The Social Structure of Schools

A member of the Davidson Gifted Issues forum recently posted this thought:

The whole concept of "acceleration" depends on acceptance of the premise that school should be organized around social education and not around intellectual education. […] Does it stem from the fact that we have a certain age for starting school--they all start at the same time, therefore they should all be in the same place for the rest of their education?

I think it was Descartes who advocated "methodic doubt", the removal of assumptions and the acceptance of only information that can be verified as true. The organization of school along social, age-determined lines – particularly at the primary level – is so basic to modern education that its rightness has become one of those things no one seems to feel they have the right to doubt. And yet, I wonder whether anyone has ever bothered trying to prove that it is right.

The reason schools in modern societies are age-segregated is quite simple: the overall societies are age-segregated. Most people seem to think of age as a natural demographic by which to separate people (personally, I suspect this emerges from the same "us-them" instinct that provides the evolutionary basis for racism and sexism, and I find it interesting that ageism is still socially acceptable). For the most egregious example, consider the fact that a person can, simply by virtue of being a single day short of his eighteenth birthday, be denied basic legal rights, property ownership, the protection of the Bill of Rights, even the respect of being considered capable of taking responsibility for his own actions. And somehow, the next morning, all of that changes.

When you have a society of which age-based rules are a ubiquitous fixture, it's hard to think about organizing schools any other way. Add to that the fact that so many people seem to think self-esteem is more important than education - what about the children who would, in a system organized around individual academic progress, leave school at 20 instead of 18? Sure, they might be better educated, more well-rounded, generally better people for it, but they might feel bad about themselves because they're older. Shockhorror.

Furthermore, the institutional nature of modern schooling pretty much precludes the possibility of individual pacing because once you're in a class, you're moving at the same pace as the other students you're with. No teacher can provide differentiated instruction for every child in a class of thirty. And it's simply unfeasible to begin bumping students up a level each term and have them learning in a series of leaps and plateaus.

Put all this together and the suggestion that we move students through school at an individually determined intellectually appropriate pace comes to border on heresy.

Don't get me wrong; I love the idea. But it would require not just a massive rethinking but a massive restructuring of education. Timetables and educational programs would have to be fluid and individual rather than regimented with exceptions for special cases. Classes would have to be smaller to make proper differentiation possible. Actually, hold on a minute; classes are social units. Supposedly moving toward a common academic goal, yes, but they're artificial social units that impose artificial social conditions. A school with truly academic goals would dump the whole idea. The school day would be based on independent exploration and one-on-one or small-group teaching.

When I started writing this entry, I didn't think such a school existed. It turns out I was wrong, and I invite you to take a look at the Sudbury Valley School, a successful school in Massachusetts that has become a model for several dozen others around the world. At Sudbury Valley, education is individual and self-initiated. Children learn what, how, and when they want to learn, and staff members act as mentors and helpers, guiding students through projects of mutual interest. There is no grouping by age. Children as young as five are given complete control over their own education. It's the kind of situation that would terrify most adults and the average teacher would probably liken to some grotesque form of child abuse, and yet 90% of Sudbury graduates go on to university, with many becoming entrepreneurs or ending up in other jobs that require initiative and creativity as well as a strong educational foundation.

Which is proof, to go back to my initial point, that at the very least structuring schools socially isn't the only way to do things. Yet the majority of adults continue to feel it is the proper way, the best way, for one reason or another – the optimist in me wants to say "because that's what they know", while the cynic wants to say "because it lets them remain in control". Either way, they are wrong. It should be common sense that the purpose of school is to meet the intellectual needs of each individual student. Until the day that it is, at least we have options outside the public school system.

Five Stupid Things People Say About Gifted Children (And Why They're Stupid)

"Gifted children should be smart enough to keep themselves under control."

As I once wrote on the Davidson Institute gifted message boards, this is like giving a university professor a job on an assembly line and telling him that someone with a PhD is obviously smart enough to keep himself from getting bored. Refusing to meet a child's educational needs is bad enough, and gives him every right to rebel; to then insist that this very unmet need should preclude such rebellious behavior is adding callous insult to grievous educational injury. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a gifted child's behavioral issues will disappear when they finally find themselves in an educational situation that is of some benefit to them.


