>yet in follow-up studies, most gifted students demonstrated social
success by >incrementally adding to their professional fields (doctors,
lawyers, professors). hardly >any demonstrated leadership or
intellectual leaps within their fields.
Membership in gifted programs is almost always conducted via IQ-test and
cutoff point. This guarantees that the child has already been succeeding
in terms of conventional educational objectives. The program then
proceeds by a "more-of-the-same" modus operandi - more information, in
more of a hurry. The goal in our program was to ace the Advanced
Placement Examinations and graduate high school with a year of college
credits. The amount of information we were expected to master was
stupefying, especially in the math/chem/physics area. You had to work
like a robot just to cover the course material, and be a very good
child/adolescent indeed to get along. The real goal was not to do
creative or exceptional things - just do things ahead of your "average"
peers at an outstanding level of "excellence." Extracurricular
activities were restricted to those that would look good on your college
application. (I gasped when I found out that my 16-year-old classmates
were hung up on - playing bridge! No feckless youth here.)
The program worked. Out of 20-25 students three went to MIT, one to
Yale, others to Case Tech, Carnegie, etc. And guess what - as far as I
know no one has done anything out of the ordinary. Leadership (except in
the formally prescribed "President of the Honor Society" type) and
creativity were not just neglected but deliberately stamped out. What
had been a group of almost exclusively well-behaved middle class and
upwardly mobile working class children became well-behaved adults of the
middle and upper middle classes.
There was a curious twist to this. The senior high class was made by
combining the classes coming from the two junior highs and then dropping
those who performed in the bottom half. These were almost all working
class kids from ethnic (Italian and Slavic) families who had been
included by the IQ cutoff but hadn't received any family pressure to
excel or simply didn't behave well enough in class to get good grades.
One of the girls who did make it up to National Merit Semifinalist
dropped out before her senior year to get married and have a baby,
without any cries of anguish from her non-mobility oriented family. Some
of the ninth graders who didn't make the cut were natural leaders -
natural and undomesticable, since they frequently exercised their talent
by disrupting the (to them boring) class.
While I always hesitate before saying anything nice about Foucalt, Phil's
signature quote does sum up my personal experience with "gifted"
education. If there are any leaders or innovators among the former
inmates of that gifted program, I would wager that they come from the
half that was cut out before the senior high level. The graduates that I
know about are all hard-working and conventionally productive but
unremarkable workers in the knowledge industry. One boy did break out -
he did everything with exceeding propriety, and then got into Yale early
admissions to study Romance languages - a paragon of obedience gone
wrong. But....he's still a well-behaved member of an ivy league
department, nothing more daring.
Is there a moral to this story? My school friends did what they were
supposed to do, did it well, and hopefully are reaping the conventional
rewards. Where the leaders/innovators are to come from, I don't know,
but I'll bet not from the standard "gifted" programs.
Rachel Heckert
PS What was I doing? Well, I did too well to be kicked out, but I
followed a Foucaldian method of (non)-adjustment (for instance, trading
in senior calculus/physics for biology and acting workshop), and somehow
the school and I survived each other (just barely). That's why I'm on
xmca and not teaching college physics somewhere. (BTW, I had a mental
block against math which mysteriously evaporated the year after I escaped
high school.)
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