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On Competition

I’m writing about this subject because recently I was given a piece of (unasked-for) advice from a very wise person. I was told that I should “give up competition.”

The advice shocked me. I don’t think of myself as particularly competitive. But the advice was given so powerfully that I had to at least consider it. Yes, I try to do my best at what I do, I thought, but I’m not really particularly…

When I got just that far in my mind, it came to me with genuine surprise that I’ve been competitive for as long as I can remember. My siblings were older, but I not only wanted to do everything they did, I wanted to do it better. At school I didn’t just want to get good grades as demanded by my parents. I wanted to be first in my class. As an adult I’ve defended competitiveness as a good, even necessary motivator of real effort even though in some cases, when I thought I might not be able to win I would just refuse to participate at all. Sometimes, especially among friends, I was competitive only in my head, so they wouldn’t suspect. All right, yes. Guilty as charged.

We live in a culture that supports, encourages, even demands competition. Schools give grades, create honor rolls, name valedictorians. There are spelling bees and math contests and History Day competitions. To say nothing of sports. I’ve been just as caught up in the pattern as anyone.

A few years back a family member managed to get me hooked on “America’s Got Talent,” and it stuck. I now record every episode (so as to fast-forward, because I hate commercials). As I write this post, the 2019 show is in the “Judge Cuts” part, where each week 18 acts have to be winnowed down to 7. Eleven acts get eliminated by the judges out of sight of the cameras. The remaining 7 go on to the “live show” at the end where they compete with each other for votes from the viewing audience.

This show is ALL about competition! Only one act can win, can be awarded a million dollars and a “headline show in Las Vegas.” First it is the judges who decide, but in the end, after the live show, it’s a matter of who gets the most votes from the viewing public.

Our world is full of such things—one person wins the major tennis matches, one team wins the World Cup or the World Series, or the Super Bowl. One jockey—on one horse—wins the Kentucky Derby. One person in each category wins an Academy Award, one children’s writer the Newbery. They’re seen for the moment at least, as “the best” in their field or sport. There may be runners up, the winners of the lesser version of the award—Olympic silver or bronze medal, Newbery Honor [this is the one I got]. But among truly competitive types, runner up can be felt like a kind of failure. [Just to let you know, I had that feeling only briefly!] But in America’s Got Talent there is no runner up.

And here’s the very big catch in the show’s structure. There is no way the various acts should be competing with each other at all, because who could possibly say whether a magician, a singer, a dancer, a “danger” act, a choir or group of adorable kids from an impoverished country who have managed to come together for an amazing act of some kind, is the best act of the season. The competition is between the proverbial apples and oranges.

One could say that no matter how engaging, the show is actually a competitive farce. Many of the competitors are completely brilliant at what they do, and they’ve worked very, very hard to be the best they can be. The back-story of each act is told in some cases to get the viewing audience emotionally involved with a particular person or act, because it’s a popularity contest. One reason the show is so enticing is that there is almost no way to predict which act will prove most popular, or for what reason. One of them will certainly get the enormous ‘award,’ but everyone else no matter how talented, how hard-working, how determined, and how accomplished will be a “loser,” (except, of course, for the publicity value of having been on the show.)

How does this relate to the gifted? In recent years a group of educators and theorists who think of themselves as gifted specialists have made the claim that the goal of gifted education should be to create “eminence.” That feels very like suggesting that the goal of anyone supporting or coaching a talent act should be not merely helping the performers develop their talent, but creating the AGT winner. Becoming “eminent” in any given field is in significant ways like winning AGT. It depends on many factors that cannot be guaranteed by excellence alone. Indeed, the effort and determination to be “the best,” can also lead a person down any of a variety of highly questionable paths. One has only to check on the number of retracted scientific journal articles to see the pitfalls of intellectual competition.

What life lessons might be involved in assessing one’s inner level of competitiveness? It can help us see how we feel about ourselves and others, how we choose friends, make critical life choices, how we feel about our accomplishments or lack thereof. And also how we judge—or treat—other people.

It is enormously difficult not to be competitive in our culture. But once we start thinking about it there are great benefits from trying to walk away from competition. It allows us to see ourselves, our friends, family, coworkers and even enemies as individuals who are, like the acts in AGT, unique. When we take competition out of the mix, it can help us stay balanced and begin to see more clearly what each individual may have to offer. Sometimes a “winner” is just that—a person who happened at one particular moment, to win—perhaps but not necessarily, a better, more worthy, or more admirable person. And it can be wonderfully freeing to judge our own intentions and efforts instead of solely our accomplishments.

No matter how old you are, or how young, there has never been another you in the world and there never will be. You are the one and only you, now or ever. So there really is no competition, except with yourself. Once you let go of the idea that someone could beat you at being you, you become free to decide for yourself how best to go about being who you want to be. You will almost certainly disappoint yourself sometimes, as we all do, but you can then choose a way to move on from that. Because nobody else can get there at all!

It comes down to the quotation that I have used for years at the end of nearly every speech I give—a quotation I’ve been seeing in a new light ever since that wise being told me—talking directly to me, specifically—to “give up competition.”

Here’s the quote: You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it.

Our culture doesn’t support that idea very well, but for yourself and for your kids, for all of us, it could be the key to the greatest reward of all—a truly authentic, and meaningful life.

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Categories Consciousness, Cultural Attitudes, Education, Emotional/Psychological, Parenting, Schools, Social Issues

A Message from New Zealand…

21 Nov

Back from NAGC in Charlotte, and intending to post a blog about the final panel of this year’s convention, I am instead sharing what Rosemary Cathcart (the newest member of the Columbus Group, whose Reach Education online course won an award this year from NAGC’s Professional Development Network–and who flew from the other side of the world to receive it) posted in NZ yesterday. This message is needed around the world wherever people assume that giftedness is not innate to the individual, and equates with achievement.

“I can do it. Anyone with persistence and hard work can do this.”

Is mindset a basic truth, or a damaging fallacy, or simply muddled thinking? How does it really relate to giftedness?

[First posted on the tki gifted community forum (New Zealand) on November 20 2017]

There has been a good deal of discussion on this site in recent days about Jo Boaler’s concept of mindset, and it’s evident that many people are feeling somewhat confused about this whole subject, and just where it fits in relationship to giftedness

That’s very understandable. We all know that some degree of effort is required to master any skill, from the simplest to the most complex. We all know this from the daily experience of our own lives. It’s true for every human being, and as David Attenborough and other wild-life experts have shown us, it’s also true for every animal and every bird on this planet. Even insects and spiders: as the story of King Bruce and the spider reminds us, mindset is hardly a new human discovery. Not only practice but the will to maintain that practice until competence is reached is a fundamental life skill for all living creatures.

It’s also true, of course, for gifted individuals. They are not somehow exempt from the universal need to practise to achieve. They too need persistence to keep going when success or competence does not come immediately or easily.

So what’s the issue?

