Tall Poppies magazine

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What are the needs of the gifted child?


by Peter Walters, (BA,Dip.Tchg)

We reproduce here the second part of the article "Why Help the Gifted?" by the founder president of the NZAGC. In answering this question, Peter Walters, (BA, Dip.Tchg) discussed:
1. What is a gifted child?
2. What are the needs of the gifted child?
3. How can we help the gifted child?
This first part answers the first question and was published in Tall Poppies vol 29 no 1. The answer to the second question makes up the second part of his article in this issue. The third part will be published in a subsequent issue.

The needs of any child are: an opportunity to develop according to his innate ability and his innate rate of progress, to find his own "identity", to learn to relate to other people, to develop skills commensurate with his abilities, to pursue his own interests, to find happiness.
So what needs are so different in gifted children?

Have you ever heard about "comprachicos"? This was a strange and hideous nomadic association, infamous in the 17th century. The word means "child buyers". They bought children, changed them into physical monsters by surgery and then sold them to be used on sideshows. Ayn Rand writes about them in her book: The New Left, The Anti-industrial Revolution. She quotes from Victor Hugo's book The Man who Laughs:

"In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the moulding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot."

Just as the needs of the physical growth of these children were not met by the comprachicos but, in fact, actively hindered, so the intellectual needs of the gifted children are not met by some of our modern comprachicos in our education system, often unwittingly and with the best of intentions, but with equally disastrous consequences.

Let me explain what I mean.
At birth a child's mind is tabula rasa: he has the mechanism of a human consciousness, but no content. Metaphorically speaking, one could say he has a camera with an extremely sensitive unexposed film (his conscious mind) and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). He is faced with an immense chaos (the world outside), which he must learn to perceive by means of the complex mechanism, which he must learn to operate.

During the first few years the child learns a tremendous amount. Observe the intense unsmiling seriousness with which the child watches the world around him. After a few years the child realises subconsciously that the world is an intelligible thing. The chaos is in his mind. He has to learn to organise his mind to enable him to understand the world around him. This is his next conceptual task. He needs to develop the method by which he acquires and organises knowledge. This method will programme his subconscious computer, determining how efficiently or how disastrously his cognitive processes will function.

To quote Ayn Rand again:
"Intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions. Whatever a child's natural endowment, the use of intelligence is an acquired skill. It has to be acquired by a child's own effort and automatised by his own mind, but adults can help or hinder him in this crucial process. They can place him in an environment that provides him with evidence of a stable, consistent, intelligible world which challenges and rewards his efforts to understand-or in an environment where nothing connects to anything, nothing holds long enough to grasp, nothing is answered, nothing is certain, where the incomprehensible and unpredictable lurk behind every corner and strike him at any random step. The adults can accelerate or hamper, retard and perhaps destroy the development of his conceptual faculty."

The young gifted child wants to learn, to seek an answer to all the "whys" that occupy his mind.

Let me read you another extract from Ayn Rand's book, and remember that Ayn Rand is an intellectually highly-gifted woman.

"A small child is mildly curious about, but not greatly interested in, other children of his own age. In daily association, they merely bewilder him. He is not seeking equals, but cognitive superiors, people who know. Observe that young children prefer the company of older children or of adults, that they hero-worship and try to emulate an older brother or sister."

A child needs to reach a certain development, a sense of his own identity, before he can enjoy the company of his "peers".

But he is thrown into their midst and told to adjust. He is delivered into the midst of a pack of children as helplessly ignorant as himself. He wants to learn; he is told to play. Why? No answer is given. He is made to understand-by the emotional vibrations permeating the atmosphere of the place, by every crude or subtle means available to the adults whom he cannot understand-that the most important thing in this peculiar world is not to know, but to get along with the pack. Why? No answer is given. He does not know what to do; he is told to do anything he feels like. He picks up a toy. It is snatched away from him by another child. He is told that he must learn to share. Why? No answer is given. He sits alone in a corner; he is told that he must join the others. Why? No answer is given. He approaches a group, reaches for their toys and is punched in the nose. He cries in angry bewilderment. The teacher throws her arms around him and gushes that she loves him.

Animals, infants and small children are exceedingly sensitive to emotional vibrations: it is their chief means of cognition. A small child senses whether an adult's emotions are genuine, and grasps instantly the vibrations of hypocrisy. The teacher's mechanical crib-side manner, the rigid smile, the cooing tone of voice, the clutching hands, the coldly unfocused, unseeing eyes, add up in a child's mind to a word he will soon learn: phoney. He knows it is a disguise; a disguise hides something. He experiences suspicion and fear.

Adjust to what? To anything. To cruelty, to injustice, to blindness, to silliness, to pretentiousness, to snubs, to mockery, to treachery, to lies, to incomprehensible demands, to unwanted favours, to nagging affections, to unprovoked hostilities and to the overwhelming, overpowering presence of "whim" as the ruler of everything.

