Our education system to a large extent was influenced by people like Horace Mann, whose theories of schooling were based around producing a good product to fulfill the needs of the Prussian state, basically turning out product on an assembly line. Thus, being a ‘good student’ ie not giving the teacher any trouble, doing the exact work the teacher requires, following in line with everyone else to produce the orderly society they wanted, became how they taught, and the system has always struggled with how to deal with those who are different. Someone like Thomas Edison (the namesake of the so called Edison effect) ran into that in the 19th century, but it is still prevalent today, now we have teaching to the test and teacher evaluations based on how the mass of students do, which further incentivizes teaching to the middle. In a mass produced teaching system, things outside it are an impediment, a problem, and are often treated as such (one stat from a gifted kids website,estimates at the time were that 85% of the ‘diagnoses’ from school psychologists and the like were bogus, and among the kids that they claimed were ADD/ADHD, many of them when they ran IQ tests on them tested highly, and the ADD/ADHD was likely them being bored in class and cutting up. ).
“Several of our kids worst teachers were “gifted” program specialists. One made the kids cry (literally) every day in class–she didn’t like kids and had no class management skills. Another pretended S was invisible for the 2 years he was in her class because on the 1st day of class, he asked her Qs she couldn’t answer.” That is another problem, when they create ‘gifted programs’ they often give it to some long serving teacher as a perk, saying “they are experienced teachers so of course they can handle this”, when often they have little training or real desire to work with gifted kids, but rather do it because gifted teaching is like special ed, it can mean extra pay, so it is given as a perk in many places. The whole point of a gifted program is to avoid things like the kid who asks questions the teacher can’t answer or won’t (because it ‘eats into class time for important things’) and the teacher getting angry at the kid, or the kid who reads the entire reading book for the year in a couple of days then is told to follow along with the rest of the class. From what presenters said at various symposia I have been at with gifted kids, the training teaching colleges give and the like on gifted kids often doesn’t match what research shows works, which is another problem. The biggest problem is that many people, if not the majority, treat gifted education as something that isn’t needed, that gifted kids are bright and therefore “will do fine”, or worse, they resent it, see this as elitism and the like, or that this creates kids who see themselves as ‘above’ everyone else, in a sense they almost seem to enjoy the thought of these kids falling by the wayside, which is sad (meanwhile many of the same people love that the school district produces winning sports programs and will spend a ton of money on them, while cutting G and T and high level courses to save money).
I wonder if they realize just how much of their lives are impacted by gifted people who have achieved, Linn Manuel Miranda if I remember correctly went to the Hunter School and Hunter High School, both of which are programs designed for kids like we are talking about, Bill Gates went to exclusive private schools that nurtured his talent (it was pretty rare in the mid to late 60’s to have a middle school with timeshare access to a computer, his did), or how many of their family members lives were saved by the researchers who challenged things like heart disease, cancer, etc…instead of nurturing kids who could be like that, there are a lot of people who seem to resent them (kind of like the people who say they voted for a candidate who was ‘just like them’, me, I would want to vote for someone smarter than I am and more suited to hold office).