Jo Boaler’s argument is that the stronger the will and the more sustained the effort, the higher the level of competence eventually reached. Because, as a general statement, that’s demonstrably true, she has gone on to claim that this somehow disproves the notion of giftedness. Her assertion is essentially that what we call giftedness is just people who’ve tried harder and longer and with more persistence to achieve. The implication is that any individual who has the will and the determination – the “grit” to use the term commonly applied – can reach a gifted level of performance.

But here’s the flaw:

Achievement is dependent on two qualities: sustained effort–AND innate ability level. This latter reality also sets boundaries to what can be achieved.

Perhaps it takes an extreme example to best show how thoroughly misleading Boaler’s argument is. At the NAGC convention I’ve just come back from, Stephanie Tolan in a presentation on asynchronous development spoke of a child aged less than four months who was already talking in groups of up to three words and who was able to greet a surprised visiting doctor by saying “Hello” as he peered over the edge of the cot. As Tolan said, this child’s hugely precocious speech can hardly be put down to months or years of practice or “grit”! (As a matter of fact, I myself have a niece who was speaking at four months – it happens, generally leaving parents feeling thoroughly gobsmacked and wondering “What on earth do I do now???”).

You and I, as people who work with gifted children, also know this from our experience with them, even if not quite to that extreme. We see the child who not only grasps concepts so much more fully than age peers but who generates questions which go far beyond the boundaries of the regular curriculum. Routinely we find ourselves working in an entirely different conceptual landscape from that of the regular classroom. (I’m thinking, for example, of a local four year old who wanted her kindy teacher to explain the difference between infinity and eternity…..).

You and I also see how gifted children are often denied recognition, not only of their innate ability, but also of their need too for sustained practice. Regular school work just doesn’t require the effort, the sustained struggle, that builds persistence. It’s a double whammy for them, and Boaler’s misguided attempt to make all human beings fit the same simplistic model seriously compounds this issue.

Why did the mind-set theorists get it so wrong?

My own guess is that the underlying issue here is the narrow focus Boaler and the mind-set people and also the talent development people and all too often our school systems have on quantifiable achievement. If what primarily matters about a child is how far up the scale they can get, then you simply don’t have that depth of understanding which would enable you to recognise the complex inner experiences which shape the responses of the gifted child and which so significantly differentiate those responses, not just in quantitative ways, but in fundamental nature from those of most age peers.

It’s not, and it never ever has been, about one child being “better” than another. It’s about recognising and celebrating the wonderful and exciting diversity of human ability and accomplishment. Don’t you agree?

Dr Rosemary Cathcart
Director, REACH Education
www.giftedreach.com

Tags: asysnchronous development, Columbus Group, Definitions, Education, gifted children, gifted education, Giftedness, Individualitiy

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Categories Asynchronous Development, Cultural Attitudes, Education, Identification, NAGC, Parenting, Schools

The Value of Challenge

15 Jul

Almost all parents of highly to profoundly gifted children know quite well that one of the major difficulties in their children’s education is a lack of appropriate intellectual challenge. When Leta Hollingworth suggested in the first half of the last century that highly gifted children waste most of their time in school and profoundly gifted children waste almost all of it, she was making it clear that the primary challenge for these kids in most school situations was boredom. There was little or nothing for their active, questing minds to engage with, little challenge from which to grow and develop their knowledge base, or discover new ideas and to evaluate them, or to learn how to come up with and best express their own important thoughts and judgments. No challenge.

In a blog post entitled “The Right to Struggle,” The Gifted Development Center’s Dr. Linda Silverman poses the situation as a matter of civil rights. “How are egalitarian beliefs served by teaching a student what he or she already knows? Effort is kindled when students wrestle with new concepts—when they have to struggle to learn. Gifted education specialist, Carol Morreale, said that when we give gifted students the same work as all the other students, we deprive them of the right to struggle to learn.” [italics mine] http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/blogs/bobbie-and-lindas-blog/right-struggle

This lack of challenge or “struggle” is clearly shown in the answer a profoundly gifted teenage girl gave in 2012 when Patty Gatto-Walden and I asked Yunasa campers to respond to a speech made by the then President of NAGC, advocating a move away from the idea that “giftedness” is an innate difference.

“…I started ninth grade when I was twelve—and … there was another girl a couple months older than me who was also starting the ninth grade…the main difference between us is that she was working really, really hard to maintain good grades at the ninth grade level at age 12. She was having a real struggle, she was constantly having to do homework, she had to put a ton of effort in. Whereas, I was sitting in all my classes daydreaming because I still wasn’t being challenged—because the way traditional curriculum is taught doesn’t hold my attention, so I always thought there was an extreme difference between [us]. …seeing this girl’s experience compared to mine when we were the same age in the same grade, …I didn’t really understand much about giftedness, but even at that point I thought, ‘This doesn’t really seem like the same situation!’” (Gatto-Walden & Tolan, 2012 presentation at NAGC)

None of this will surprise parents of highly gifted children or the teachers who understand and work with them to provide either acceleration or intense levels of enrichment (or both) to give them worthwhile learning experiences in school. They need to encounter real challenge.

But today I want to take this idea of the value of challenge in a different, and maybe new-to-most readers, direction.

Bear with me. When I was a child we kids were sent out in good weather to “play outside” and told to be sure to come home by dinner time, or when the streetlights came on. My husband’s and my boys (the next generation kids) were also allowed to go out and play on their own. It was what kids did! They rode bikes or roller skated, played games, invented games, pogo-sticked, walked to parks, libraries, playgrounds. In my case the kids on my block explored the shores of Lake Michigan, across the street from my house. Kids without adults, just being kids.

But something changed in 1979 when our youngest had just turned seven. Six year old Etan Patz, walking the two blocks to his school bus stop in New York City by himself for the first time, disappeared. What followed across this country was the launching of the missing children movement, the practice of putting the faces of missing children on milk cartons, and the idea that all children must be taught about “stranger danger.” Even though we lived in a pleasant residential neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio I remember following the official advice to get our son “dog tags” to wear with his name, address and phone number. Of course, he knew that information himself and could perfectly well find his way home on his own, but news broadcasts reminded parents steadily that “something might happen” to children to keep them from being able to do that. That “something” that loomed over all of us was whatever had happened to Etan Patz. Eventually, of course, the world learned that he had been murdered by a mentally ill neighbor.

But something fundamental had changed in our culture. Over time parents came to think that whenever their children were outside their homes “unsupervised” by an adult they were actually in danger of being hurt or killed by a stranger. Though some (or many) parents knew how rare such events really were, they were still plagued by a fear that such an “almost-never-happens” catastrophe might happen to their child. And it would have been their fault…

Now, closing in on four decades later, parental fear has grown and spread from the possibility of kidnapping or murder to a huge variety of unpleasant experiences that children “need” to be protected from. The media (social and otherwise) bring us a steady diet of warnings, and examples of dangers children may face on a daily basis. And given that highly and profoundly gifted children are often unusually sensitive and different enough to be frequently bullied, they may seem to be especially vulnerable.

