Time published an article this week by John Cloud entitled Are We Failing Our Geniuses.
In the article he follows a young woman with high intelligence from her held-back life in Texas to a pioneering charter school in Utah for the gifted.
He says:
Any sensible culture would know what to do with Annalisee Brasil.
Of course, a sensible culture is about as common as any sensible mob... Since every individual has a standard of what "sensible" might be, I suspect I wouldn't enjoy a sensible hive mind culture, actually.
Still, this is a huge issue.
If you want to find out a lot about some of the most hopeful work in gifted education, seek out Miraca Gross at the University of NSW in Australia.
It is her work that has proven that gifted kids need as much social and coaching support as kids on the other side of the hump of the bell curve.
I remember well, with my own IQ tested well above 145 by age 10, how most of my teachers signed up for the common wisdom of our age, which was "if she's that smart she should be able to take care of herself." Those were the *good* teachers.
The bad ones were the ones who told my parents, "Shava will never get anywhere in this world unless she learns to conform." And those teachers intentionally tortured me, procrustean-style, for any heat or light I produced.
In a town of 8,000 in Vermont, there was basically very little hope for me to be exposed to other kids operating at my level. My tested IQ is 1:1,000,000, about. One table describes my employment options as "Shakespeare, Goethe, Newton." No pressure.
Never finished college; barely started. But by 22, I was chief software engineer for prototype applications on the first commercial multimedia system (although we didn't call it multimedia) at DEC, managing a project with a team of about 40 multidisciplinary folks from video production, graphic design, management, robotics control (our subject matter), educational design, and so on.
Nevertheless, at 48, with a decent publication list and a fabulous -- but all over the map -- vitae, it's hard for me to find conventional work by conventional means. Why? Because unless I know someone at the company, my resume ends up in the round file. No degree.
Happily I'm not shy. Most of my jobs I've created in collaboration with a company I've decided I liked -- or I started the company. Right now I'm starting a "mixed reality" consulting group to move real companies into working with virtual worlds, social networking sites, and MMOs (think Second Life, Facebook, and World of Warcraft) -- marketing, PR, and "presence" design.
With 25+ years on the Internet, much of it working with online communities -- and a stint in Portland as VP/Marketing&BizDev for what I made the 3rd fastest growing private company in Oregon and the Inc. 500 (and for which I got nominated by the reporting staff of the Portland Business Journal for Woman Entrepreneur of the Year), you'd think I would be qualified.
But, in fact, on of our first prospective clients expressed open dismay at my lack of degree.
A modern undergraduate degree is pretty flimsy. Culturally it's the equivalent of a high school diploma in the 50's, I suspect. You have to have it, and if you're really smart and motivated, you should be able to get one by age eighteen and start your life.
If I could have gotten an undergraduate degree by 18, I suspect my life would have been considerably different. I consider myself to be an "applied public intellectual" -- a niche for which there's little respect outside of academia and their alumni. My father had an education degree and a divinity degree.
I went the Eric Hoffer route in my own way, and my parents never understood.
Regardless of the papers I published, the professional committees I sat on, the early multimedia and Internet work (hey, '82 isn't *way* early, but for what I was doing, it was pioneering...), the $3.8M/yr intrapreneurial project I got funded at MIT at 27, the national fight I led in 97-99 against the IRS on technology/society issues -- not a whit of this moved my parents because for the most part, they had no idea what it meant.
The result so far? Three marriages come and gone. Much good work, most of it infused with uncommon adventure and joy. Much influence on others who have gone on to do wonderful things, and often come back to thank me. A life of surfing on pure chaos. Little care for money, and tired of the question (even from myself) of "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?" Working half time for a cause I care for doing grantwriting for about $2K/mo while I start a new business (not caring for money does make you frugal!). Engaged again to a younger guy who's a stage magician and fundraising coach for nonprofit/political causes -- fully creative as me, with the same sense of adventure, and far *sweeter* than my last two husbands (and, might I mention, I've given up on that "needing someone to ground me" impulse).
But if I had not spent so much of my life rationalizing that flailing about without a peer group was a good thing, if I'd had a guidance counselor who could have told me more than "I don't know -- you can do anything you want!" and really helped me "color my parachute," what would I have been doing today?
