’t normal. Using the bell curve as a measure, smart people are actually a minority of humanity, and the very smart are an even smaller minority. No matter. Everyone prefers to think of themselves as above average.

There’s another disconnect—those who are smart would like to be considered normal, while the world insists on viewing smart and normal as nearly incompatible. One thread that runs though media articles about prodigies and the exceptionally gifted is the attempt to reconcile normality and exceptionality. Even if the slant of the article is generally friendly, what comes through quite clearly is that such children are normal in spite of being highly gifted. An article that’s now  a couple of years old is fairly typical. It’s about a girl who, at the age of 13, found that yogurt contains a bacteria which kills E. Coli. She was interviewed at age 16, having recently earned a patent on her discovery. According to the writer, she’s “very, very bright. She's also a normal high school kid with lots of friends.”

Sounds harmless if you don’t think about it too much, but media’s “gee whiz” attraction to very smart kids is always accompanied by the caveat of normalcy. It isn’t enough that the kid has friends or participates in sports; those activities have to be highlighted as evidence that they are still just like regular people. There’s nothing new about this bias; a Life article about the students of the Hunter High School, many years ago, reported on how humble they were in spite of being so smart. Humility isn’t so popular as an attribute these days, but the intent is the same.

There’s really no way out of the dilemma. The public image of minorities is never changed by the reality of individuals. If you believe that all atheists are devils, or that people of color are less intelligent than whites, encounters with individuals who defy that image are just exceptions. The only significant change possible is in your own mind. If being smart isn’t normal, then being smart is something to be grateful for.

Edweek.org has a variety of resources for teachers, but prowling around, I discovered that a good deal of their material is useful for parents and anyone who’s concerned with education. It’s not specifically for the gifted, but this recent blog entry is certainly one that fits here very well.

The Bill of Rights for the Gifted was originally published in the NAGC’s September 2007 issue of “Parenting for High Potential.” Check out the full bill with all the details here. There’s also a link to a PDF mini-poster of the bill.

A Gifted Child’s Bill of Rights

1. You have a right to know about your giftedness.
2. You have a right to learn something new every day.
3. You have the right to be passionate about your talent area without apologies.
4. You have a right to have an identity beyond your talent area.
5. You have a right to feel good about your accomplishments.
6. You have a right to make mistakes.
7. You have a right to seek guidance in the development of your talent.
8. You have a right to have multiple peer groups and a variety of friends.
9. You have a right to choose which of your talent areas you wish to pursue.
10. You have a right to not be gifted at everything.

Here’s an article on changing trends in gifted education that you might find rather depressing. I’m not sure whether it’s depressing, or simply pointing to something that hasn’t ever made a heck of a lot of difference. The author listed topics that were “hot” for the last 10-30 years but are now getting far less interest. She also lists those that she sees coming to the forefront. She bases her choices on catalogs of National Association for Gifted Children conventions, which is probably about as good a measure as any, of changes in the field of giftedness.

What has decreased in interest? Practically everything that applies to the individual child: underachievement, advocacy, identification, learning styles, among others. Another loser is the once popular topic of multiple intelligences. I suspect that this one reflects the usual fate of fads which are supposed to be the “next big thing,” but turn out to be just one more bandaid on a very big wound.

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Societies are created by minds which are similar enough to function in similar ways. In turn, societies maintain their structure by shaping the minds within them to think and act in similar ways. This is the process of socialization and acculturation.

Richard Dawkins wrote: A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. He could have added that the process is automatic and largely unconscious and that, most of the time, it works perfectly. The very existence of societies, cultures, of whole civilizations, their stability and continuity, depends on each new generation's unquestioning acceptance of prevailing mores and customs, and that, in turn, depends on the way the human brain functions. Most children do absorb, quite unconsciously, the beliefs, the behaviors, and the standards of their culture. They are not shaped by evolution to question, to analyze, or to criticize..

But if societies are not to stagnate they must also have individuals, even if only a few, who challenge rather than accept what they see around them, who upset the established order with their ideas, their visions, their creativity. Evolution does seem to have provided those individuals sparingly but steadily throughout history. And if we are ever to have the benefits of evolution, without depending wholly on sheer chance, we must learn to recognize the signs of creative power in the young.