It is this constantly growing fear that has created the phenomenon known as the “helicopter parent.” The image this term conjures may seem extreme enough that most parents don’t see themselves this way, but it can be hard to avoid some of the over-protectiveness it suggests. That over-protectiveness has spread beyond individual parents to our society itself, so that neighbors and even strangers have been known to contact police to report children going to a park, a library, even sometimes on their way home by themselves, without an adult to watch over them. It is in response to this level of concern that the “free range children” movement was started to bring childhood at least a little closer to what it was when I was growing up. But the phenomenon of helicopter parenting does not appear to be greatly affected by this press for greater freedom. Usually starting when children are quite small, over-protection continues these days into high school and college.

Recently, my grandson (who starts high school this fall) was talking to my son about where he might like to go for college. Son told grandson that out of state tuition for his first choice university was wildly expensive. “That’s okay,” grandson said, “you and Mom can just rent an apartment there and I can take a gap year and live in the apartment so I can become a state resident.” There followed, of course, a brief and realistic financial discussion!

When I learned of this conversation, I pointed out that I’ve been hearing about helicopter parents who rent an apartment for themselves in the town or city where their child goes to school (in some cases may even buy a house!) so they can live close enough to help their son or daughter choose classes, to feed them, do their laundry, meet all their professors, and arrange regular conferences with any who fail to give the child acceptable grades, etc. My son just shook his head. “In this family we are all looking forward to the time this kid goes off on his own!”

So when I was recently talking to a young woman whose job it is to counsel students who are having difficulty adjusting to college (of which there are apparently an ever-increasing number), I asked if this issue of parents taking up residence in the same town was something this particular school had to deal with. “Not just in the same town! There are mothers who move in with their kids—sometimes even in the kid’s dorm room.” It was in that startling conversation that I first heard the new term, snow-plow parent. “These parents don’t just hover over their kids,” she said. “They go in front of them in everything they do to make sure the kid doesn’t encounter any obstacles of any kind. It’s practically an epidemic!”

These conversations got me to thinking about the whole issue of learning and challenge. For a number of years employers have been reporting that young men and women newly out of college (or even prestigious and challenging graduate programs) seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility and make decisions for themselves. When given a task typical of the job they’ve been hired for they need far more support in figuring out how to do it than earlier generations did. “They want and expect—in fact need—someone to lead them by the hand, tell them what to do and how to do it, and then keep an eye on them to be sure it gets done.” I’d like to think this doesn’t apply to highly or profoundly gifted kids, but given some of the top schools these young people graduated from, one wonders.

So I decided to write this blog in order to ask parents the question “What, if anything, might you change in your parenting methods and strategies if you treated your children’s need for life challenges the same way you treat their need for intellectual challenges–as a valuable, even necessary aspect of their development as human beings?”

Years ago I gave a talk at NAGC called “The Problem of Pain,” which was later published in the CAG Newsletter in California and is included in my 2016 book Out of Sync. [https://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness] The piece provides what I call a “Nifty Tool Kit” for helping one’s child cope with pain. It is difficult for any of us to watch our children suffer physical, emotional or psychological pain. We tend to want more than anything just to take it away. Fix it. Find a way to keep it from recurring. But no one gets through life without pain. Reaching adulthood without developing any strategies for coping with it is not a benefit.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating pain. I’m not a believer in the adage “no pain no gain.” There are many ways to learn important life lessons from positive experiences. And by life challenges, I don’t mean only those that bring pain. It is a challenge to choose a major, a challenge to fulfill an obligation one may have undertaken without fully understanding the work involved, a challenge to walk away from a relationship that is forcing one to camouflage one’s real self, and a challenge to stand up for oneself when one has been judged unfairly. And it is, of course, a challenge to begin accepting responsibility for one’s actions and choices. Those are all part of learning to be a fully functioning adult. And here’s one that highly to profoundly gifted adolescents often struggle with—a challenge to discover not just what one can do, but what gives one joy in the doing.

Life—for everyone—includes difficult challenges like loss, grief, loneliness, uncertainty, disappointment, mistakes and bad choices. If their parents constantly rush in to “fix” any uncomfortable situation, or remove any and every obstacle children or adolescents might encounter, how do they develop the kinds of coping strategies that will be essential in the rest of their lives? We insist that children need to learn at or near the top of their cognitive capacity so they’ll have the intellectual tools they’ll need to reach their potential. It’s equally important to let them stretch themselves to contend with the difficulties they encounter in their personal lives.

Parenting is difficult and scary, and parenting out of sync kids is no walk in the park. We don’t have “owner’s manuals.” We do the best we can. I’m certainly not suggesting you abandon your child in the face of difficult life experiences! I’m suggesting only that you consider that question I asked earlier:

“What, if anything, might you change in your parenting methods and strategies if you treated your children’s need for life challenges the same way you treat their need for intellectual challenges–as a valuable, even necessary aspect of their development as human beings?”

Tags: asysnchronous development, Education, Giftedness, Individuality, Learning, Schools

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Categories Asynchronous Development, Consciousness, Cultural Attitudes, Emotional/Psychological, Over-Excitabilities, Parenting, Schools, Social Issues, Uncategorized

Mind’s Diversity

4 Jun

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”–Albert Einstein

In the midst of the current world chaos when people encounter the word “diversity” what probably comes to mind first is what might be called obvious diversity—race, religion, ethnic origin, culture, citizenship, gender, economic status. What I am writing about today is less noticeable and for some perhaps rather more controversial—I think of it as diversity within mind.

I don’t mean the differences between gifted and more typical minds, between left and right brain dominance, between math/science and humanities preferences, or even Dabrowski’s OEs. There is much to be said about all of these, and of course much has been written about all of them in the gifted literature.

What is less discussed in that literature, less discussed in the academic community, except obliquely, is the fact that the human mind has two primary modes of operation. They could be called ways of accessing information or even ways of knowing. These two entirely different modes are Intellect and Intuition. The first is the aspect of mind measured by most intelligence tests—intellect. It is the dwelling place of reason, logic, rationality. It is generally thought of as a specifically human attribute, the mental capacity that allows us to learn, explore reality, understand, share ideas and knowledge, create, and invent. When some people use the term mind what they mean is just this—intellect. If they think about intuition, they consider it to be some vague and unreliable something that, if it exists at all, is akin to what in animals we label instinct, a lesser kind of consciousness that might occasionally surprise us when the phone rings and without seeing the caller I.D. we have a “hunch” about who is trying to reach us.

In spite of Einstein’s words, above, intuition is not most generally a serious focus of attention when considering the unusual or extreme intelligence of gifted individuals. While intellect is rational, many refer to intuition, therefore, as irrational, and dismiss it on those grounds. I far prefer the term nonrational, which acknowledges its difference without dismissing its genuine value. A couple of years ago when I was in a FaceBook group created to discuss giftedness, any mention of the kinds of unusual awareness that are available to us through intuition was met with hostility and ridicule. I probably posted the Einstein quotation before I left the group, tired of the futile attempt to broaden the conversation to include the aspect of mind that allows direct knowing. Yet in a kind of linguistic U-turn, in earlier times to say that someone was “gifted,” or had “the gift,” actually meant that the person had highly developed and powerful intuition, sometimes known as second sight, sixth sense, or psychic ability.

