Oh, I've really missed you guys and am tickled by everyone's interest in all of this! :-D
Independent of the current IQ/test talk, I have a few random thoughts and some rambling on giftedness that I would like to just put out there. So here goes:
Is it nature or is it nurture? I think it's both, really, but mostly nurture in today’s world. When it comes to what schools and the general population would term 'gifted', it's based on producing scores to demonstrate capability in a particular field and comparing them to the norm. Well, I'd say hands-down that today’s well-educated/literate child will outperform the custodially-cared-for/normal preschooler whose care-providers merely ensured that the child survived and was potty trained as required sometime before attending school to be officially taught by someone else finally.
Too many parents have an aversion to teaching their children and I'd guess it's due to 1)a bad taste in their mouth from their own (mis)schooling, 2) being conditioned to believe that they can't do as good a job, and/or 3)a forced condition in which they must work and rely on a 'normal' care-provider. All of this, I'd say, results in a lack of exposure/experience in the normal child, thus distinguishing the well-educated child as 'gifted' for having received such exposure/experience. Nurture, in this case, more than likely wins because the well-educated child's mind was given the opportunity to do what I believe comes naturally, like walking and talking.
Imagine the result of binding a child to a stationary object or not giving a child the opportunity to engage in conversation until he/she were 5 years old. The devastating results have been documented, and yet we engage in similar activities in the first few years and think that the 'normal' child is 'normal'. 'Normal' may be the result, but I don't think 'normal' is necessarily right, neither for the child nor humanity. Do I believe that there are children who are genetically more 'gifted' to excel in particular subjects/fields? Sure, but considering today's lack of 'gifted' training, I don't think that the spread would be so dramatic between the 'naturally' gifted and the 'intentionally, well-educated' gifted child.
It's like swimming, I suppose. I'm not a 'swimmer', although I know how to swim. Most here could say that they aren't 'gifted', but that they are 'well-educated'. Now, last I checked my uncle who is, well, 25+ yrs older than me still couldn’t swim. Does this mean that his brain just couldn't do it? No! It just means that he never got around to the proper training. Don't ask me how - He was born and raised on a small island!! LOL Clearly it wasn’t necessary for his survival (or maybe by the time and in the manner he was finally exposed, his instincts told him that avoiding the water was best for his survival!). Could he ever learn? Sure, I think that if he somehow mustered up the confidence and desire, then yes - when it comes to swimming, he would be a non-educated becoming educated. Do I think that at this point he'd ever be as good as, say, PokerDad - nope!
However, if I told you that my uncle had been adopted and comes from a long line of Olympic swimmers, which isn't true but let's pretend, we could guess that he may have had a chance of also being an Olympic swimmer, save for the fact that he wasn't introduced to the sport. Having hypothetically come from a line of swimmers, my uncle's genes may have been such that he had an extra vertebra, which allowed his lungs to be massive compared to the norm (great for holding your breath underwater and providing necessary oxygen to the body). This was the case for my father who was an excellent swimmer and consequently became a SEAL. One could say that nature guided his interest to swim, especially if his genetically large lungs resulted in his receiving accolades, even if solely from peers and parents, for his 'natural' water skills as a child. My cousin has the same build. Is either of them an Olympic athlete? Nope, one could argue that they may have been designed for such, but that their genetic ability wasn't nurtured enough. Their training and environment weren’t such to develop their natural swimming abilities to the fullest … or at least not to the point of proving it at the Olympics. ;-)
A non-genetically adapted swimmer may be an Olympic winner, though, if he were given the proper training and this were the first year that the Olympics were being held. I think as far as Olympics go, the bar is pretty high now, whereas I believe that our culture is still in its pre-Olympic days when it comes to testing and fostering true genetic giftedness in the non-sports fields, not just IQ, but in multiple intelligences, as Gardner coined it. And yes, sensitivity is a characteristic shared by many of the ‘gifted’ whose minds have realized the importance of taking in detail but not yet the importance of filtering.
By the way, I find it very interesting that so many memory-challenge winners start as adults (I strongly encourage you checking out this video:
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/1-E9MMTciBo&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/1-E9MMTciBo&rel=1</a>]]>), and that the pilots, as adults, successfully learned to retain a photographic memory (may read more here:
http://figur8.net/baby/2011/07/19/right-brain-education-developing-the-photographic-memory-function/). What does this tell you about the lack of stimulation in our environment and our brain’s capabilities, even as adults, when coupled with curiosity?
My argument is not that we can’t be curious and learn as we get older, only that if done right, we can trigger it earlier in our kids, and if we nurture it, we can produce a life-long love of learning and hopefully inspire future generations to create a better world. I’m tired of seeing so much potential wasted around me. I would argue that as humans, collectively, we possess much more potential than any other resource on this planet.
Maybe your perception is different, but I see our world being destroyed in so many ways because our minds are just not seeing the problems and our children, overall, aren’t growing capable enough of stepping up to the challenge to solve it. Failure to figure something out in a particular subject squelches interest and dwindles their desire to do anything productive in that field. Failure to understand in multiple fields devours confidence and fear of failure produces apathy, further exacerbating the problems in our world, as these ‘turned off’ children become parents who produce children who, unless sufficiently influenced by an outside force, are that much more apathetic and ill-equipped. My experience is that the gap between the creative and the apathetic is growing and I would go so far as to say that our species has cancer and that we need to do something asap to radiate and survive.
