![[photo]](/academy/images/photos/workinggirl.jpg)
"There is nothing more unequal," wrote Jefferson, "than the equal treatment of unequal people."
Perhaps you're a parent whose children go to school one day -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed -- and who return from school another day knowing, sadly, that their school would never meet your high expectations? They want to question, to create, to analyze, or to synthesize, but their slow-paced teacher wants them to blindly repeat simplistic facts and follow uniform rules. Have your children somehow realized that the system wasn't designed for them? Have they been cast adrift in seas of mediocrity?
California's 300,000 gifted and talented students would benefit more from public education if they received a quarter of the special funds each physically and mentally-challenged child receives -- but they don't. "Gifted and Talented Children are, in fact, deprived," states the U.S. Department of Education; they "can suffer psychological damage and permanent impairment of their abilities to function well." Many of these great kids are both gifted and challenged, and we are there to help. We may support the ideals and tenacity of patient parents whose organizations seek political remedies to gifted students' problems, but we also know that your gifted child may need help from gifted educational specialists right now.
All too frequently, factory-modeled instruction -- private and public -- bores gifted and talented children: and boredom invites mischief. Schools may either force gifted children to endure barely-credentialed, anti-intellectual, teachers from third-rate education departments, or administrators may refuse fine teachers the right to innovate gifted curricula. Even superior teachers of groups who gain administrative support cannot simultaneously create lessons to intrigue the upper three percent of their class while they entertain legitimate questions -- and suffer interference -- from the lower ninety-seven percent.
Gifted students need teachers who understand their higher moral consciousness: their ability to question and expose irrational customs and tired leadership. Gifted mentors, unburdened by slow classes and indifferent administrators, may permit boundless intelligence to advance at a breathtaking pace. They may channel the force of intelligence with (uncensored) curricula that broadens the students' interests or, alternatively, they may help perfectionist students reduce stress. They may give rules to rule-breakers as they logically explain the consequences of human action. They teach students who may seem scattered or lost in brilliant thought, who must learn how tradition-breaking and abject honesty affect others. Mentors must hone the students' writing and speech for effectiveness. They must develop "integrated" programs for the mind, body, emotions, and spirit which teach great brains to achieve, to socialize, and to love.
Gifted educator Barbara Gilman asserts that there may well be cases of AD/HD amongst gifted students which can be cured by drugs, but she stresses that boredom and fidgeting more frequently result from "understimulating environments" (Gilman, p. !97) Almost invariably, your gifted child must wait and wait and wait for their chance to shine. If they cannot "suffer fools" and monotony gladly, gifted students retreat into books, dreams, clowning behavior, rebellion, or sad delinquency. Gifted students, empowered with creativity, humor, sensitivity, and curiosity, suffer as students of egalitarian democracy: "'Multiple meanings, innuendos, and self-consciousness plague us,' writes a gifted student, 'Intensive self-analysis, self-criticism and the inability to recognize that we have limits make us despondent.'" (Guiding the Gifted Child, p. 51)
"...asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and (modes of) awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony increases with higher intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted renders them particularly vulnerable and requires modifications in parenting, teaching and counseling in order for them to develop optimally."
We urge every interested student to apply because we believe that gifted students may not score in the top two per cent on a test that measures only linguistic and mathematical talent. Like the pioneers of gifted assessment Howard Gardiner and Anne Marie Roeper, we believe that gifted students show their intelligences in a variety of ways, which may include at least the following (adapted from Howard Gardiner’s Frames of Mind):
Words: Many gifted students read great novels at early ages, listen with exceptional memory and understanding, write amazing articles, essays and stories, speak words in public that awe adults, and debate great principles. These children, who will readily pass verbal tests, should be encouraged to read, write, speak, discuss and debate great books and ideas. Our school believes this talent is fundamental to most careers and that most students can develop it readily.
Numbers: Some students like to count everything and to understand the rules of numbers. They may learn higher-level math and may apply this skill to the natural and social sciences. These students like to analyze patterns.
Lines and Curves: Visual/special learners can draw or paint anything, on paper, on computer, or in their minds. They will make the images that define our society’s future.
Movement: Bodily/kinesthetic learners show their intelligence through movement, whether it be the large muscle movement of the skilled baseball player or dancer, or the precise movement of the electronics hobbyist or surgeon.
Music: Musical learners express themselves with notes, or understand things in terms of notes. They might thrill parents and teachers with singing, dancing, or the wide variety of instruments.
Socializing: Interpersonal leaders are learners who can gather business cards from twenty people in an hour, who can make speeches that touch others’ hearts, who can get people to do things that might otherwise be ignored. They know how to make friends in work and play. They are democracy’s salesmen and presidents. Most gifted students are introverts, but even they can be trained to socialize well when needed.
Reflection: Intrapersonal learners know themselves as well as interpersonal learners know others. They are the poets who sing the “Song of Myself,” the people who can grasp feelings and set their own goals based upon principles they themselves devised.
Adaptation: Naturalist learners can grasp the whole of a situation and adapt themselves to its needs. Whether they observe the animal world or a primitive society, their synthetic intelligence lets them survive all challenges.
Of course, our academy may only serve certain kinds of intelligence completely: we can’t simultaneously train Olympic bobsledders and Operatic divas. The School of Choice welcomes gifted, talented and hard-working students of all races, genders, faiths and creeds. We urge parents to apply to our school to find out if they are qualified; we are here to help kids reach their highest potential—and to have fun while doing it!