"This child can’t be gifted because his/her grades aren’t high enough."

Students with special needs aren't denied the services they need because their grades are too high; why should gifted students be denied services because their grades are too low? Like visual impairment or a learning disability, being gifted is a defined, measured special educational need which is independent of academic success. Intelligence also does not change, barring major brain damage; a gifted child remains gifted, and fluctuations in academic performance are the effect of another variable (most likely the onset of total mind-numbing boredom).


"The easy kids."

I remember the first time someone accused me of wanting to work with "the easy kids". At the time, I didn't know nearly as much about teaching the gifted as I do now, but I still knew he was off his rocker.

Are gifted children generally better behaved than others? If their educational needs are being met, then on average, yes. But if we consider for one second the fact that the primary job of a teacher is not riot control but education, it becomes obvious that gifted students are in fact some of the most difficult to teach. An ordinary teacher spends 1/3 of every year doing review lessons, which the vast majority of gifted students do not gain anything from. The material covered by that ordinary teacher in the other 2/3 of the year can be absorbed by gifted students in a few weeks. This means that a gifted teacher has to present, at a minimum, roughly fifteen times as much material as an ordinary teacher. In addition, because of their students' superior higher-level thinking skills, gifted teachers must cover every topic in much greater depth, meaning they themselves have to have deeper knowledge and understanding of the subject areas involved – and they usually end up teaching all subject areas. Easy?


"It wouldn't be good for him/her socially."

Of the statements on this list, this is the one you're most likely to encounter in the wild. That's because most highly effective accommodations for gifted students – especially full or single-subject grade acceleration – have for years been assumed to be socially detrimental. It is, at this point, a proven fact that this is not correct; dozens of studies have been done on the social effects of acceleration, and to my knowledge not one has found it to cause any damage to a child's social development or status. In fact, the reverse is often true, since remaining in a classroom filled with one's intellectual inferiors does nothing to promote socialization. When a child is reading Twelfth Night and her classmates are struggling with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, how interested do you think she is in talking to them?


"Every child is gifted in their own way."

This statement is the most dangerous on this list, because it subtly destroys all rationale for making gifted programs available. If everyone is gifted, then giftedness is no longer a special educational need, and gifted services are unnecessary.

This is usually said by people who have no idea what "gifted" actually means, though on rare occasions it's simply a product of immense self-delusion. "Gifted" isn't some nebulous quality like "special"; it's defined and quantifiable. In most jurisdictions that I know of, it's defined as an IQ two standard deviations above the norm. Regardless of the precise definition in use, "gifted" refers to a specific population with specific needs, just like "special education" – and as a term and a group, deserves the same respect.

Is acceleration really the best we can do?

Grade acceleration is one of those things that never happen quietly. It’s one of the most contentious issues in education, in the sense that although it’s not common enough to provoke ongoing controversy, it always comes to a fight when the topic arises.

The majority of both classroom teachers and parents are likely to agree that grade-skipping is tantamount to dropping a neutron bomb on a child’s social life; many teachers will actually further argue that placing a child in class with older students will have negative effects on his academic success as well. Gifted educators, on the other hand, will tell you that acceleration has been proven to be of more benefit to gifted children than just about any other course of action, and that it is an utterly baseless myth that grade-skipping has any negative social effects. The latter argument is backed by just about every study that has ever been done on the subject.

The social argument against acceleration is founded on the false precept that children naturally “fit in” and interact best with others their own age. This is not even necessarily true of average-achieving students; it is not unusual to find children who are more comfortable with people a few years older or younger than themselves than they are with those their own age. With gifted children, it is actually very unlikely to be true. How probable is it, really, that a three-year-old with a second-grade reading level will prefer the company of other three-year-olds? How likely is it that other three-year-olds will find her an attractive playmate? It is far more likely that she will befriend older children, with whom she can share more of her interests and hold a more fulfilling conversation.

As for the academic effects of acceleration, it is nothing short of laughable to presume that giving a child work at his level will be somehow damaging.