Interestingly, speaking to a diverse audience about mind and giftedness when I ask people to raise their hands if they have ever experienced an accurate, intuitive “hit,” a majority raise their hands. For some this sort of direct knowing is frequent and common enough to be relied upon, for others their intuitive experience was a one time, goose-bump-raising, highly memorable event.

I’m among those who argue that intuition is a valuable and basic aspect of the mind, every bit as worthy of being recognized and developed as intellect. For those who distrust it or disbelieve in its existence, I would remind them of a time (I’m old enough to remember it) when elementary school children in this country (especially in Catholic schools, but elsewhere, too) were discouraged or even punished for using their left hands instead of their right. Handedness was not yet understood as an innate aspect of the individual’s brain structure. As we learned more about the brain, we realized that being left handed—or ambidextrous—is not only natural to some, but is associated with some unique and worthwhile attributes.

In the Myers-Briggs inventory of types, one of the variables (N) stands for intuition, the method of taking in information that is opposed on the scale to sensing (S). Those who prefer Sensing on the N-S continuum look for information that is concrete, can be accessed through the senses, and includes details and facts. Those who prefer Intuition are more likely to get hunches and trust them, and to perceive underlying structures and patterns and make assumptions based on those. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines intuition as “…the immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning; instantaneous apperception.”

Both N and S are natural capacities that may be more or less developed, more or less used, according to nature, but nurture is involved as well. When we do not respect or allow intuitive ways of knowing, we may do as much to shut it down in those whose natural capacities are closer to N on the continuum than S, as forcing the exclusive use of the right hand distorted for many the attributes of left-handedness. Those who have been told (or believe) that intuition either doesn’t exist or is vague and unreliable, are much less likely to develop and use it than those in whom its presence is acknowledged, supported, valued.

As we are more and more inundated with information, more and more challenged to keep up with the constant flow of new information on almost every topic imaginable, it’s likely that we are going to find it more and more critical for the individual to acknowledge and gain access to that “other” way of knowing that is entirely outside the realm of reason, rationality, logic and intellect. We need to have a way of sorting through the deluge to limit our intake, to get accurate hunches about just what pieces of information in that stream we most need in any given situation or any given moment. When we do get such hunches we need to respect them rather than dismissing them automatically, even though they may be given to us in a “still, small voice” easily over-ridden by the loud and confident intellect. As we begin to trust them, they begin to work for us more and more often, more and more accurately.

One of my colleagues is affectionately known as “Nancy Drew” because she’s able to find information other people can’t. She is led to that information intuitively. Though she reads incredibly fast, she is often able simply to go directly to the right shelf, the right box, the right file drawer in the midst of an archive that might take another person weeks or months to sort through in a more rational, methodical way. She trusts her methods, and seeing her results lets the rest of us trust them, too. Books she needs have even been known to fall off the shelf to get her attention.

I knew that my Myers-Briggs results showed me to be far out on the N side of the N-S continuum, but I didn’t realize that many psychics refer to themselves as Intuitives. So I often said, “I don’t have a psychic bone in my body.” Then several professional psychics told me I was one of them. Thanks to my strict, rational-materialist upbringing and education, I dismissed their suggestions. Then one of them told me that while I could learn to access my intuitive nature, people with highly capable intellects (“the gifted”) are among those most difficult to teach to do that. I was lucky, though. I’m a fiction writer and have made much of my living with my imagination.

Once, while doing research for my novel Welcome to the Ark, I went to hear the grandson of Edgar Cayce speak, and he quoted his grandfather, saying “Imagination is the doorway to intuition.” Imagination and intuition are not the same thing, since intuition is a way of knowing and imagination is a way of exploring (or creating) possibilities. Imagination allows us to escape from the tyranny of what is already known, from facts previously established, and from the “real world” to explore new territory. In that new territory intuition may then encounter its truth.

Einstein famously said (in a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post) “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Much of what Einstein gave to the world came from a combination of imagination and his own thorough grounding in what was already known or theorized and the extraordinary intellect that let him devise ways to test and share his sudden insights. But it certainly was the free flight of imagination that allowed him to make intuitive leaps to entirely new ground. He also famously said that to encourage children to become scientists one should nourish them with fairy tales.

Intellect feels safer. One can follow its trail from fact to fact, from source to source, from concept to concept, thought to thought, reflection to reflection. The accomplishments of intellect can be traced, diagrammed, understood—unlike the “Eureka!” moment, when, like a kaleidoscope turning, an entirely new pattern suddenly emerges in what feels like a magical way that could not have been predicted or understood by analyzing the trail.

While it’s true that some people are intuitive super stars, able to tune in to information, “vibrations,” others cannot sense, that is no more of an excuse not to train ourselves to use this aspect of mind than it would be to say that no one other than the profoundly gifted should work to develop their intellect. I have been working at developing my own long-neglected intuition for a number of years now (over the often strenuous objections of my rational mind), and I’ve come to believe that it is essential for the future of humanity, not only to accept intuition’s apparently magical existence, but to respect what it can give us that reason cannot. Some of its aspects can seem “paranormal” and unsettling, since we have no way to really understand them. But I remind myself regularly that we don’t actually understand intellect either. Consciousness itself is still one of the great mysteries.

Personally, I’m not sure I would want to hand the task of helping children develop their intuition over to our schools, since they are overburdened as it is. But—as I’ve said often before, I think it amounts to educational malpractice not to tell kids that it exists, that it is a powerful natural aspect of mind, and that it can be developed. And schools can certainly do far more than most do now to help children value imagination, use it, practice it, and most of all respect it. Respect for imagination both allows and encourages the opening of that door to other ways of knowing.

Meantime, there are many people who are intuitive masters already engaged in teaching people how to access, develop, and use this aspect of mind. There are many books and workbooks for this, some designed for adults, some for children. Parents may have to be the ones to find the resources for this, but from my own childhood experience, I can confidently say that telling children that their moments of direct knowing are dangerous, unreliable, and should not be accepted or used, is like forcing left-handed kids to use only their right—a kind of purposeful crippling. It is only when we respect and encourage the development and best use of the whole mind, both intellect and intuition, that we access humanity’s highest intelligence. Edgar Cayce said imagination is the doorway to intuition; I would add that intuition is the doorway to the infinite.

Tags: Aspects of Mind, Diversity, Giftedness, Individualitiy

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Categories Consciousness, Education, Imagination, Intuition, Parenting, Schools, Uncategorized

Stepping into a New World

14 Oct

Those (possibly very few reading here) who know tarot will recognize the “Zero” card in traditional decks as The Fool. The image for this card usually includes someone about to step off the cliff of the known world into empty air—carrying or wearing a pack. He is shown as care free and smiling. We consider it inherently foolish to step off solid high ground, oblivious to the fall that clearly seems so certain. But there may be something other than foolishness involved. There is an aphorism that says, “when you must move forward beyond the edge of the cliff one of two things will happen—firm support will appear under your feet, or you will sprout wings and fly.

