Rethinking Giftedness and Gifted Education (2011) [pdf]

One thing which stands as obvious to me is that we should, as a society, strive to provide the "special education for gifted" to everyone. Then we'll magically have more "gifted" children. At my kids' school, there's one day a week where all the "gifted" kids are going on "special program", where they do chess, some electronics, robotics, math, in a very free atmosphere. This should be the standard education, not some elite program for selected kids.

&quot;Exceptionally Gifted Children: Long-Term Outcomes of Academic Acceleration and Nonacceleration&quot; by Miraca U. M. Gross is an extremely illuminating long-term nationwide study of the exceptionally gifted and what differences result between accelerating or mainstreaming them.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.eric.ed.gov&#x2F;fulltext&#x2F;EJ746290.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.eric.ed.gov&#x2F;fulltext&#x2F;EJ746290.pdf</a>

Being an expert violinist takes about 4 hours of “purposeful practice” per day from 5 until 18. Really even this just means “good enough to get into the school that can then maybe get you into the Berlin Philharmonic”. This is also where Malcolm Gladwell got and then sort of over-simplified the 10,000 hour rule.<p>Of course, being a violinist takes that long because we have a well defined training platform that has been developed for 400 years. Being an expert cloud architect, a relatively new field, would take less time. Once someone gets into the Berlin Philharmonic and then plays for a few years, they are closer to 30,000 hours. Can’t imagine being an expert of cloud architecture couldn’t be done via 2 hours a day for 8 years, which is 6,000 hours. It barely existed 8 years ago!

I think what is often missed in mainstream discussions on &quot;giftedness&quot; is those gifted but with disabilities.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Twice_exceptional" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Twice_exceptional</a><p>These are students that are gifted, but due to their disabilities underperform. It isn&#x27;t uncommon for them to not be identified as gifted, and thus never be put in gifted classes despite being very intelligent.<p>Imagine having someone 140+ IQ that is stuck in a standard classroom all 12-years of their pre-college education because they weren&#x27;t ever identified. They typically are the students that enroll in special services and get exam accommodations in colleges.<p>At least colleges recognize these sort of students. For example Princeton has such services: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ods.princeton.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ods.princeton.edu</a>

The original big push for gifted education in the US was primarily a response to the Soviet Union’s scientific and technology advances after the 1950s. During these times, gifted programs were well-funded, and they provided smart but poor or unconnected kids vast opportunities that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.<p>After these funding programs died down, the “gifted” label was usurped by upper middle class parents for obvious reasons. As far as I know, gifted programs today are much different than they were before the 90s. And, as Gifted has become a status label in upper middle class communities, one can see that politics has become more important than natural abilities. For example, in some large, well-funded school districts (like Fairfax Virginia), it’s common for the number of students in gifted education programs to be quite higher than statistically likely. In fact, parents and students compete for these positions using test prep systems, cheating, political maneuvering, and even fraud. So, in my mind, gifted education in the US is mostly a dead concept.

Gifted education is, I believe, an area that has rather too much funding compared to gifted mental health services. (Mental health services generally, of course, but often gifted children are functional long enough and just enough that debilitating conditions that have nothing to do with intelligence, but could end their life, are not identified in them.)<p>A lot of the gifted education policy discourse seems to treat gifted children as resources where the yield must be increased. But they are, like all children, humans and the primary problem of their condition is not &quot;not achieving according to their ability&quot;, but indeed it is suffering. Policy should strive to address, first, suffering, and only then be concerned with achievement. (Again, as with all children. For example, this is what is done with education for children that don&#x27;t have the intellectual abilities for regular schooling.) And I don&#x27;t really wish to tell actual experiences here, but gifted children have plenty of suffering that is not simply due to being bored in school or not told they&#x27;re smart often enough.