These two rebuttals are generally the bulk of the gifted educator’s argument, which, once made, will usually be forwarded to six people who won’t read it and one who will file it and then lose the key to the cabinet. If by some miracle the argument is listened to by the classroom teachers, principal, parents, and school district administrators, the child will be moved down the hall, possibly given a phone book to sit on, and then treated like any other member of their new class. The problem with this should be obvious.

A gifted child, even one who is younger than the others in his class, is not like any other member of the class. Not for one second can we assume that a year’s age difference negates the needs of a gifted child or the responsibility we have to him. I go back to my favorite myth of gifted education: that gifted children are born “ahead” of their agemates but progress at the same speed. The opposite being the truth, it should take only a moment’s thought to realize that, regardless of her age, a gifted child who is at a fifth-grade level in September will reach sixth-grade level long before June. Consider a vastly oversimplified hypothetical child - let’s call her “Sophie” - who acquires knowledge and skills at exactly 1.5 times the average rate. At age four, she works at a first-grade level, so her school agrees to advance her to first grade from Kindergarten. At first, she’s overjoyed at the challenge, but that soon wears off when she realizes that whenever the teacher explains something new, she has it figured out long before the other children. That’s bad enough, but the worst is yet to come: at the end of the year, the rest of the class has advanced to the level at which they should be at the beginning of second grade, but Sophie, who is now five years old, is functioning at the level of a child halfway through second grade (age 7.5). Fast-forward three years, and Sophie is eight years old, going to school with nine-year-olds, and working at the level of a twelve-year-old.

This example isn’t true to life, of course (the phrase “spherical chickens in a vacuum” comes to mind); children develop in fits and starts rather than on a straight line, for one. But I hope it serves to illustrate my primary disagreement with acceleration, which is that placing a gifted child in a higher grade does not provide for the speed or the depth with which he can process information; rather, it simply moves him into a group which is working at his academic level at that precise moment in time, but which he may soon be beyond. Additionally, it can serve as an excuse to ignore the needs of such children, giving schools and teachers the opportunity to say something to the effect of “Jack has already been accelerated, which we feel is adequate provision for him.”

Furthermore, older children are in no way a gifted child’s peers simply by dint of having an extra year or two of knowledge and experience under their belts. A gifted child’s only peers are other gifted children. Parents who are worried about their children “fitting in” would do well to understand that it is difficult for a child to have a healthy social life when they are faced with a complete dearth of intellectual equals.

Acceleration has many things going for it, chief among them that it is, once you have the necessary signatures and forms, remarkably easy. A child who’s been grade-skipped can get on the same bus in the morning, go to the same school, play with the same friends, and come home at the same time as they did before the skip, without the parents being inconvenienced and without any financial implications on any party. It’s the educational equivalent of a “fire-and-forget” missile, or the “easy button” in those Staples advertisements - one action, relatively easy to make, that is generally thought to have drastic effect. And it does. But I for one believe it is simply not enough - and beyond that, I find the concept of it offensive. If teachers claimed that the very best we could offer students with special needs was to hold them back a year every now and then, there would be outrage from just about every direction. Acceleration is exactly the same concept. Just like children with special needs, gifted children require a unique kind of education and a high level of individual attention. They require resources created with their talents in mind and educators trained to help them reach their potential. They require a little more attention and consideration than it takes to move them three classrooms down the corridor.

Many gifted educators swear by grade acceleration. I consider it an admission of defeat. To advocate a grade-skip, in my mind, implies that the system has so failed a gifted child that the only option is to move them up into a class where they might at least encounter a few concepts they haven’t already mastered. I won’t for a moment suggest that it doesn’t help; I just think we could do much, much better.

Name Change

You know how gifted people are stereotyped as perfectionists who are never pleased with themselves?

Yeah. Stereotypes exist for a reason.

The name I'd given this blog has been wearing at me as not quite right pretty much from day one, and I finally realized why: the name, or rather the thought behind it, was too much about advocacy. Now, I will be writing some advocacy stuff, no question, but this blog is mainly intended for people who already believe in the need for GT services. So I wanted a more general name. And I've just spent the last three hours wracking my brain to come up with this: Twenty-Nine Letters.