Stepping off the very edge of the known world takes radical trust. Not just trust, but the ability to trust in trust itself. When the solid ground you’ve been standing on begins to shake and crumble beneath your feet, it may be wise rather than foolish to grab a few tools and step off.

I think about this new world thing today because I just returned from the OAGC fall conference in Ohio where I gave a keynote on Monday about the definition of giftedness as asynchronous development that was contributed to the field by the Columbus Group (yes, in Columbus on Columbus Day!) At that conference there were inevitably many people acutely aware of tremors in the ground beneath their feet.

In my small sessions for teachers questions were raised about how those dedicated to “doing no harm” to their gifted asynchronous students (or any others in their classes, for that matter) can be effective in a system that allows little breathing room and punishes teachers if their students do poorly on the tests that have come to rule the academic calendar. We spoke of good, even great, teachers leaving the field because of massive frustration. “It should not be this way,” we agreed. I reminded them that some states are beginning to change draconian testing policies and suggested that when things get bad enough, even massive systems have to change, a bit at a time. Finally, I found myself telling them to do whatever they can manage, and keep up their own spirits and their willingness to stick with it by finding at least one thing to be grateful for in every school day. Then I apologized for having only the tool to give them that Bernie Siegel offers to cancer patients facing uncertain outcomes. Has teaching come to this? But I don’t apologize for the tool, because it is a very powerful one.

New forms arise out of chaos, but it takes courage to hold on through the chaos. What we pay attention to expands in our experience, so it is important to focus on what works, no matter what else is going on around that.

For myself, what I noticed to be grateful for in the very large gathering at OAGC (as well as back in March at the NJ state conference) was the strongest sense of a shift in consciousness I have ever felt in such gatherings in this country. There is a growing awareness that our old way of thinking about “mind” as referring solely to rational thought within a rational/material world, is insufficient. No matter how good it is, the rational mind cannot predict what the world our children will face as adults will look like, what they will need to know, or what skills they will need to have to find a place in that world. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, educational patterns based on ideas about the human mind from decades, even centuries ago, will fail.

I put up a slide asking the conference attendees to consider their own definition or “sense” of what mind is, using at first these three images:

The first represents, of course, the traditional scientific belief that mind originates and resides in the physical brain, the second symbolizes the mechanistic cogwheels of intellectual/rational/logical thought, and the third a kind of nebulous, wispy not quite physical “something,” hard to pin down or “understand.”

Then I added a fourth image from painter Alex Gray:

energy body

This one acknowledges an energy basis of both mind and body.

The feel of a very big room full of educators, when offered these images, is more open these days. There seems to be a growing willingness to consider new ideas about what mind, what consciousness, may be.

This is deeply heartening to me, because the ground we’ve been standing on all these centuries (while we have been developing, using and relying on our quite splendid rational minds to understand and analyze and tame the material world) is demonstrably crumbling beneath our feet. Materialism, with its emphasis on separation, on particles rather than waves, leaves out something absolutely essential—what might be called the “heart” of humanity.

Here is a slide I have used in several talks to try to help broaden the concept of what mind consists of:

Aspects of Mind/Consciousness

Awareness Perception Emotion/Feeling

Intellect Imagination Memory

Will Intuition Compassion

Only a few of these aspects are addressed in most school curricula. We need to consider the world our children might help create if we began to recognize and value more of what can be called the non-rational aspects of our consciousness. The rational mind, focusing on analyzing, separating, labeling, categorizing and creating hierarchies, has brought us to where we are today, disconnected from each other and from the nature that supports us. We see the effects of this disconnection all around us and in every evening news broadcast.

The Columbus Group focuses not solely on intellect and achievement, but on the “whole child” in the education and raising of gifted kids. It is essential that we also begin to recognize “whole mind,” the “whole being” as we look to the human future. According to Jack Kornfield Sanskrit has only a single word for “mind” and “heart.” Imagine the difference it would make if we could heal the separation we now see between these two aspects of ourselves! It shouldn’t be such a huge stretch now that the field of neurocardiology is showing that the heart both receives and processes information.

The members of the Columbus Group who went to New Zealand in April for our Symposium on Asynchronous Development all felt something personally transforming happened there. That symposium began with an indigenous ceremony specifically recognizing the connectedness of all peoples, all beings, all aspects of our universe. Such a different way of beginning an educational gathering surely had a part to play in this noticeable sense of transformation.

For me this week it was a lovely synchronicity that October 12th is not only Columbus Day, but is called Indigenous Peoples Day in some places. The old world (that had long been inhabited when Columbus set sail to “discover” it) possessed valuable—non-rational—tools of consciousness most of Europe had forgotten, tools that are likely to be useful or even necessary for taking our own next step as the ground continues to shake beneath us all.

Tags: Aspects of Mind, Asynchronous Development, Change, Columbus Group, Education, Gifted Child, gifted children, gifted education, gratitude, New World

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Consciousness, Education, Imagination, Intuition, Positivity, Schools

Off the Charts On Its Way!

11 Dec

Breaking news! I have been reliably informed that Off the Charts, Asynchrony and the Gifted Child will begin shipping today.

Those of you who have already ordered your copies will have them soon—those of you who haven’t, can order them now, secure in the knowledge that they will show up soon. They can be ordered at www.rfwp.com

In case you missed earlier descriptions, this book—19 chapters from 14 authors—covers the phenomenon of asynchronous development in the gifted (there’s a chapter about asynchrony in adults and one about the asynchronous family) from many perspectives. In the twenty years since the Columbus Group brought the term asynchronous development into the field as a definition of giftedness from the inside, many people have written about it, many of them considering asynchrony primarily as the uneven development often seen in gifted children, or the “many ages” of gifted kids. But it is much more complex than that. It has to do with a fully outside-the-norm mode of experiencing life–a different quality of awareness. The gifted are not just different from those in the center of the proverbial bell curve—they are different from each other and may even, as they develop, become extremely different from earlier versions of themselves.

I’m one of the editors of this book (the primary editor is Christine Neville), as well as the author of two chapters and co-author of one with Michael Piechowski (another of the editors), and I have to say that it is one of the most important books you’ll encounter if you want to gain a greater understanding of the beingness of gifted individuals, and how that beingness (in interaction with their learning and living environments) affects their ability and motivation to achieve.

Even firm supporters of the talent development approach to educating the gifted need to understand the complexity of experience that lies behind the unusual specific abilities we call talents if they are to support and encourage their development. Giftedness and talent may not be precisely the same thing, but they are often inextricably combined.

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Asynchronous Development, Education, Emotional/Psychological, Parenting, Schools

Revisiting A Wrinkle in Time 50 Years On…

3 Dec

November 29 was a big day for birthdays of writers of massively successful books for kids. Louisa May Alcott, C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle were all born on that day. But as loved as all these authors are, it’s Madeleine’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, that I am moved to talk about today. It was published fifty years ago—something I find not only hard, but quite annoying to believe—and has sold over 10 million copies. Having been rejected by publisher after publisher, many of whom believed its foundational concepts of theoretical physics “too hard” for kids, it won the Newbery Medal in 1963.