Our society has become test conscious. As America fails to meet international testing standards in math and science (TIMMS), we study away for STAR tests and the new SAT’s for college entrance. Tests can be administered for ADHD, visual motor processing, auditory processing, dyslexia or hearing loss. The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory can be used to neatly evaluate personality types. These tests are normed with diverse populations using test items chosen to be relevant to different ethnic groups to avoid racial bias. Most people think of the Weschler or Stanford-Benet tests of IQ (or the shorter Slosson FRIT test), which mostly question abstract verbal, spatial and mathematical reasoning. These tests give scores like the following:
Average: 90-109
high average: 110-119
Superior: 120-129
moderately gifted: 130-144 (Two percent of the total population is “gifted”)
highly gifted: 145-159
exceptionally gifted: 160-174
profoundly gifted: above 175
In 1998, the State of Colorado decided that GATE children were so "exceptional" that they needed "special provisions to meet their educational needs" (Gilman, Empowering Gifted Minds, p. 38) Following Gardiner, Colorado used broader measures of giftedness which included:
Following this criterion, School of Choice students must exhibit exceptional capacities in at least two intelligences and must display emotional maturity adequate to advanced study in a variety of subjects. The related nature of the above intelligences makes assessment of giftedness more holistic than the parts might suggest. Students at our school may be "doubly-exceptional" in that they may have certain learning challenges. Students must not have severe behavioral problems that would make group instruction impossible. Non-English speakers are gladly accepted. We will certainly consider grades and test scores in any admissions decision, but we know that gifted students’ emotions and asynchronous development sometimes distract them from attaining excellence in every subject in bureaucratic educational systems. Always we give individual attention to bring out their potential.
Americans do not segregate themselves strictly by age when they leave school: they group by choice. Factory-schools, by contrast, must group the gifted by cohort to facilitate mass educational production. Yet the gifted mature at different rates than their peers. Their minds frequently develop long before their bodies and emotions mature. No single classroom can fully challenge their complex personalities; no teacher can, at once, please the left brain and the right.
Limited by standardized schools, challenged by the paucity of political and financial support for GATE programs, stymied by union opposition to tax breaks or vouchers that might let them seek more appropriate education, far too many gifted students underperform during and beyond class. They may mask their intelligence to gain acceptance or attention, to win rivalries, or to avoid risks and win lower expectations and lighter homework. Accelerated and multi-tiered education will lessen these students' problems, but only if they could gain entry to solid GATE programs which rarely exist.
Gifted students need gifted teachers whose mature individuality stems from their own independence from bureaucracies foolish enough to ignore individual differences or selfish enough to sacrifice your child's future to other peoples' ends. Must the gifted always teach themselves to perform their miracles?
Parents rightly seek to improve classrooms for the gifted (through organizations like the California Association for the Gifted). Many liberals seek increased funding for the gifted in public schools; many conservatives, by contrast, seek vouchers that would enable middle and lower class gifted students to attend private schools. Our egalitarian political ideals frequently lend support to the underdog student but neglect gifted underachievers who might, if trained properly, develop whole industries to employ underdog students, who might cure diseases and stop wars, who might entertain generations with funny stories, or who might create safe, renewable energy resources.
Wouldn't it be nice if the parents did not have to depend upon politics to better their children's future? Private schools and public GATE programs give gifted students differentiated classrooms which meet many of their needs. Yet hardly a teacher alive can demonstrate genius in all eight forms of intelligence recognized by Howard Gardiner: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, environmental, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Your children may wish to develop intelligences to depths that a qualified GATE instructor cannot alone fathom.
Geniuses learn fastest from hosts of creative synthesizers and trained specialists. These gifted instructors, frequently uncredentialed and unorthodox, may include an actress from a local theater, a college chemistry professor, or a published novelist who loves to teach fiction.
Only schools with differentiated curricula or independent educational professionals can tailor education directly to the child's intellectual talents. Alternatively, tutors may establish small, affordable, classes to give gifted students friends who match their maturities: A fifth grader, who takes PE with her cohort, may cherish seventh-grade painting, twelfth-grade calculus, and concert-level violin instruction.
Gifted tutors have the time classroom teachers lack to fully and lovingly appreciate gifted students as individuals; they may raise and counter subversive feelings and validate emotions lost by students acting out burdensome roles. These mature educational specialists may bond closely with talented students during years of fruitful interaction. While politicians argue school politics, parents may form voluntary associations of the type Alexis De Tocqueville praised in Democracy in America, associations which might produce educational enterprise as diverse and effective as gifted students' minds. If parents, their friends, and their teachers cannot give their own gifted children the specialized attention they need, then they should call upon distinguished independent educational professionals to teach fields gifted children love. Tutors, writes The Washington Post, are becoming less of a 'stigma' and more a 'status symbol.' When the gifted need essential education, small is truly beautiful.
At best, GATE programs will give better classes within a school, but those programs will be watered down by social interaction in non-gifted classes and recesses. Tutors may accelerate gifted children after school, but they will be bored by the many hours they must suffer each day in classes designed for others. Gifted students may sometimes profit from tutoring their peers, but this should not be done at the expense of their own development. Their high potential to develop themselves and serve others will be wasted if they are kept as sacrificial cattle in "inclusive" classrooms.
Challenging private schools can hire enlightened teachers to move children ahead asynchronously towards their potential in each subject. They can accelerate education to teach it at faster pace, with less busy work. Or they can enrich it by asking gifted children higher level questions that would baffle ordinary students. They can assign War and Peace or Plato's Republic to advanced readers, ask math students to apply Calculus to Physics, or give art students the tools to paint masterpieces. These students need to grow at their own pace because they are the Atlases who hold our world up to the stars.