My son is 14. I suspect his IQ isn't as rarified as mine, but it hardly matters. The schools don't know what to do with him. He attends public school (his father, my ex, vetoed homeschooling -- take it up with him) so we will "homeschool" afternoons and evenings on the side. He describes me as the Auntie Mame type -- he read the book this summer. Will he end up in a life that is disaffected, outsider, and flailing? I hope not, but I'd prefer it to submitting to Procrustes.
[A hat tip to my friend R.A. Hettinga for the tip on this article]
--
Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:
Shava’s column, Iconoclasm, published several times a week to Gather Essentials: Newsis an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news.
Shava Nerad has been working on the Internet for twenty-five years, at the boundaries of Internet and social issues. She is executive director of The Tor Project as her day job. She lives in Somerville, MA with her teenage son, her fiance (a professional magician and fundraising coach), and a corgi/dachshund mutt named George.
Opinions here have nothing to do with Tor.
You can find all of Shava's Iconoclasm columns at http://Iconoclasm.gather.com
Keep up with Shava’s other postings and Gather activity by joining her Gather network -- just click here and select the orange “Connect” button on the left-hand side of the page (colleage connections only please, unless you know me on the street!)
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Comments: 18
you do have some good points. Our 2 daughters are both very bright, though i do not know if i can call them prodigies. Public school is a mixed bag. They have never been beaten up for being smart, at least. There were a few kids who shared their intellectual curiosity.
I was once told by a school administrator in gifted services that they missed the boat when they could have joined up with Special Education and gotten access to more resources. There is a prevailing notion that briliant kids do not need any special services, they are going to thrive on their own. But hey, there are plenty of guys in prison who were gifted kids once. Boredom can cause you to drop out of school, just like failing.
what a trajectory your life has taken! write the book! i'll buy it. :)
How you've touched me with your so right-on article and introspection. With that same IQ as yours, I too have surfed on so much chaos and such greatness, all in one wave at times it seems, as I reflect for a moment on my beautiful life listening for that moment here and now, to the surf of my mind on some warm inner beach of insight, which grew out of the parental horrors inflicted on young by a pair deeply grooved by the Nazi occupation of Denmark. I could tell you stories that would blow the minds of most people, but dare not as they would probably be shelved as myth. Out of that chaos, I am the only one to have emerged with a cognitive mind and emotional heart linked well enough to feel peace, or even to have survived with a heartbeat and neuronal function (I laugh, since few could take that seriously and it exposes me to unwarranted fear-projections within he framework of the true seriousness of my work among peer.)
Einstein, if I can extrapolate one of his most profound quotes and slightly take a liberty with a paraphrase, stated that *nothing within the academic world brought him to his understanding of relativity at the universal or the local scales... that it was pure imagination which drove his understanding, and that all the number crunching later on was done only to interact with his Newtonian-trapped peer, work out the message with them, until it could be shared at the practical level with the world.* Of course, he was slightly trapped himself once he reached that analytic level of interaction, by the likes of Schroedinger and Bohr.
I guess what I'm trying to say, Shava, is go for it, on and on, and let only your imagination and that wonderful machine with all those endless loopings of neuronal activity behind your sight and between your hearing be your guiding light. I have in my work come across a Danish high school student who is about to start at the university, and she has won so many physics and mathematics awards around the world, and what hurt her so bad, was the constant badgering by teachers and high school advisers, who wish, within the eminent wisdom of our socialized "pædagogisk" and compatriotic solidarity of being a good cog in the workings of the state and state-beneficial privatization machine... rather than her simple desire to explore the outer limits in the universe of so much relativity, of the one question uppermost on her mind... "What is light?" Her question isn't even one dealing with the subject-driven paradox of particles or waves, for she's already crunched those numbers. Group theory only approaches her understanding of things. But no one in the hierarchy of her world gets her, or that her imagination must not under any circumstance be hindered by anyone, no matter how sage the social theory, who would suggest she limit the power of her inquiry.
So I connected her with one of America's most eminent quantum relativists, and his aged wisdom and her youthful inquiry made both of them wiser, younger and older all in one fell swoop.