You may find this an odd name. Its meaning is very personal. This blog is now named for (not after - for) the first gifted student with whom I ever worked. She continues to inspire me and I thought it only fitting that I honor her somehow. And no, there weren't 29 letters in her name; it's not that simple! There are 29 letters in the word I taught her how to spell the first day I worked with her: floccinaucinihilipilification (here's the link to prove I'm not just making that up). And yes, she learned it.

The original "What is an Icarus Indomitus?" post will stay up, because I do still believe in that philosophy. It's just not an appropriate name for the blog as a whole.

What is it like to be gifted?

It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the Earth is turning and you just can't quite believe it 'cause everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it - the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour and I can feel it. That's who I am.

Those of you with impeccable taste in television will recognize this as a quote from Doctor Who. You may wonder what it has to do with anything, considering the character speaking in this quote is a nine hundred-year-old time-travelling alien. Well, I'm not suggesting that gifted individuals can feel the Earth's rotation, obviously. But this particular quote occurred to me today when I was thinking about how gifted people experience the world. They see and feel and understand things others don't, often provoking the same emotion with which the Doctor delivers this line: wonder tinged with loneliness - the loneliness of experience. It's a bittersweet feeling - probably (though sadly I will likely never be able to test this comparison) the same as that of seeing the Earth from space for the first time and knowing that nobody you talk to when you get home will be able to understand what you saw and felt, even if you were to talk about nothing else until the day you died.

Being gifted is about being different, and giftedness brings a different experience of the world. One of my two "favorite" myths about giftedness is that gifted children are "ahead" of their peers. "Ahead" makes it sound like all kids are in a race and the gifted ones got a jump-start somehow. It also implies that gifted and non-gifted children have the same experiences, just at different points in their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here's a new metaphor for you: imagine there are two trains crossing a mountain range. One is the "gifted" train and one is the "non-gifted" train. The "non-gifted" train heads through the mountains in a perfectly straight line, through tunnels and over bridges. It never detours. It arrives everywhere it's expected to be at pretty much the right time. And it gets to the other side exactly when it's expected, to the cheers of those waiting on the platform.

The "gifted" train, on the other hand, is a very special train: it decides it doesn't need to follow the track. Instead, it crosses the mountain range in a dizzying maze-like path, looping around mountains, going over peaks, running through valleys, exploring rivers and waterfalls, stopping at a few villages along the way, and by the time it reaches the far side of the mountains, its route map looks like a knot the very thought of which would be enough to give an Eagle Scout a coronary. And with all the extra things it's seen and done, it still arrives before it's expected - and before the non-gifted train.

My other favorite giftedness myth is that the word "gifted" is actually a prefix that must be attached to the word "children". People ask, "Were you gifted as a child?" How is one supposed to answer that question? Perhaps, "Yes, I was, but a large spike was accidentally driven into my head when I was eighteen, so I'm now a perfectly normal adult."

Gifted children grow up to be - surprise! - gifted adults, and thus progress from a group whose discussion causes general discomfort into one whose existence is essentially denied by all factions of society apart from the writers of The Big Bang Theory. People seem to think the "problem" of giftedness simply goes away somewhere between the SATs and the first day of college. But it doesn't. Gifted adults face many of the same issues gifted children do - issues such as a lack of mental challenge and intellectual stimulation in everyday life, difficulty finding friends who are intellectual peers, a tendency to "dabble", inability to follow unfounded rules, and proneness to overexcitabilities. Of course, gifted adults are also blessed with the same abilities they had when they were gifted children: creativity, flashes of insight, impeccable memory, etcetera. From both the positive and the negative impacts of giftedness on a person's life, there comes an experience of the world which is unique, and which does not suddenly revert to normal upon reaching adulthood. The gifted train never returns to the track.

So how does it feel to be a person who experiences the world in such a special way for his whole life?

The nineteen in twenty gifted individuals who fall in the mildly to moderately gifted range may not see the world so uniquely that they feel the loneliness of experience, though they will almost certainly feel a regular stream of "Why can't everyone else see this?" moments for the whole of their lives. They may sometimes be frustrated by the world's general "slowness". They are capable of a great deal of self-teaching, have huge reserves of mental and sometimes physical energy, and think things through much more deeply than non-gifted people. They may find that post-school life provides the intellectual stimulation they have missed as children, if they choose a profession that requires deep, creative thought. In school and in later life, they are likely to be seen as exceptional and labelled "geniuses" or "geeks", but generally speaking, they can function as part of a "normal" group and have meaningful friendships with non-gifted individuals.

