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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Mass education is designed for the average student.
Its goal is to provide students with the basic knowledge they need in order to function in the modern world. The most efficient way to do this is by standardizing curriculum and teaching methods. This is what teachers are trained to accomplish.

Differentiated curriculum is a political football
School financing is always subject to current economic conditions. Changing levels of funding means that special interest groups must fight for a portion of what is available. As a small and almost invisible minority which generally arouses animosity rather than sympathy, the gifted have an uphill fight. The mentally and physically handicapped are both visible and sympathy-evoking,  and are supported by a large and vocal block of special-needs advocates. When the needs of the underdogs are perceived to be in conflict with the needs of those who “have it all,” public sentiment will always favor the underdog, and politicians will take the path of least resistance.

No foundation exists for differentiated gifted programs
There is general agreement that programs for gifted students need to be highly differentiated to meet the wide range of intelligence and skills. The standard approach is broadly defined programs with vague goals. They are designed more for appearance and to deflect complaints and criticism than for actual results. A multitude of problems stands in the way of any real change. 1. A lack of trained teachers, and the costs of special training. 2. Lack of measures for evaluating students’ needs and abilities. 3. Scheduling and curriculum chaos that would ensue from individualizing education to the extent necessary. 3. Lack of real commitment to gifted education, and even disbelief in the concept of giftedness.

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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.

So many interesting subjects to learn about. So many possible directions. There’s a new career or avocation out there somewhere, waiting for you to discover it. But how do you choose? Another change of perspective may be useful here—stop thinking about yourself as just a learner. That’s a powerful mindset inculcated by 12 to 16 years of education, and then by the necessity to learn specific skills to carry out the demands of our jobs. Gifted children are encouraged to see themselves as learning machines, and as little more. You learn for grades and academic honors; you learn for the best jobs; you learn in order to keep that complex mind busy.

Think about yourself as an explorer. The chances are very good that everything you study on your own time is part of your explorations into something that consistently attracts you. If you’re looking for a meaningful path for your life, ask this question: what have you been exploring? The answer is in the pattern of your interests.

What subjects have you gone back to over the years—in the books you’ve read, the courses you’ve taken that weren’t a requirement for something or other, even the movies you’ve watched? Are there themes you can follow and connections you can make? When you read a new book or study a new subject, does it bring up echoes of others, start you thinking along familiar paths, but with new branchings? Does it present interesting questions? What you’re looking for isn’t a specific field of study, but something you connect with emotionally and intellectually, something that will offer you a long-term challenge. It should take you in a new direction—find or create a new career, start a research project, develop and finance a foundation or a scholarship fund, invent something unique and wonderful.