The Poor Neglected Gifted Child
16th March 2014
To people more worried about kids who are falling through the cracks altogether, doing slightly less than we could for the most gifted might not seem like a pressing problem. But if the study is right that exceptional youthful ability really does correlate directly with exceptional adult achievement, then these talented young kids aren’t just a challenge for schools and parents: they’re also demonstrably important to America’s future. And it means that if, in education, we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student, we risk shortchanging the country in a different way.
“We are in a talent war, and we’re living in a global economy now,” Lubinski says. “These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles. Schizophrenia, cancer—they’re going to fight terrorism, they’re going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids.”
The transformation of children into a ‘public good’ is now complete — they aren’t individuals any more, but a natural resource that must be exploited, like shale oil. The same people who can’t leave a seam of coal in the ground without digging it out and burning it, whatever effect that may have on the actual people who live there, are transferring that same attitude to ‘our children’.