Those who are highly gifted (approximately 0.1% of the human race) or exceptionally gifted (0.01%) - I myself sit right around the dividing line between these groups - have a more unique experience. We see connections others don't and have frequent moments of creative, philosophical, or intellectual insight. We experience emotions in unique ways, and sometimes react to things with a staggering intensity. We tend to find that the world at large is simply not "set up" for us, nor we for it. Life is an ongoing search for intellectual stimulation. Peers are difficult to find and it is hard to maintain more than casual friendships with non-gifted individuals. Boredom sets in easily, necessitating job, lifestyle, and even life-course changes that occur with unusual frequency. Our perception of society at large is often that it is overly rigid, mistaken in some of its values or priorities, or generally lacking in creativity and individuality; to highly and exceptionally gifted children and adults, the world can seem a grey canvas begging for color.

Those who are profoundly gifted (approximately one in a million people, but often impossible to properly identify) are, quite simply, the greatest minds of their age. Da Vinci and Mozart numbered among these individuals; Einstein did not. These people may never encounter a concept they cannot comprehend, and the intuitive leaps of which they are capable can escape the understanding of others for years (or centuries). They are extremely sensitive to detail and complexity. They often have extremely intense emotional and moral reactions. They face all the problems associated with giftedness tenfold: they are so unique that even high-IQ societies offer little opportunity to meet intellectual peers (of whom there may be only a few thousand in the world), no occupation exists which can provide them with a consistent mental challenge, and the workings of "normal" society may be completely alien and indecipherable to them (imagine trying to work out the social norms of an ant colony and then insinuate yourself into it). Even highly gifted individuals cannot begin to guess what it means to be profoundly gifted. The loneliness of experience for these people must be overpowering.

So maybe gifted children and adults don't feel the turn of the Earth - but just like the Doctor, they have an experience of the world others don't. And while that experience is often wondrous, it brings with it a loneliness that touches every facet of life.

Fight the Sledgehammers

This being my first real post about GT issues, I think it's fitting that I start from the beginning: the need for gifted services.

My mother happened to meet a teacher at a recent event of some sort, and mentioned in conversation that I was starting my MA in Gifted Education. This "teacher" essentially roadblocked the conversation by saying, "Oh. I don't believe in streaming kids that way." My mother, not having the passion for gifted issues that I do, didn't respond. Had I been there myself, my reaction would have gone something like this:

What is the purpose of education? Some - I call them the Sledgehammers of Equality - believe the purpose of schools is to produce an entire population with a standard, undeviating skillset. Some may talk about “preparing children for the workforce”, and seem to be under the impression that a twenty-first century, technology-based economy does not prize individuality and talent; some are more concerned with “self-esteem”, and believe that the key to giving each child confidence in their abilities is to ensure that they do not differ at all from the people around them. Whatever their reasoning or provenance, the Sledgehammers are powerful. Many (perhaps most) teachers either agree with them or, at least, are content to teach under the system they have created.

But good teachers know that the purpose of education is to ignite the mind and help each child reach his own intellectual and creative potential. Research has borne out the idea that, roughly speaking, students whose intelligence is within two standard deviations of the norm can reach their potential within the regular classroom, perhaps given some accommodations. This equates to an IQ between 70 and 130 (if you’re one of those who don’t believe in the validity of IQ, I will be discussing this in a future post), and includes roughly 95% of the population. The other 5% (2.5% at the low end and 2.5% at the high) require special services to reach their individual potential. The regular classroom and the regular teacher are simply not equipped to educate a mind different from the average to such a degree; the “direction” of difference changes nothing. A freeway built for cars that travel at 75 miles per hour is appropriate for neither bicycles nor Formula One racers.