(If by some chance you or the gifted kids in your life haven’t read it, I urge you to head for your book store or library or ebook and remedy that oversight as soon as you reasonably can.)

When I told my friend and sometimes collaborator Katherine Paterson, another Newbery medalist, that I had just reread the book, having had to get it from the library because my own copy has disappeared, she sent me a copy of this year’s anniversary edition, for which she wrote the introduction. A brand new copy (with all sorts of lovely extras) now sits on my desk, with newly written blurbs on its back cover, such as this from Scott Westerfeld: “…Hers were the first books I read that mixed math and magic, the quest and the quantum.”

I had read A Wrinkle in Time aloud to my son when he was six years old because he was in great need of meeting Charles Wallace Murry, the profoundly gifted, highly asysnchronous little boy who is the younger brother of Meg, the novel’s profoundly gifted protagonist. My son needed to know that there were other kids who were as different as he was feeling in the first grade, and in pretty much the same way. The profoundly gifted characters in this book—and the companion books that followed—Charles Wallace, Meg, and her friend Calvin O’Keefe, have given super bright children a sense of having peers and companions in the world for half a century.

But it is not the giftedness of the young characters, or the anniversary year, or even the occasion of Madeleine’s birthday last week that motivates my writing about it here just now. It is the book’s plot. I reread it because I needed to be reminded of the particular evil the children struggle with once they tesseract to the planet Camazotz where they hope to rescue Mr. Murry, who has been imprisoned by IT, the planet’s all-powerful leader. The evil “shadow” that has fully engulfed Camazotz, and threatens other planets, including Earth, is uniformity. IT is not so much a person as a singular consciousness that enforces absolute conformity of thought and action. The people of the planet, IT assures the children, are happy, content and safe because they are essentially identical. There is no need for individual thought.

Recently I posted “Are We Redefining the Wrong Word” in response to the conflict in the gifted field over what giftedness means and how the educational world should address it. The effort to unite the field under the single banner of talent development has been presented as a more politically viable, more efficient, more fundable and less complicated method of holding a place for gifted children in the country’s educational system than continuing to contend with varied points of view and a multiplicity of approaches.

When my husband read that post, he accused me of having become a raging radical when he wasn’t looking, and asked whether I was actually calling for the replacement of all the schools in the country with learning communities. “What would you do with the 80 or whatever percent of people who are okay with the current system?” I reminded him I’ve always raged a bit. I used to say I wanted schools to be bulldozed and the ground salted so they couldn’t grow up again. (Put it down to OEs!)

But his point had sunk home. I’ve been thinking a lot about Camazotz. A Wrinkle in Time does not seem to me today quite as brilliant as it seemed when I read it originally. But its evil is demonstrably evil, which is why I reread it in the first place, to support my own extreme distaste for age-grade, lockstep, factory schooling–way too much uniformity.

The danger of uniformity of thought and the total dismissal of all other viewpoints seems a bigger threat than ever in today’s world. One has only to think of our recent election and the hostilities that are still going on in its aftermath to see why some would find relief in everyone thinking the same way they do. People whose ultimate goals and intentions are much the same have come to think of one another as enemies thanks to a disagreement over how to achieve those goals and intentions. The more I thought about Camazotz, the more IT-like my own wish to rid the world of factory schools began to sound.

And then I encountered an interview with Barbara Marx Hubbard, whose new book Birth 2012 and Beyond considers what she calls humanity’s “Great Shift” to conscious evolution. Her thoughts are just what I needed. Many people who have commented on my “Redefining the Wrong Word” post in various venues have spoken of the need for and the supreme unlikelihood of a paradigm shift of sufficient magnitude to fundamentally change education. Hubbard’s “conscious evolution” is a way forward.

She suggests that allowing people to find something new to do or commit to in their own lives that can help with positive evolution, “is far better than if you ask people to do the same thing together” [italics mine]. She speaks of social synergy and explains how it differs from cooperation. “Cooperation could be many different things, including ‘We’ll help you if you help us.’ Synergy happens when one group has a yearning to express something that another group feels the need for, and vice versa. So you get to be uniquely more of who you are by joining than you do by remaining separate. …That’s a big growing edge for human endeavor right there. When we come together in synergy, each person or group gets celebrated, amplified and empowered.”

What if we could find ways for all the groups who care about and work for gifted kids (the kids themselves, parents, teachers, counselors, academics, theoreticians, pediatricians, school administrators and yes, politicians) involved in social synergy, working in their own individual way, but jointly focused on the best developmental future for the kids?

Pretty much everything on the planet is in the midst of massive change. The time is past for top-down planning and the old hierarchies. There is no single “IT” mind that can possibly have the answers to all the questions humanity needs to address. We need to stop seeing different ideas as a threat and begin to look for what aspects of other points of view could support, supplement, or create new possibilities for our own. There is no them and us in our need to support the growth and development of our children—WE are part of a fully interrelated whole, and it is our very differences that create the possibilities for positive evolution.

And speaking of massive planetary change, how can any of us be satisfied with an educational paradigm designed quite purposefully to put limits on all the variety of developing minds with both the ability and the desire to push ahead into unexplored territory? Almost everything that faces us these days is unexplored territory, whether we like it or not! Instead of labeling these out-of-the-ordinary minds arrogant or elitist—or odd or broken, let’s invite them all into the conversation about possible ways to move forward. Any for whom the past methods seem to provide what they need, let them stay with those. Transition times are just that—times when the old and the new overlap. But let us please quit kidding ourselves that past methods are “best methods” and acknowledge that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of possibilities. And let’s give young minds more respect than we have generally granted them before. Let’s not just talk—let’s listen!

There are other values in A Wrinkle in Time and the later books about the Murry family that may seem to be fantasy. But who knows what real synergy could begin to show us? There is a great deal more to mind than intellect and it could be time to quit limiting the rest of mind, too!

Instead of what’s wrong with other thoughts and other ideas, let’s begin looking for what’s right with them. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all method, there are none that are all brilliant or all worthless. Imagine that our lives depended on developing synergy. They just might!

Tags: Change, conflict, cooperation, gifted education, hierarchy, Individuality, synergy, uniformity

Comments 12 Comments
Categories Consciousness, Education, NAGC, Parenting, Positivity, Schools, Social Issues, Twice-Exceptional, Unschooling

Are We Redefining the Wrong Word?

27 Nov

NAGC 2012

As George Betts pointed out today or last night on FaceBook, this year’s convention of the National Association for Gifted Children was perhaps the most polarized, fiercely divided convention in recent years. A year ago the organization’s president, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius gave an address that argued the need for the field to come together under the umbrella of a new and singular definition of giftedness, of a unified concept that could and should direct both educational programming and research—Talent Development. It is unlikely that she had any idea before she gave that speech advocating unity that it would unleash a firestorm of controversy and develop over the following months a split just about as intense and fraught as the current split between America’s political parties.

