![]() I got to have a personalized learning experience aimed at having fun, with a teacher who wasn’t busy trying to corral twenty other kids. My school used the most common form of gifted education for elementary schools, where children are occasionally pulled out of class for specialized enrichment. Personally, I had a very positive experience with gifted education. The solution isn’t to make gifted programs more inclusive, but to get rid of them altogether. The entire purpose of them is to uplift some children over others. Even putting discrimination aside, there’s no way to make gifted education truly equitable. These programs represent a severe misallocation of resources towards children who are already more likely to succeed academically. Rather than helping kids in need, these programs serve to maintain racial wealth disparities. Whether intentionally or not, gifted education has become a form of de facto racial segregation. The result is that on average, African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students are admitted to gifted education programs far less than their white peers. are disproportionately white compared to students. This allows for another level of racial bias, since public school teachers in the U.S. Children must also be recommended by a teacher. Especially in children under 10, IQ scores tend to correlate heavily with socio-economic status, which in turn, correlates to race. IQ testing was largely popularized by the American eugenics movement, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this leads to widespread discrimination. Methods of ‘identifying’ these extra-special children vary, but most programs use some form of standardized testing, typically an IQ test. Some must be inherently better than others. It is not possible for all children to be gifted. By definition, gifted children can only exist in relation to non-gifted children. The Texas Education Agency defines gifted students as children with the potential to perform at “remarkably high level of accomplishment” in comparison to their peers. Gifted education is exclusionary by design. The people most harmed by gifted education are those who are excluded from it. If telling a child they’re special can have this bad of a negative impact on their self-esteem, it must be far worse for a child who’s told they aren’t. They aren’t even the primary victims of gifted education. Gifted kids are not uniquely harmed by the American education system. ![]() ![]() Any student could develop these problems, regardless of how when they started reading at a college level. The American education system can absolutely cause burnout, social isolation and self-esteem issues, but this isn’t unique to gifted children at all. If you are a ‘former gifted kid’ who earnestly believes this, I have great news for you. A phrase repeated frequently is “I wasn’t given the resources to succeed.” Many ‘former gifted kids’ argue that gifted education should be expanded to cover topics like burnout, work ethic, and time management. It’s that they were not treated special enough. However, the most common complaint I see raised by ‘former gifted kids’ on Twitter and Tiktok is not that they were singled out and given special treatment. Many have taken to social media to share their thoughts on gifted education and its many flaws. Gifted education became widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s, so only in the last few years that ‘former gifted kids’ have been able to talk about their experiences from an adult perspective. These are commonly reported experiences among people who were labeled as ‘gifted kids,’ along with ‘gifted kid burnout,’ which results from gifted students being unable to keep up with the high expectations put on them as children. I also struggled with self-worth issues, having been told for years that my academic ability was what made me special. As you can imagine, this made it kind of hard to make friends. There is a very simple problem with taking a select group of kids and telling them that they are better than all the others: They believe it.Īs a child, I earnestly believed that I was smarter than most of my classmates, and therefore, better than them. Gifted education programs can be a great educational opportunity, but they can also have a significant negative psychological impact on children. And I think it should have never happened. It was a foundational part of my early childhood education. The curriculum was designed to encourage critical thinking, build problem solving skills, and make learning fun. Once a week, I got to spend the entire school day in a special class with less than a dozen other kids, learning from a passionate and highly-qualified teacher. In first grade, I was admitted into my school’s ‘Gifted and Talented’ program.
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