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.