Treating gifted childen as the kids who live next door...

Press, 4 December 1981, Page 14

Treating gifted childen as the kids who live next door...

By

STAN DARLING

Taking gifted children completely away from normal schools and putting them into a situation that does not reflect the real world is a mistake, says a Christchurch woman who has worked with such children here and in England. But giving children with special abilities too little attention — as often happens, either accidentally or on purpose — is another mistake, says Mrs Elizabeth Beard, a past president of the Christchurch Association for Gifted Children’. Earlier this year, she attended the Fourth World Conference on Gifted and Talented Children in Montreal. She admits that some countries, through crash programmes designed to help them catch up to technologi-cally-advanced societies, are providing fuel for the old argument that elites of young people are being created. New Zealand's educational system, with all its drawbacks, is at least flexible enough to allow special abilities to be brought out within the system, Mrs Beard says. “The countries teaching their teachers to devise special activities for individual children are doing far better than countries that really feel the need to compete on a technological basis,” she says. “There shouldn’t be separate schools, or any form of creaming off at all". That could smack of forming an elite. “I don’t think a separate system does the gifted child any good, and it certainly doesn't do the other children any good. You have to be aware of misusing talent by having a nationwide aim of specialising in the production of scientists and specialists for jobs and occupations that really just rip off your own country. It depends' on your ideology, I think.” A country like New Zealand should be producing a range of teachers, community leaders, poets, philosophers, and all the rest. “In America after Sputnik, that was a misuse of talent, and that’s what started the ball rolling, and gave the education of gifted children a bad name,” says Mrs Beard, who has a gifted teenage son. Because of criticism that special help for the gifted is elitist, such children have

tended to become educationally disadvantaged. Mrs Beard disagrees with the reasoning, of course: “To attempt to educate each individual child to the fullest extent of its potential is as egalitarian as you can get.” She says the New Zealand notion is to "educate people so they all finish up the same, in a sense. So they all get equal treatment. That is the myth of egalitarianism. “But what that means is that children with individual differences tend to miss out.” That happens less at the lower end of the scale, with slow learners in subjects such as reading, but gifted students have just as many problems. “Trying to relate to the average is just as difficult from either end,” Mrs Beard says. “There is this myth that if you’ve got brains or talent, you can get along without any help. "So if resources have to be cut back, special activities are the first to be chopped. Some people are annoyed at giving resources to children that seem to have so much going for them. That just isn't so. They can become delinquent or drop out like anyone else if they have problems. “We have to emphasise the fact that gifted children are perfectly ordinary children, with the same needs as any others. They’re not monsters from outer space or anything like that. They are the kid next door.” In an ideal school setting, children with special abilities would probably be withdrawn from their regular classes for maybe three hours or more a week so they could be stimulated in areas where they have particular strengths. “They would have a truly differentiated curriculum presented to them,” Mrs Beard says, “not just extra homework. Now that is already done in sport and music. Children with those abilities are taken out and given extra coaching and so on, so why not with other areas?" The reason more is not done is “partly money, but partly this peculiar notion of equality,” she adds. “People seem to find intellectual ability threatening. Those good

in sport are praised, but if you have a maths or essay contest winner, sometimes you keep quiet about it. “Really, the two abilities are the same. Parents need to realise children have intellectual as well as physical strengths.” Gifted children associations help most in getting the young students out to afterschool activities that stretch their imaginations, and in working with schools to strengthen their own approaches to the children. Schools should be careful to avoid channelling special students into specialised areas too soon, Mrs Beard says. "If you specialise too young, you drop subjects. That’s fine, if you can pick them up again later on your own. But some things you can’t unless you are exposed to them early. “You should offer gifted children as many choices as possible, so they can do things like get double and triple majors at university, swap around, because that’s what they’re capable of. “If children are forced to stick to their most obvious strengths, they can get branded as Einsteins or brainboxes. "The system can • also chuck out the ones who are slow, label them failures before they even get going. It is common to get labelled. It is difficult for someone who knows the answers to keep quiet in a classroom, and easy to become known, as a know-it-all and show-off. As gifted children get older, they can learn to keep quiet rather than get teased. “And teachers find it difficult to cope with someone whose hand is up at every question. That’s why they must be offered some kind of insights into ways of coping with children like that. Statistically, you could get one child in every classroom who was advanced.” Mrs Beard says that the attitude of blending “into the anonymous surroundings of the classroom” (see box) is common among gifted children, who can easily become under-achievers as they try to conform. Families in the local association do not just let that happen. About 100 families belong.

“Parents are now asking for more classes in things, such as we now do in French and geology,” Mrs Beard says, “instead of having just the one-off activities. But we are not able to run as many classes as we would like." The local association has a long list of activities that reveal a great amount of parental involvement in keeping the children from standing still. On the list are such things as examining cataloguing methods at the library, a math games and puzzles afternoon, a geology lecture, creative writing workshops, a family picnic, a discussion group on debating methods, a visit to see a hospital’s electron microscope, and a visit to an electronics factory. “We are trying to keep it about 50-50 educational and social,” Mrs Beard says.