High Cognitive Minds

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.

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?

Click to read more ...

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.

Click to read more ...

I finished reading Alissa Quart's Hothouse Kids: the dilemma of the gifted child, a few days ago and have been mulling it over ever since. It's an odd book, being divided pretty much between discussions of children who are gifted, but mainly under-served or completely unserved by the schools, and those children who are "wannabe" gifteds, though It's really the parents who are wannabes, desperate to give their children a status that they may not be able to live up to. Aside from the disturbing aspects of the book, it served to confirm my feeling that the whole concept of giftedness has changed drastically, becoming ever more muddled over the years.

Giftedness has always been more than just a way of indicating intelligence and talent. Whether it's a status symbol or a political and cultural football depends on the mood of the times, with prodigies serving as its poster children, viewed with either awe or as victims of parental abuse. It's redefined to be more inclusive even while the reality of the concept is being questioned and actual support for gifted programs is being laid waste.

It's also the victim of two simultaneous trends: the dumbing down of public education, which is part of the general upswing of anti-intellectualism; and the self-esteem movement, which concentrates on personal feelings to the exclusion of all else. Young people know less, but they feel more, and one of the invidious results is that they have a bloated estimation of their abilities and their capacity for insight. The combination of ignorance and ego can be seen everywhere on the web, particularly on forums and personal weblogs. The functionally illiterate, including those who call themselves gifted, offer their second-hand opinions on complex subjects, and expect to be praised for their wisdom. And they usually are, by others who share their ignorance and sense of entitlement.

Click to read more ...

“Rejection of the classroom is an international phenomenon and has little to do with whether the schools are public or private, secular or clerical, or with the philosophy of teaching employed in the various schools.” Cradles of Eminence, Victor Goertzel and Mildred Goertzel

“…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. …This attitude is clearly expressed by Einstein in a letter… ‘I shall not become a Ph.D. …the whole matter has become a bore to me.’ “ Dean Keith Simonton, in Before the Gates of Excellence, Rena Ochse

“The striking generalization that bubbles up from the MacArthur Fellows' letters (in a survey by the authors) is that our school system, public and private, most often rewards patterns of behavior inappropriate for an independent thinker, researcher, or artist.” Educating Able Learners, June Cox, et al.

Click to read more ...

"The drawing prodigy Eitan, who drew with such brilliance at so young an age, has today, in his twenties, lost his passion for art. At the time of this writing, he plans to go into computer graphics, an occupation only indirectly related to his drawing talent." Gifted Children, Ellen Winner

I never cease being amazed at statements like this and I always wish that I could see into the heads of the experts on giftedness when they come up with these strange viewpoints. Many people have had trouble with the transition of certain skills and areas of expertise to digital form, so perhaps Winner is one of those whose conception of art is so narrow that computer graphics simply can't be regarded as art. Or is something else going on?

Click to read more ...