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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If most of the world’s population was color-blind, a color-blind expert on art would be entirely possible. This expert could talk sensibly about the history or art, about various artists and their styles, and even about the elements that go into a work of art. He could discuss balance, line, contrast, and innumerable other details that make up a painting. What he wouldn’t be able to discuss, except in a very limited way, is color. Indeed, if a uniquely-sighted artist created a painting out of small dots of color, the expert wouldn’t even be able to identify the objects in the painting. He would condemn the canvas as a chaotic mass of meaningless dots, and most of the world’s art admirers would agree with him. In such a world, the artist who developed pointillism would have been laughed out of the art world and promptly forgotten.

Protection of professional reputation and career, along with biases in education and training are two significant reasons for the continued lack of information about intellectual traits. But they may not even be the most important reasons. The most important is never, as far as I’m aware, discussed publicly. We could call it the color-blind expert syndrome, and  I’ve found it everywhere in the literature.

Ellen Winner has written about gifted children and about art and by all professional measures, qualifies as an expert in those areas. Yet these quotes from her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities strongly call into question any experiential understanding. Of one gifted child, she said “... he described pictures that he discerned in the grain of wood, and angels and harps in the shapes of clouds — further examples of a need to create visual stimulation for himself.” And of another: “...I would say that underlying all his behavior was a desire to make his environment stimulating. This explains his persistent questions, his creation of math problems, his scientific theorizing, and his omnivorous reading.”

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An article on underachievement and ways of motivating gifted underachievers who are working below their potential — Is a student who’s making all As working up to his potential? Is school achievement an adequate measure of potential?

One idea from various sources that sticks in my mind — students need a well-rounded education. Concentration on one or a few interests, especially if that interferes with curriculum requirements, is a bad thing. Students must be encouraged to balance their interests. Is the normal school curriculum a balanced education? Don’t outside interests broaden a student’s knowledge.

Is it possible that obsessive interests, pursued long enough are indicative of a talent and possible future intellectual creativity? Is it more important that a student exist within the very limited constraints of the typical curriculum or that they acknowledge and nourish their own needs?

Ainan Cawley. This seven year old prodigy’s name comes up fairly often in the search terms, twice in the last two days.  Today’s issue of the Times Online has an article about his father’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to find a university placement for him. Ainan’s extreme giftedness has naturally been a subject of interest to many people, an interest constantly promoted by his father, even to the extent of responding to letters to the editor, and answering questions or leaving comments about giftedness all over the web, always leaving the URL of his blog. I have no doubt that he will show up here in response to this post.

But what I’m interested in is encapsulated in his responser to a comment on the Times article. He said “It is far more harmful to ignore the intellectual needs of a prodigy, than to engage them.” The assumption that rapid acceleration and early college is the only way to avoid ignoring a child’s intellectual needs is at the heart of books like Accidental Genius, and of Mr. Cawley’s efforts to have Ainan admitted to college.

He is following in the footsteps of generations of parents trying to understand and encourage their children’s extraordinary abilities. It isn’t his fault, any more than it was the fault of Michael Kearney’s parents, who followed the same path, that more than fifty years of research into giftedness has nothing to offer them in the way of alternatives. The mother of “Adam,” one of the prodigies discussed in David Feldman’s 1986 book, Nature’s Gambit, was desperate to support her son’s intellectual development. At one point she asked how to find an Aristotle capable of educating Adam. It was clear that she had a much better understanding than most parents, including Mr Cawley, of the kind of education her son needed, but had no idea how to go about providing it.

Does it require an Aristotle to educate these children?

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…knowledge of a content domain may be one important determinant of whether that child demonstrates gifted performance on memory or reasoning problems that tap that knowledge. …these studies do not address the equally interesting question of how some children have managed to acquire rich and extensive knowledge… Conceptions of Giftedness, Robert Sternberg, Janet Davidson, eds.

Gifted research has been plagued by its emphasis on quantifiable data; the result is that important areas of giftedness remain a mystery to this day. The problem is that testing is entirely dependent on and limited to the questions you’re able to ask.  If you fail to ask the right questions, the tests aren’t going to reveal anything useful. And if you limit testing to just one subset of a population—in this case, school children, extrapolations to other subsets—adults—may be not merely wrong, but irrelevant. The statistics mindset prevents researchers from asking open-ended questions that could evoke a wider variety of responses.

One of the unsolved problems is the developmental process that takes place between childhood and adulthood. What leads to failure or development of talents? How do talents develop, particularly in domains with no formal teaching structure? The other problem, which isn’t so much a problem as an overlooked (or ignored) aspect of giftedness, is the different types of mental processing which are possible. Linda Silverman has made a stab at this with her distinction between visual-spatial and linear processing. But she also acknowledged, partly in response to her readers, that there are other, unexplored and poorly understood processes.

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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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