So, here's the thing about giftedness, especially with regards to written literacy, that I think is so neat: that we're all pretty much capable of it. Why? Because, as I've mentioned before, I think that the bar of expectations is too low, so whenever a child is in an environment that encourages their brain to function, guess what - it does. Why? I'd say it's because we are all born to survive, to decode and adapt to our varying environments as young children to ensure survival as a diverse species. So, a parent who loves swimming and exposes his child to his loved sport will produce a swimmer. A parent who loves physics and their child stumbles upon their notebooks, will understand the language of physics. A parent who is artistic will expose their child to the arts. And a child's love for their parent's/peer’s interests will accelerate the child's curiosity and knowledge overall. That is, until that child is put into an environment where his survival instincts tell him that such skills are no longer necessary.
Multiple parents have already posted on this thread instances in which younger children adapted up to mingle with their older siblings. The article talks about children throttling to match their environment. It’s not just our youngest who are throttling by the way. Look around and you’ll find too many adults who are dissatisfied (a sign that there is a problem to be solved), and yet they continue this way because their desire to remain in their environment is greater than their desire and or confidence/ability to change whatever has them dissatisfied. As humans we are born seeking to understand our world and our purpose in it; we want to “fit in” but we want to feel authentic as well, and when the two are in conflict, one is somehow sacrificed.
Overall, our educational and resulting cultural systems are failing our children - as if we didn't already know. And this is why there are an overwhelming number of 'gifted' children who become disenchanted with the school system and don't go through the motions of higher education. They care more about self-developing and the challenge that comes from discovering and producing in the 'real' world than they do about jumping through hoops in a classroom for the benefit of a paper whose purpose has yet to demonstrate any true meaning to them.
If our system allowed our children to learn more through experience than textbooks that require them to draw from inexperience, and instead guided them through hands-on projects, pausing to analyze, evaluate, create, etc, then I think we'd find the results much more successful. As it is now, 'gifted' children, whether verifiably gifted or not, are underachieving left and right and our society is suffering the consequences. I haven’t checked the stats, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of ‘gifted’/well-educated adults is growing smaller in the population over time. Degree or no degree, verifiably gifted or not, I think more people should be inspired to ‘do good’/create positive change and not just sit around all day idly wasting away. How many 'problems' could be 'solved' if more minds were inspired and equipped to make learning natural, yet trained to value the commitment required to resolve a challenging puzzle/problem/issue/conflict?
And what of giftedness and literacy? Well, I for one agree with
annisis who wrote earlier in this thread that in addition to noticing gifted children's 'creativity' outshine their 'intelligence',
"Gifted children seemed, to me, capable of seeing things differently than the average child or adult. This was, of course, coupled with a strong desire to learn, and an insatiable curiosity, either in specific or general topics. Gifted learners also tend to want to overdo projects, or in more common terms are over-achievers. " My theory is this: reading is a beautiful puzzle, and the sooner we teach them to enjoy decoding their world, the more they will want to understand it. Again, if we take it back to a child's natural gift to be curious about their environment and decode, create & communicate to ensure survival of the species, then literacy in any field, not just reading, means that the brain has figured 'it' out. And having successfully overcome one challenge, it wants to devour another challenge. Until it finds that doing so is not socially acceptable or necessary and must then adapt to conform to the norm.
As I stated before, until we raise the bar as a society, children who learn to read by 3 will be gifted bc they are being compared to the non-reading, non-decoding, non-experience-enriched norm. Reading is a form of problem solving. It gives meaning to a particular order of squiggles, letters and words, no differently than numbers to a formula, musical notes to a song, body language to a plays, or words to an object, action or feeling. Through reading alone (or any of the above examples) the el child will start school ahead of his/her peers because of the years of experience solving problems, interpreting the data, and eventually applying and creating from it when they incorporate it into their dialogue, writings and performances.
There is a relatively new pearson poll that summarizes, among a few other notable facts, how the American population realizes the importance of early reading, but very falsely assumes that the non-book-exposed preschooler will just catch up to his book-exposed peers in a short amount of time. Alarming in this poll is the connection that drug, alcohol, high school difficulties, adult failure & poverty have with not having enough exposure to the written word. I definitely encourage you to glance at the short poll here:
http://www.pearsonfoundation.org/downloads/Pearson_Foundation_Early_Childhood_Education_Percpetion_Poll.pdf.
Life is a beautiful mystery and the gifted, whether verified or not, are those who are curious enough to realize this, capable enough to figure any of it out, creative enough to make an improvement, and communicative enough to share their findings with others and ask for help along the way, propagating this cycle in hopes of yet another doing even better (this reminds me of those Olympic commercials where a teenager would watch the Olympics and claim the winner’s score as their new goal). There are so many nerves in the brain when we're babies willing, ready and able to soak up anything that is stimulating because it may be necessary for survival. Well into adolescence the brain is still seeking efficiency, testing the limits of our boundaries and purging what is deemed unnecessary. So, yes, the window is open wide right now to be titled 'gifted', but aside from seeking the title to ensure that our children are receiving properly challenging material, the reason we should embrace 'giftedness' is because it's about developing the curiosity necessary for unlocking the puzzles in our lives, and unleashing the creativity within us to leave the world better than when we got here.
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