I discussed a theory one time with a social scientist at Harvard when I was working on a PhD in cultural anthropology. I only studied peripherally there, but this sociologist became a good friend of mine. We discussed often natural selection. When the synergistic microorganisms that evolved out of small pools of certain types of water long ago, perhaps 3 billion years of more ago, the struggle to survive into the light was fierce. Then as microorganisms synergistically or otherwise interacted and drifted, to evolve a complex structure out of many of these cooperative microorganism, to then eventually, some 3 to 4 million years ago, bring forth a species that stood up on two legs to watch over the threatening savanna grass, and free up the hands for tool making and bearing, enabling easier motion to new horizons and hence the capacity of greater genetic diversity, and a voice box just so to evolve a cultural language of great complexity to transmit from organism to organism, generation to generation, survival strategies... we now have grown out of the alpha necessity of *brute might* being the determinant or selective factor of what constitutes a good gene pool.
But we are so trapped yet by the inherited shadows (Jung) of that ancient jungle, as we engage in our world in that hierarchal (mostly patriarchal) way the G-8 and other economic theories that dominate our world thinking, its politics and the great societies that clash in an archetypal way as we globalize. And what we both discussed was that often it is those whom even eugenics one time wanted to eliminate from the human gene pool that actually have the answers to human survival at this critical juncture of human evolution. For those who have survived great trauma to stress the mind, and come out to the other side with incredible - and some would call dysfunctional - coping skills are actually those who would help provide the world with global-wide skills to survive global suicide, coming at us at from many more fronts than most even realize and at incredible inertia. I've often heard social scientists state that today's imagination is tomorrows empirically driven reality. It seems most people go through life not realizing that almost every decision they make, from how their VISA card is used at the local supermarket to buy a product to the decisions they make on a November day every four years or so, are either contributing to humanity's collectively passive suicide or to its collective survival. Those children that have survived dynamically through a personal experience of childhood suffering, for nothing so impacts the brain's plastic hardwiring, ought to be the ones we all look to and nurture in society, to better understand what special neuronal wiring that helped bring about a rather interesting sort of cognitive logic. It reminds me of a non-linear mathematic theory, that states "a sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
Thanks for triggering in me this line of thinking, and I'm hoping I haven't confused too many readers who come across this at Gather. All this is very simple logic for me, and I definitely don't use up my day even thinking about it. It is as familiar to me, in my daily and very grounded life, as the back of my hand.
i wonder why i am going back to school??
@bent -- I also feel, often enough, as though I live in a different world than those around me. It's a fascinating and distracting place! And when I was about 30 years old, I finally broke myself of saying "I have a friend who" or "I read about this person who" had done some interesting thing -- when I was really talking about me. People think that I am bragging when I tell them things I have done, but really, it's just what I do.
I am not better than anyone. My "intelligences" are not all high -- my math isn't great, my mechanical ability is only so-so, etc.
I have three divorces that seem to indicate I might not be the easiest person to live with, and my son just read Auntie Mame this summer and suspects he has me pegged (although, it's a loose fit in that cubby -- I'm an outgoing introvert, and not nearly so wild or rich!).
My father, also very bright, used to tell me, "Being smart never made anyone happy -- you need good friends and a good heart." The thing he never said, because in his own way he was always working, was "...and you still need to work hard." Another favorite saying of his, which I think is not original, is that "God pays by the job, not by the hour." By this he meant both "be efficient!" and also "when your work is complete, recognize it and take your rest."
So, on my parents' advice and nurturing, I always stayed at least a bit social, I keep my heart open, I try to work hard and also be easy on myself (that is the hardest!). I think these are all great challenges to gifted kids.
I think gifted education today seems to be becoming very politicized. It's a badge of honor for the parents rather than a need for the kids. Everyone wants to have gifted kids, particularly among the social and financial elite, it seems. Folks will fight to get thier kids into these programs under the impression that it will give them an edge on some future Ivy League application. I think that's a part of the equation that wasn't talked about in the article.
A school classroom will never be the answer for all our children because each child/student is different. From different ways of learning to different interests to IQ to opportunities...
The old-fashioned classroom model was new at one time. More efficient? Perhaps it was then. And useful for children to receive an education from a teacher, someone trained and educated, as many parents were not. But many parents DO know best how to teach each child.
I doubt we'll ever see a return to home-schooling in every family, but I wouldn't be surprised to see education change its focus quite dramatically.