The 2.5% of children with an IQ below 70 are variously known as mentally handicapped, mentally retarded, or whatever term is considered sufficiently sensitive this month. These individuals generally require full-time or near-full-time special educational programs. And they generally receive such programs. The 2.5% at the other end of the scale have to fight tooth and nail to receive any services at all – and any services they are offered are often stopgaps or temporary solutions, like one-hour-a-week pullout programs or grade acceleration (that’s another future post). Why? This goes back to the Sledgehammers. They believe that the purpose of special education programs is to help children with special needs function identically to their agemates (not true), and they shudder at the thought of programs that might allow the gifted to reach a higher plateau. This, they say, would make everyone else feel bad.

Because apparently, the way to feel good about yourself is to compare yourself to others. And they would instill this philosophy in our children.

In advocating their philosophy of enforced equality, they attempt to rob 2.5% of the population – approximately 1.5 million school-age children in the United States alone – of the opportunity to fulfill their potential. They also attempt to rob the greater society of the benefits of innumerable products of genius that may never come to be. We almost lost Einstein himself to the education system’s contempt for genius. How many potential Einsteins have been lost along the way?

Is gifted education divisive, as the Sledgehammers claim? That depends on whether you believe self-worth comes from within or without. Most children who are not athletically skilled seem comfortable with the existence of those who are. This is because they see that adults are comfortable with the concept of athletic ability. Most adults, however, are not comfortable with the concept of intellectual giftedness. Genius is a taboo subject; the only thing it is less appropriate to talk about than one’s own giftedness is one’s children’s. So of course children learn that everyone should have the same level of intelligence. But we can un-teach this. We can teach children that in the realm of the mind, just like in the realm of the body, there are some with talents others cannot match, and that this has no bearing on anyone’s value as a human being. We can, in essence, practice what we preach about celebrating diversity and everyone being special in their own way.

Or we can continue ignoring the problem and failing the greatest minds of tomorrow.

You choose.

So what IS an Icarus Indomitus?

Note (22 December 2009): "Icarus Indomitus" was the original name of this blog.

The story of Icarus is probably the best-known of all the Greek myths.  A young boy, wearing wings his father built for him, flew too high; the heat of the sun melted his wings, and he fell to his death.  He was reckless.  He was prideful.  He refused to listen.  In fact, Icarus is generally portrayed as a bit of a moron.  So why would I name a blog about gifted & talented issues after him?  And what's this "Indomitus" business?  Isn't that Latin, not Greek?

Icarus died for ignoring the commands of his elders.  He was too adventurous, too curious, too passionate.  He did not do as he was told.

If he wasn't a gifted child, he would certainly have felt a great affinity for them.

Around the world, there are young Icaruses who fly too high for the comfort of the adults in their lives.  I'm talking about the child who arrives in kindergarten able to read and is told she has to go back to learning her letters; the child who is reprimanded for reading about quantum physics while he is meant to be practicing long division; the child who should be spending her school days with children three years her senior, but is told she wouldn't survive among them.

Adults tell gifted children it is wrong to fly higher than anyone else.  Is it jealousy?  Fear?  I wonder.  And then when they do try to fly too high, adults pull them down.

"Indomitus" is indeed Latin (my Latin is better than my Greek, and anyway, I like the alliteration).  It means "untamed" or "unconquerable".  The Icarus Indomitus is, therefore, the gifted child who will not be pulled down from his rightly earned heights.  Who will not do as he is told when the person giving the command is his intellectual and moral inferior.  Who is adventurous enough and curious enough to fly to places undreamt-of by most, though he may go alone and be punished for the transgression.  These children may be some of the most difficult to teach and to raise.

Which only means there is something vastly, perhaps irreversibly wrong with the way we view and treat them.

Gifted children should be untamed, should be free to explore and fly and be.  Childhood is the time for passions and adventures, before the loss of spirit and wonder that comes with adulthood.  Icarus Indomitus is my own little philosophical concept: the child who flies as high as she wishes, unfettered by adult society's strange notions of propriety, and in fact aided by adults who believe in the right of such a child to flourish and grow in his own manner, in his own time, to his own ends.

That is what this blog is here to advocate.  In the coming months, as I begin my Masters program in Gifted Education, I plan to write weekly (ish) entries about teaching, mentoring, and raising gifted children.  I hope I'll be able to offer some insights, and receive some in return.