The “gifted child” has never been a popular child – at least not with
members of the pedagogic establishment, teachers in the classroom, kids in
the playground, egalitarian crusaders and most of all, the parents of
children who wished their kids were gifted too.
Just look at the way popular culture portrays them as “boffins”, “nerds” and
“swots”. While in the media they turn up as hothoused little horrors who
always end up as unhappy adults.
There are signs, however, that maybe, at last, we’re ready to embrace gifted
children and bring them out of the cultural cold.
When I had my first child in 1984, my fellow fathers would always say: I don’t
care how gifted my child is, as long as it’s a happy child. In 2004 I had my
second son. This time around my fellow fathers were buying books with titles
like How to Have the Most Brainy Child in the World and Quantum Physics for
Toddlers. In middle-class homes the tapes of traditional nursery rhymes had
been replaced by DVDs that would make your child a baby Einstein. Mozart had
killed Mother Goose.
But is the belief that with a little parental encouragement we can all have a
gifted child just a false dream, perpetuated by the gifted child indus-try?
Last week a study by the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s
Hospital Research Institute showed that infants who regularly watched baby
DVDs and videos such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby understood fewer words
than those who did not.
You may wonder what sort of idiot would buy DVDs like that? Me, that’s who. I
confess to having been one of those pushy parents, the kind that drags their
kids off to art exhibitions, who plays number games in the bath and reads
them Shakespeare at bedtime.
Now I have doubts: am I just wasting time and money? Am I too anx-ious? Am I
too pushy or too compla-cent? To find out I decided to go to a conference of
the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children at Warwick University to
talk to some of the 800 experts in the field of dealing with the gifted
child.
First of all, I wanted to know what exactly is a gifted child?
Only at a conference full of clever academics would nobody dare make a
definition. “There is no single, internationally agreed definition of what a
gifted child is,” said conference chair-woman Professor Deborah Eyre.
Another professor told me that gifted was nothing more than a “culturally
relative term, the Canadian Inuit people have no concept of the gifted”.
“Yeah, well thanks for that,” I said, “I’ll make sure I don’t send my kid to
an Inuit school.”
Eventually I managed to piece together a definition of what a gifted child
was: they’re the ones who perform at the top end of the ability range – or
have the potential to. But finding out how many gifted children there are in
the UK is even harder. I was told time and time again by professionals that
it all depends on where you draw the line – should you include the top 10%
or the top 15%?
One speaker at the conference, Dr Thomas Balchin, claimed that the
government’s criterion of the top 10% is far too wide and gives a false
picture of how many gifted children we have in Britain.
The term has undergone something of a change in recent years. What we have is
a new, inclusive form of being gifted so that it no longer refers to a small
number of the best and the brightest but to those are merely smart and
capable. What’s more, according to the government’s criteria you can make
the gifted grade if you are good at football and have personal attributes.
What about the popular idea that the gifted child is a cursed child? There’s
the famous case of Ruth Lawrence who at 11 went to Oxford and later talked
about her unhappiness as a child. There was 10-year-old James Harries, the
gifted antique dealer who appeared on the Wogan chat show and later had a
sex change.
Professor Joan Freeman is a distinguished psychologist who has been studying
gifted children since 1974. She tells me, “It’s not true that gifted
children are unhappy or in some way damaged. They tend to be stronger and
more resilient. I think there is an element of schadenfreude about gifted
children, people want to believe that they are miserable.”
Given the recent growth in the gifted child industry, I asked Freeman if we
were becoming a nation of pushy parents, hothousing our children into
greatness?
“No, not really. You tend to find those sorts among the middle and upper
classes,” said Freeman, who as the author of How to Raise a Bright Child
admits to being part of that industry.
So how do I know if I’m a pushy parent? “You can spot them by their homes,”
said Freeman. “There are teaching aids on every wall, no televi-sion, a list
of verbs on the fridge door and the computer is only used for learning
programs.”
It’s easy to mock such parents, but it’s a sign of wider social change. As we
become a more meritocratic society, so we become more competitive. The race
to succeed is more intense now that class background no longer determines
your position in society. Parents are so anxious for their children to do
well, partly because their children are a reflection on them – but also they
are all too aware of the economic realities and hardships of contemporary
life, even for the middle classes.
Among the speakers at the conference I talked to, there was an overwhelming
sense that there has been a great sea change in the way we regard gifted
children. Once they were seen as products of privilege that didn’t need our
support and their champions were viewed as elitists and reactionaries.
“We are not interested in developing the abilities of a small number of the
kids and ignoring the rest,” said Eyre. “We want to help every child develop
their potential.”
I’ve noticed that so many parents are under the impression that if their child
can string a few words together, they must be gifted. So does every child
have the potential to be gifted?
“Absolutely not,” said Freeman. “You can’t make a child of below-average
ability into a gifted child.”
Both Eyre and Freeman were, surprisingly, against “hiving off” gifted
children. They talked about helping the gifted from all classes as a form of
“social justice” and they talked passionately about the need for
“inclu-siveness”. It was curious hearing them use the rhetoric of
progressive educationalists to promote the needs of the gifted.
But are we actually helping the gifted from all groups? After all, they will
be the doctors, the scientists and wealth creators of the future. Freeman
said that the educational system was supporting the gifted child. “When I
first started in this field there was nothing. Now we have government
putting millions into it.”
Champions of gifted children point to various government-sponsored initiatives
such as the creation of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth
as signs that we are making progress. They are pleased and proud that every
publicly funded school in Britain is required to have a gifted and talented
programme in place that will identify such people and encourage them.
But Eyre, who advises the government on the gifted, was more cautious. “The
Labour government has put more into the needs of the gifted than any
previous government,” she said. “But they still haven’t done enough.”
That’s putting it mildly. When Labour came into power in 1997 many believed
that at last hard-work-ing and gifted children from poor backgrounds would
be able to go to the top universities. But a decade later social mobility
has hardly improved. Today, 40% of all Oxford and Cam-bridge students are
still from public schools, which educate only 7% of schoolchildren.
But just how much support there really is for fostering the talents of gifted
children – from all classes – is doubtful. I spoke to Jim Campbell,
professor of education at Warwick University, and one of the founders of
Goal, a scheme set up to help gifted children from underprivileged
backgrounds. He conceded that nationwide the support has been “patchy”. But
when I asked about support from teachers he told me that around 46% of
teachers in the UK think it’s good that gifted students are given proper
attention.
I was shocked. Fewer than half of UK teachers are signed up. Those who argue
on behalf of the gifted child may say that it’s a case of the glass being
half full. The problem is that the glass doesn’t look half full when it’s
your child’s future at stake. This leads one to the question why is there
such low support for gifted children among teachers?
One teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, told me: “The problem is, many
teachers feel that if they’re paying attention to the needs of the gifted,
the needs of other kids will suffer. They tend to think that the gifted ones
will do well anyway, so why bother?”
The reason to bother is simple: a society that wastes the talents of its young
and most gifted will pay the price tomorrow by its own impoverishment. Our
failure to seek out and support bright children in our schools wherever they
may be is a national disgrace.
