Gifted children

[Tabouli]

Well, well, well.

I turn my back on both OT and main list digests for a couple of days, and look what happens!  I peek tentatively at my latest OT digest and it's bulging with one of my pet subjects: gifted children!  And begun by a post from a fellow Melburnian, no less!  Well.

Shaun:
> I work with profoundly gifted kids - kids for whom IQ tests, etc, are very important 
for them to gain access to appropriate education. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" 
published just over 20 years ago has caused massive harm to these kids needs and 
their chances of getting the education they need and they deserve. Gould couldn't 
be blamed for this if the work was credible - but it's one of the most biased pieces of 
literature I've ever encountered.<

I have read "The Mismeasure of Man".  In fact, it was required reading for me in the "Intelligence" unit of my undergraduate psychology course.  Of course, that was a long time ago, so I may be misremembering by now, but I'll risk making some comments here.

IIRC, a major aim of this book was demonstrating how IQ tests and results on said tests were commandeered by what could be termed "social Darwinists" to demonstrate the "hierarchy of races".  That is, the finding that white people almost unfailingly obtained much higher average scores than black people and somewhat higher scores than 'yellow' people demonstrated proof of Darwin's theory of evolution, proving that 'black' people were the least evolved and the 'white' people were the most evolved.  This view was, I believe, widely held among western intellectuals at the time, and they were delighted that IQ tests provided such incontrovertible evidence of their superiority to the savages.

Hmmm.

The fairly glaring point said white intellectuals didn't think of was that, well, um, who wrote those tests?  Western middle class intellectuals.  It seems pretty logical for white intellectuals to invent an "intelligence" test which measured what Western intellectuals considered to indicate intelligence, no?  And therefore hardly surprising that Western middle class intellectuals scored the highest on it.  My Intelligence lecturer (Ted Nettelbeck) used the book as a starting point for discussing the attempt to develop a "culture-free" measure of intelligence.

> It's a work of political theory - not really the scientific work that Gould claimed it was. 
>
>He certainly raised some good and valid points - he showed how testing could be, 
and has been, used to discriminate unjustly. The trouble is, he threw the baby out 
with the bathwater.<

I think making those points about how IQ tests were used in this way was a very good idea, myself.  I could rant for pages on the difficulties of using psychometric tests across cultures and languages, and have in fact been called in to give advice on this very subject to grad students writing questionnaires for comparing cultural groups.  Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic equivalence is a very, very complex issue, yet a worrying majority of psychologists, including very senior respected psychologists, still have this blithe notion that all they need to do is translate their tests and they will still work exactly the same in another culture.  Anyway, that's a side issue.  If we're using a well-standardised IQ test like the WISC or the Stanford-Binet to test children within the same cultural group this shouldn't be too big a concern.

I'm curious, though, to hear the definition of "profoundly gifted".  Should I assume the MENSA definition of an IQ over 150?  Or something else?  What percentage of children fit into this category?

> The problem is that over 50% of gifted children are underachievers - and the higher 
you get up the scale of giftedness (there are generally considered by experts to be 
three or four levels of giftedness - each with significantly different educational 
needs) - the higher that proportion is - and a significant number of these kids are 
underachievers because their school environment is inappropriate to them.<

My, my, but we're getting close to home here.  I am a serial collector of underachieving "gifted children".  They comprise about 30% of my social circle, and two of the most significant of my past relationships.  I was also identified as one of this gifted children category myself, having the usual high IQ, social difficulties in primary school, placed in the gifted children class at secondary school to be extended and so forth.  Once upon a time I was absolutely gung-ho about the whole gifted children education business, trumpetted the cause from the rooftops.  These days I'm not so sure.

It's not that I no longer believe that children with very high IQs have special needs which are handled very badly by the standard education system.  I do.  It's more that I have become increasingly convinced that the way "giftedness" is typically handled by well-intentioned parents and teachers is a disaster, and contributes massively to the sort of life breakdowns I have witnessed.  (What is the current plan for gifted children in Melbourne, Shaun?)

Kimberly:
> In my case it was a bad idea to set me apart at a very young age 
without giving me some sort of understanding as to how/why the 
decision was made.  I was left trying to figure out why I should get 
particular attention, or to do fun things the other kids didn't.  I 
don't remember it ever being explained to me beyond being told that I 
was "bright" or "smart".  The result of this, for me, was disbelief 
about half the time, and enormous fear of failure the other half.  
Any minor failure that I had left me fearing that I was a fraud, that 
they'd gotten it wrong, and that any moment someone was going to 
figure it out<

Precisely.  It's as if that IQ score is magic.  The hapless child, typically aged 4-7, is suddenly told that s/he is a genius, a creature superior to other mortals, who is, and this is the worst bit, Destined For Greatness.  Yes, by the time you're 25, little one, your name will be up in lights, because you are SUPERIOR!  You are Better Than Other Children!  You have magic powers which guarantee you success in any field of endeavour you choose!  You will be rich, famous, a rocket scientist, a brain surgeon!  And, all too often, the terribly chuffed parent is delighted at this new symbol of status.  "They did these tests at school and found that Katie's *gifted*, you know!"

