High Cognitive Minds

Every so often, I run across an article about a new education option for the highly gifted, and I get my hopes up. They're always dashed, but my standards are, admittedly, pretty high, and in a day and age when the primary goal of education is apparently lowering everybody to the same level of mediocrity, any effort to change that deserves at least a short round of applause.

So an online high school has to be good news. Stanford University's EPGY Online High School is Stanford's latest contribution to increasing educational opportunities for the gifted. "Stanford's tries hard to reproduce many of the trappings of a traditional high school. There is a student government, a student newspaper, a yearbook and clubs." Classes take place in real time, via video. And students are able to work at their own pace, and in their own time. This is obviously a serious effort to meld traditional school and new technologies, throwing in a good chunk of flexibility. But it's an effort available only to an elite few.

Video conferencing requires a broadband connection, something not yet universally available. And there's the cost: a whopping $12,000. a year for full-time students. Admission is limited to those who have been identified as exceptionally or profoundly gifted, and who have a record of scholastic achievement. The school opened its first year with 30 students, and plans to expand to 100 next fall, not a long reach, considering that the vast majority of gifted students recieve almost no special services.

Still waiting are the gifted students who are underachieving, who have never been identified, or who wouldn't be able to fit into a structured curriculum, even one as advanced as Stanford's.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-online17jun17,0,2546675.story
Update: This story is no longer available. To find out more about the gifted program: http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/

Things I've been thinking about lately: cognitive complexity, information overload, the wisdom of crowds, the technological singularity. They're all related. The problem is to figure out the relationships, and find the implications hiding at the deepest levels. Ideas can sometimes serve as metaphors for other ideas creating concepts that are larger and more inclusive than either of the originals.

It probably wasn't an accident that I discovered this article last night. I've been trying for years to find the right term for the kind of mind that goes beyond the usual conceptions of giftedness, and cognitive complexity is the perfect expression.

"Complexity refers to the extent to which an individual or organization differentiates and integrates an event. Differentiation is the number of distinctions or separate elements (i.e., factors, variables) into which an event is analyzed. Integration refers to the connections or relationships among these elements.

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The movies might not seem like a good basis for a discussion of personality but here's a blogger who knows how to make connections that aren't always perfectly obvious. Drawing from a biopic: Schindler's List, and a fantasy: Lord of the Rings, he discusses popular attitudes toward the possibility of becoming anyone we want to be. If you're shy and withdrawn, there are shelves of books that will tell you how to become outgoing and, as a natural corollary of that change, bound for success in whatever you do.

Despite research that tells us our personalities are fairly stable, everything in our culture says otherwise. Schindler's list portrays a profit-minded industrialist who didn't have any problem using Jewish slave labor, but eventually risked his life to save Jews from the Nazis. It can happen, of course, but the movie gives us the impression that it can happen to anybody. The truth, which the post almost manages to touch on, is that it wasn't Schindler's personality that changed, but his motivations, his understanding of what he was doing and how that had to change.

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