He learns not to question the supremacy of the pack. He discovers that such questions are taboo in some frightening, supernatural way; the answer is an incantation vibrating with the overtones of a damning indictment, suggesting that he is guilty of some innate, incorrigible evil: "Don't be selfish." Thus he acquires self-doubt, before he is fully aware of a self. He learns that regardless of what he does, whether his action is right or wrong, honest or dishonest, sensible or senseless, if the pack disapproves, he is wrong and his desire is frustrated; if the pack approves, then anything goes. Thus, the embryo of his concept of morality shrivels before it is born. He learns that it is no use starting any lengthy project of his own, such as building a castle out of boxes. It will be taken over or destroyed by others. He learns that anything he wants must be grabbed today, since there is no way of telling what the pack will decide tomorrow. Thus his groping sense of time, continuity of the future’s reality, is stunted, shrinking his awareness and concern to the range of the immediate moment. He is able (and motivated) to perceive the present; he is unable (and unmotivated) to retain the past or to project the future. Thus, though modern educators pay lip service to the importance of developing a child's individuality, their insistence on the greater importance of social adjustment results in training a child to conform to the pack. This can be a special kind of torture for the gifted child.

A thinking child cannot conform-thought does not bow to authority.

Resentment of the pack towards intelligence and independence has existed from old times onwards.

"However, instead of teaching children respect for one another’s individuality, achievements and rights, progressive education encourages the tendency to form ‘in-groups’ and to persecute the outsider. When on top of this the outsider is penalised or reprimanded for his inability to ‘get along with people’; the rule of mediocrity is elevated into a system. (‘Mediocrity’ does not mean an average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies an intelligence that is more capable.)"

How else can one explain it, if, when an intermediate schoolboy who thinks like an adult and speaks like an adult because he is intellectually gifted, is physically attacked by his fellow pupils, the teacher tells the parent: "It is good for him to be put in his place". What place? Submission to the authority of the pack?

Or here is another insidious practice. There are some principals of primary schools, who, at the change of the school year, deliberately break up friendships that have been established between children by placing each child in a different classroom. The rationale? The child must learn to get along with anybody. The result, as some parents can testify, can be quite traumatic, especially for an intellectually gifted child who has trouble making friendships anyhow. What is the lesson the young child learns? It is wrong to establish lasting, deeply felt and intimate relationships. Temporary, transient, superficial relationships are the proper things to establish.

As I said earlier: a child needs to reach a certain development, a sense of his own identity before he can enjoy the company of his "peers". To establish his own identity he needs to find other children with whom he can share his interests, his ideas, his humour and his language. This he can only do with children who are at the same level of his intelligence and growth, not necessarily of the same age. What is the logical reason for this crazy notion that children must socialise only with children of their own age? Do adults have only friends of their own age? Why then do we ask of children a discipline which we do not accept for ourselves?

Children need to learn to relate to other people. Gifted children need to learn this too. However, human relationship is a subtle and intimate aspect of human values, which can only be established on the basis of trust, respect, and confidence. It can only be learned on experiencing relationships with people of like interests and intellectual ability to enable the child to experience and automatise his feelings of trust, respect, and confidence, not only in the other person but also in himself. After that he can start exploring relationships with other people outside his own realm.

Yet in the schools we actively encourage the splitting up of children with somewhat homogeneous characteristics and many principals proudly proclaim that there is no streaming in their school, that all children are relating to each other beautifully, and the process has got the beautiful name of normalisation: i.e. making everybody normal. What is overlooked, however, is that gifted children are not normal, and trying to make them normal is equivalent to trying to make a normal person abnormal. Thus we are back to our comprachicos. Do we place a small person in a medieval stretching rack to bring him to normal height or a tall person in a vice to stop him from growing beyond normal height? If we do not do this in physical aspects, what right do we have to apply these restrictions to intellectual aspects? What is "normal"? It is normal in a group of children of the same age to have a range of heights from very small to very tall; it is normal to have a range of intellectual potential from very low to very high; it is normal to have a range of rates of learning from very slow to very fast, etc. And the statistical device called "the normal distribution curve" is a poor representation of this. It is, in my view, the most misused and abused statistical device, especially in education.

Quote from "The Psychology and Education of Gifted Children" by Philip E. Vernon, Georgina Adamson and Dorothy F. Vernon:

"Terman and Burt advocated the organisation of classes on a mental age rather than chronological age basis, though they realised that a compromise would be necessary. Otherwise, if, say, all children of mental age 10 were put together, it would mean including pupils whose chronological ages ranged from about 14 to 6. Such a policy also implied that intelligence tests accurately measured each child's basic or innate capacity for acquiring school learning, which is only partially true. Nevertheless, if acceleration or retardation in accordance with achievement were more fully adopted, and more attention paid to children’s IQ’s in class allocation, it would be possible to arrange more homogeneous groups or streams, and thus to do more for the gifted as well as for the dull. It would mean that a very significant proportion of the most able students would be able to cover the conventional school and university curriculum in two years less than the average student takes, and thus become qualified for productive professional or other high grade careers two years earlier."

The needs of the gifted child are mainly: the opportunity to develop according to his innate ability and his innate rate of progress; the opportunity to relate to children of his own intelligence level, who share his interests, his humour and his language.