Oddly, my own experience of the convention was extremely positive overall. Others who share my focus on the internal world of the gifted child, and on the fundamental developmental differences between the gifted and other children, had been stirred up by such an overt challenge to and dismissal of their perspective. They showed up to any sessions that fit that perspective with an unusual level of passion. I doubt that in the more than 25 years I’ve been attending and speaking at NAGC I’ve ever experienced more enthusiastic and responsive audiences.

As usual, the Columbus Group gathered after the convention, to share with each other our experiences over the last year and consider what we as individuals and—now that we’re out in the open—as a group, can and should do going forward. I arrived home wiped out and faced with only two days to get ready for Thanksgiving. I’ve been home now for a week, and my mind has been seldom at rest as I’ve pondered my experiences in Denver.

Patricia Gatto-Walden and I did a presentation this year, titled “What the Kids Want You to Know: It’s My Life.” A group in the UK 20 years ago took the keynote of the World Conference (a speech focused on gifted education as a way to make the best use of each culture’s natural resource of bright kids to benefit their country) to the kids at summer camps for the gifted and asked for their feedback. Taking a cue from them, we read aloud the shortened version of Paula’s speech that appeared in Compass Points to our Yunasa campers. Expecting no more than a handful to show up, we invited anyone who wanted to respond to it to share their thoughts for an hour long session. So many kids (nearly a third of the campers) were willing to give up regular camp activities for that hour, that we could barely fit them into the room we had available. They spoke enthusiastically for the full hour and several of them asked afterward that we send them the full text of the Subotnik, Worrell and Olszewski-Kubilius monograph that had formed the foundation for Paula’s speech.

Few of these kids knew anything about NAGC, and one of the first questions they had was, “Does this organization have kid members?”

We said it does not. Quite naturally, the kids thought this was outrageous—“How can it be for gifted kids, then? Don’t they get it that we have pretty good ideas about what we need? Do they think we don’t think about education during all the time we’re in school?”

What shocked me was not their question, but that I had never asked it myself. I’ve been aware, of course, that schools bring kids to NAGC, most often to perform, sometimes to serve as panel members in a session or two. But kid members? I hadn’t considered it necessary.

A Moment in the Wayback Machine

From the time my five year old son had the “head-on collision” with school that led me to begin learning everything I could learn about gifted kids, I have thought that it isn’t really the existence of kids with unusual intelligence that creates a need for specialized “gifted education,” it’s the way education is structured in this country and in most of the rest of the world. It’s a factory model created well over a hundred years ago and it has changed only slightly since. Children are treated pretty much as interchangeable cogs (or, with an emphasis on product, as “widgets.”)

At the very first gifted conference I ever attended a speaker said, “If God had known what schools would be like, He wouldn’t have made kids the way he did.” I thought it was a clever statement, but its full impact escaped me at the time. After all, school was school! I’d known what that meant since my October birthday allowed me to start kindergarten at age four in a system with a December cut-off date.

In the 1980’s, when I had begun to write and speak about the needs of gifted kids, I said in several talks that if school were done differently, we wouldn’t need the designation “gifted kids.”

People invariably argued with me, pointing out that gifted kids would still learn faster, more broadly, more deeply, and more connectedly than others and we’d still have to diagnose those learning differences. I agreed that gifted kids wouldn’t vanish—but that if we found a way to individualize education to meet the needs of every student, doing the same for the gifted would be just part of the deal. I kept remembering what my son said one year when I asked him after we’d moved—yet again!—whether the kids at his new Quaker school would tease him for wearing Kmart sneakers instead of the currently popular expensive brand. “Mom! Nobody teases anybody for being different in a school where everybody’s different!”

The absolute joy of that school was that the children were treated as individuals. Yes, they went to classes mostly based on age, but within those classes, probably because of their specifically Quaker focus on that of God in every person, each child was respected for being him or herself. But it was a small school and “everybody knew” (including me) that the whole country’s public system just couldn’t afford to be run that way.

When that school ran out of grade levels for my accelerated son, I briefly considered homeschooling, because we lived in Norfolk, VA, the only city in the USA where at that time homeschooling was legal. I’d been reading John Holt’s Growing Without Schooling and conversing with him by mail for a couple of years by then, loving his ideas and the freedom they provided for the kids. He didn’t focus on gifted kids–just kids. A friend of mine had illegally homeschooled her son back in Ohio (which had necessitated “hiding” him in the house all day every day) and insisted that it was the only way to individualize sufficiently to truly meet the needs of an exceptionally gifted child. But it was not in the cards for my family—I didn’t have the necessary patience and my extraverted son was horrified at the whole idea and refused even to consider it.

What Do We Mean by Child?

As I’ve thought about how the two sides in the current definition argument might possibly come together, it has occurred to me that maybe gifted isn’t the problem word. The problem word is child. Why does NAGC not have child members, when its stated mission is to serve children? Because today children are still defined by the field of education not as young individual human beings with individual needs and minds and drives and lives, but as a class of beings in need of being taught by adults what they presumably will need to know when they become adults.

There is an extent to which that definition makes sense, of course. Children have a lot to learn and there’s a long period of dependency during which they need to be sheltered, touched and held and cared for, fed and dressed. Human children need to interact with other humans (though not exclusively with adults) to learn language. Much of what they learn begins with observation and imitation. And of course there are all those tricky things like silverware to handle, stairs to navigate, windows not to fall out of, streets to cross. Plus there are reading, writing and arithmetic, which many of them will first be exposed to in school.

But what we believe about children has changed. There was a time when a child was thought to be an empty vessel, waiting for adults to fill it up with information. (Just last year I saw a YouTube about educational reform that actually still said this!) Science long ago showed that belief to be in error. Human children are learning creatures determined to explore and manipulate their environment, to test and try, to build and tear down, to question and experiment and interact with whatever other living creatures they encounter—all of which can be classed as “play” in the early years. And today in any household with technology, they mostly find a way either to use that technology on their own or get someone to show them how.

The sooner we put them in “school” where the primary activities are to sit still, be quiet, listen, wait for and then follow directions, answer questions “correctly,” and judge themselves in terms of how other children are doing at these tasks, the sooner we begin to limit their natural modes of learning. Instead of play that expands their experience and mastery, learning becomes what they do (or rather what they are directed to do) in school. There is very little difference in what they are directed to do, one student to another, and little if any concern about individual interests or personal choice. Natural learning gives way to coercion, solitary activity directed toward a predetermined goal, and a teacher’s external validation or criticism of their efforts.

(One could ask oneself just what sort of adult life these “lessons” are designed to prepare them for. Factories, yes. But factories are either in other countries now or use a lot of robots. Schools should not be in the business of programming human robots!)

Meantime, as the Yunasa campers told us last summer, the adults don’t ask them what they need or listen to them when they express their needs anyway.

And What Do We Mean by School?