Now, they mean well.  They mean to be encouraging and inspiring.  They sincerely believe what they say.  But the problem is, life doesn't actually work that way.  A high IQ score is *not* magic, and does *not* guarantee anything other than an easy ride academically until one's mid-teens or so, and it certainly doesn't guarantee success or happiness.  The problem is, by the time the child has cruised to his or her mid-teens, they take effortless success and adulation for granted.  It is their right.  It is *normal*.  It is their identity.  And then, all of a sudden, a new and terrible element enters the success equation: effort.

The child has never had to stoop to such a thing before.  They see it as beneath them.  Other children have to do that stuff, but not me.  But slowly, inexorably, as the effort component increases in importance, some of those lowly inferior children start to catch up.  How dare they?  At this point, there seems to be a split.  Some gifted children bite the bullet and grudgingly apply themselves to working within the system.  And excel.

Others seem to hit a point of disillusionment with the whole education process and more or less resign from it.  Drop out of school, or limp into university and stop turning up because there are no longer any awed teachers on their backs.  And from then on, every single lowly non-gifted peer who becomes a success (my, but failed child prodigies hate Madonna!), every single day that passes without them achieving fame and glory, is a deep, deep failure.  They end up with bizarre self-esteem profiles, on one hand still devoutly believing that they are superior to all other mortals, on the other deeply insecure and depressed, because they have failed to deliver, and perhaps they were just frauds all along.  Sometimes they turn elsewhere for challenges.  My last boyfriend, who dropped out of school the day he turned 16 is, as I gradually discovered, busy destroying his brilliant mind with marijuana and devotes what's left of it to finding ingenious loopholes in legal and administrative systems so that he can continue to get away with being $30,000 in debt and counting because he spends all of his dole money on drugs.  And still believes that he will one day be a great political leader because of his superior intelligence.  It's hideous.

Then we have the social element, on which other people have already commented.  Giving a child special attention is hardly going to endear him or her to the other children.  It creates resentment among the "not-gifted".  What to do?  Turn the child into a recluse, or a bored troublemaker who either still does brilliantly, or deliberately underachieves?  Put the child up a few grades where the academic gap is narrowed, but the social gap is almost unbridgeable?  Put "gifted" children together so they have each other to talk to?

Amy:
> I am aware that these are as much emotional or moral qualities as 
> intellectual, but that just goes to show that "intelligence" is not a 
> category of the brain separable from the rest of the package.
>
Shaun:
>Well, to me, I have had to treat it that way. I am in the business of helping people 
deal with their gifts in a very specific area - the realm of intellectual giftedness. I'm 
an expert in that area. But I am not an expert in dealing with their creative skills, 
and especially not with their empathic skills. If they need help in those areas, they're 
better off with someone else.<

I think the real issue here is the Western education system.  After all, I believe that Binet specifically *invented* the IQ test as a test which would predict performance within this system, and subsequent tests, though more sophisticated, are presumably designed along similar lines.  Therefore, in terms of Shaun's need to identify children whose *educational* needs will not be met effectively by this system because their aptitude is too high, an IQ test is a pretty good indicator.  OTOH, I think Amy is looking at a broader issue: that of the child as having a full range of needs outside and beyond the scholastic domain in which s/he has been identified as exceptional.  How does picking out children on the basis of only one domain, and defining them by it thenceforth benefit the child as a whole person, not just as an academic achiever?

This, I think, is the crux of my problem with the gifted children issue.  What I see happening is children building their entire identity around the fact that they score better than other people on IQ tests, and in the long-term, once they get out of the system in which they have superior aptitude, this can become a serious problem, because the truth is that IQ score magic does not provide everything you need to be happy and successful and to build yourself the adult life you want.

After years of buying into the IQ magic philosophy (easy to do: when being superior to others is central to your identity, of course you want to believe that what you're good at is the best measure of personal worth), watching what happens to gifted children *after* they leave school has convinced me that what really counts is not "intelligence" at all.  I now plump for the first quality Amy listed: resourcefulness. My dope-smoking ex had plenty of intelligence.   All the IQ tests said so.  But was he happy, or successful, or even functional because of his high IQ?  Not at all!  What he completely lacked was resourcefulness.  One day he was busy proclaiming his intellectual superiority, and I said yes, but if you're so intelligent, why haven't you figured out a way to get the kind of life you want to lead?  He got very upset and angry with me, and I backed down (no stomach for the fight, me), but on the inside I was unrepentant.  It's not what you got, it's how you use it, and IQ tests only measure what you got.

Perhaps I should sneak off one day and write an RQ test...

Tabouli.


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