Why democratic education makes sense for gifted children

Through the whole of my time as a university undergrad, even while I went to classes day after day that were supposed to be teaching me how to be an educator, I had serious problems with the education system. Traditional schools, I thought, failed to respect their students, failed to be relevant, and often failed to even educate. At the same time, my seemingly unrelated interest in teaching the gifted grew. About a year ago, I started thinking seriously about starting my own school for gifted children, and in the last few months, as I've learned more about democratic education, I've started to figure out what it's going to look like.

Gifted education and democratic education have a lot to teach each other. But first, there are some unpleasantries to get out of the way.

Democratic education, like traditional education, can have a bit of an "equality" fixation. I recently read an article by John Taylor Gatto, an author who's written a number of books on democratic and alternative schooling, in which he claims that the very existence of gifted children is a "myth". It makes sense, in a way; traditional schools like to tout the notion of equality, but rarely act on it (continuums of age, academic performance, social skill, athletic skill, etc create vast inequalities within a traditional school). Democratic schools, meanwhile, operate like democratic societies, and when they function properly, every person in the community is indeed equal. But "equal", people must often be reminded, does not mean "equivalent". While democratic schools may value a wider range of talents than traditional schools, and may provide such diverse opportunities for growth and learning that each person is better able to reach their potential and become both happy and recognized, it is still fact that some individuals are more intelligent than others, and that some have intellectual gifts so great that they create a special educational need. And in a society which truly prizes equality, a special need – such as giftedness – must be respected; to refuse to meet such a need would be to relegate the individual in question to a sort of underclass. Even the communists didn't say "to each the same"; they said "to each according to need".

Gifted education, on the other hand, seems to be rather stuck in an institutional way of doing things. Parents of gifted children often consider homeschooling and other alternatives, but gifted educators are intent on doing everything under the roof of the current system. Maybe it's an aversion to the possibility of losing the baby with the metaphorical bathwater, maybe it's a subtle admission of defeat, but gifted teaching methods are always designed to fit within schools as they stand now. And yet, we know that, as badly as traditional schools work for the average child, the situation is a thousand times worse for a gifted child. We say they need a completely different style of education, but whenever we set up a supposedly tailored learning environment for them, we mine the old system for horrid ideas and carry over classrooms, traditional authoritarian teacher-student relationships, antiquated administrative structures, rigid class schedules, compulsory curricula, and coercive punishment/reward systems. I would submit there's no danger in throwing out the bathwater carelessly if the baby has already drowned.

So with the possible disagreements between these two unwanted stepchildren of education out of the way, forward then to the many ways in which gifted education and democratic education can be happily united.

To start, gifted children are the perfect self-directed learners. They have deep interests, pursue knowledge with enthusiasm and energy, and have a great capacity for self-teaching. They tend to choose educational activities, even if the term "educational activity" is defined according to traditional "academic" standards rather than expanded to experiential learning. In many schools and programs for the gifted, students are given opportunities to complete independent projects, take college classes, or find mentors to learn new skills, but this is all within the traditional school structure of bells, blackboards, and asking permission to empty one's bladder. If we trust these children enough to pursue their own independent research, and admit they possess the intelligence to study material that would normally be considered years beyond them, surely we can trust them to structure their own time. And for the question of determining what they learn, the same argument applies that applies to placing any child in a democratic setting: in the average school, the last year of education from which a child will use everything they learn no matter their later path in life is third grade. Once you internalize that fact, there's not much can convince you of the necessity of forcing young people to fill their heads (temporarily, as we all know) with information of others' choosing.

A democratic environment also suits gifted children's unique social and emotional needs. Gifted children, when they misbehave, do so for exactly one reason: someone isn't respecting their abilities. They may be feeling sidelined, or as though adults aren't listening, or just plain bored. One of the things that sets democratic schooling apart from traditional schooling is its climate of respect. Nobody is sidelined, adults always listen, and if a child is bored, he can just choose to do something different. It's more than their academic abilities gifted kids need to see recognized, though. As I recently discussed on the Davidson Gifted Issues boards, any child (or adult!) who feels they're being unjustly expected to obey and conform will rebel, and we have a stereotype of this happening the teenage years because this is when a person's moral reasoning, sense of self, and ideas about what's right and fair in a relationship between two human beings all begin to solidify – but with gifted kids, those things can all come much sooner, sometimes so soon that the child in question is unable to articulate the ideas and emotions they're dealing with. Rebellion and despondency are the two possible roads at that point. In a democratic school, ideas about obedience and conformity are replaced with freedom, individuality, and community.

It is also important to note that an unusually high fraction of democratic school attendees go on to post-secondary education, and that the vast majority of those view their democratic education as a benefit to their pursuit of further studies. Far from being hamstrung by her lack of years of experience at sitting behind desks practicing using her listening ears, that budding neuroscientist will most likely find herself better-prepared for the responsibility and freedom of college academics from experiences in a student-driven learning environment.

So, with all that going around in my head, you can expect that in five or ten years' time, I will be starting up a democratic learning center for gifted and talented children. I don't have a name for it yet, but I might've found a motto: "The wisest men follow their own direction." –Euripides.