Like it or not, times have changed! How often have you heard one adult say to another, who is struggling with some aspect of current technology, “what you need is a ten year old.” When my now nine year old grandson was two, he was already more adept at using his father’s computer to find what he wanted to interact with on the internet than I was. Now he scoffs at my efforts to learn something new on my “too smart” phone. It isn’t only theory that tells us that learners can be teachers and teachers learners. It is our everyday lives. And there is a tsunami of information available to and through the new technologies that kids are more adept at finding than many of us.

It is long past time to give up schools or redefine them as learning communities, where it is not just age that creates groups, but interests (passions), knowledge, experience and needs. In such learning communities there could be webs rather than boxes–language, math, history, geography, art, meant to be dealt with separately in small blocks of time–webs that could interweave what is known in service of creating something new, or helping the learner to grasp new information and move into and understand greater complexity. And children need to have a voice in how such learning communities would or could operate; because children are unhampered by the structures and restrictions of prior experience; they lack our long memory of “how it has always been” that would hold them back from imagining how it could be.

Our gifted kids, so very interested in learning, so passionate about exploration, could genuinely help to lead the way. One of their major differences (at least until we squash it out of them with work sheets and grades and gold stars and tests, grade point averages, boundaries and limitations) is their rage to learn and understand, and to do something with meaning. Those same kids who discovered at two how to find what they wanted on a computer screen, have ideas about how learning can happen, progress and change. And how the technology so many of them love and the games so many of them play, could enhance learning for themselves and other kids. They could work with adults who are willing to collaborate on finding the best ways forward rather than determining and dictating those ways!

Teachers who love their profession and have passion for their subject matter could, in learning communities, be freed to practice that profession instead of struggling to prepare a broad spectrum of kids in a narrow age range to succeed on standardized tests that really can’t measure either student learning or teacher competence.

We can’t have what we can’t first envision. And we are in a deep and dreadful rut. I started a Face Book page (www.facebook.com/deependxgifted) last November in hopes that those who visited it could begin thinking in new ways and sharing their visions about how education could happen if we began over again without schools. We didn’t get far. FB pages aren’t that great for collaborative thinking—everything gets pushed down the page and disappears. But that doesn’t mean the discussion shouldn’t be taking place.

We have to find a way to make things work better. I would welcome the best ideas of the Talent Development folk, but I would want them to acknowledge the existence of kids whose inner experience of the world really is different from the beginning. It isn’t just our field that’s in crisis and conflict. Our whole world is at stake. Pretty much really! New thinking, new ideas and new partnerships are essential as everything continues to change at warp speed. Let us outsource factory schools to some other planet so that we don’t have to find ways to keep squeezing human children into boxes designed for widgets or robots.

I end all my talks with the following quotation, meant for every human, child or adult, because we need to know that we are not interchangeable!

“You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something would be missing from existence, and no one could replace it.” –Osho

Found this on A Space for Learning, 11-12-12

Tags: Change, Definitions, Education, Giftedness, Individuality, Learning, Schools

Comments 20 Comments
Categories Cultural Attitudes, Education, Identification, Imagination, NAGC, Parenting, Schools, Story Principle, Testing, Unschooling

Schools are to Creativity… (Part 2)

16 Jul

…as zoos are to wildness.

I got to visit cheetahs NOT on exhibit at Melbourne zoo–thanks to Jo Freitag

Sometimes in order to see things clearly one has to peel back layers of feeling. My philosophy is that we can’t do anything wrong (as we’re doing the best we can at any given moment) but that we may be able to do things better, and feelings can help us do that by pointing to what isn’t working as well as it could. Today’s post goes on from the feeling response I wrote yesterday. Different readers will respond differently, depending on their own feeling layers, of course.

“…As zoos are to wildness.” That is a critical part of the sentence! I am not against zoos. In fact, I spent part of my life wanting to be a zookeeper. I had our family read aloud the works of Gerald Durrell, whose life, other than writing, was devoted early on to gathering animals for zoos and then to creating an important zoo of his own. One of the greatest synchronicities of our son’s life happened during his college semester in London when, looking into a bookstore window, he thought he recognized the reflection of the man standing behind him. He turned and asked the man if he was Gerald Durrell. When the man said he was, our son enthusiastically shared how important Durrell’s books had been to his childhood. Durrell invited him to the zoo run by his Wildlife Conservation Trust, and of course he went!

As with schools, there are zoos and zoos. Fewer and fewer of them are places of imprisonment for their charges or focused solely on putting animals on exhibit for the entertainment of their paying customers. Many do important conservation research. And there is for the most part a serious effort to provide as natural a habitat for the animals as possible. Nevertheless, the task of maintaining wildness is difficult to achieve with some species and impossible with many others!

Just so with highly creative kids. Creativity itself is about not following directions, about finding new ways to do things, new ways to approach things, new ways to put things together or “reconcile the disparate.” It is an individual thing. An institution whose job is to educate all kids cannot function without requirements, directions, methods and–yes–coercion.

One of the most difficult half hours of my life was the first time I was asked as a visiting author to interact with a kindergarten class. I’d written mostly young adult novels at that point and normally visited upper elementary or middle school classes, where I started by getting the kids excited about an idea. I had literally never been in a room with more than 20 five year olds before that day. I made the mistake of starting by getting the kids turned on. Five year olds, of course, pretty much don’t need turning on–chaos ensued. And I never managed to restore even a semblance of order.

Creativity and institutions of any kind don’t go together easily. At best there may be an uneasy alliance. Institutions need patterns that creative people break. Over and over again the “creative genius” who founds an organization of any kind–a company, a school, a theatre company–is replaced once that organization is up and running by someone whose particular skills are suited to guiding and maintaining rather than inventing. And it isn’t always that the founder is thrown out–some leave when they discover that keeping the organization running bores them silly and that making things new all the time can be disruptive and threatening to others. Creativity often looks like destruction, when old forms have to be taken apart to make way for the new.

When that sixth grade teacher who was the nemesis of my life told my mother that I’d never amount to anything because I was “interested in too many things,” she was thinking along conventional lines: “jack of all trades, master of none.” The greatest joy of being a writer, of course, is that I get to keep writing different sorts of stories, doing different kinds of research, inventing whole new people and worlds. One of the things that made me craziest in school was the schedule–same classes same day of the week, week after week after week. As an adult I would not be able to do a job that involves constant repetition.

So this is the second half of what I wish to say about creativity in schools. We can’t support it perfectly, but we can keep working to do better. Some schools and some teachers have more success than others in making room for creative kids, but much of the support the kids need may have to come from the fact that–unlike zoo animals–they get to leave the building at the end of the school day.

What I wrote during school was mostly written in the classes I didn’t like under the guise of taking careful notes (the notes my teachers thought accounted for my good grades.) But most of my writing as a kid was done in trees, under bushes, at home in my room–outside of school and not at anyone’s request.

It is possible for a creative kid to survive even the most coercive school environment with a little help from outside–parents, other kids, adult mentors or just enough time and space to dream, and materials for playing, experiencing and inventing on their own.

But kids whose creativity can be submerged by doing really well at following directions, by a culture that is uncomfortable with rebels, or by a need to protect themselves from the hostile forces often ranged against them, do get hurt. There is no life without pain; I’m not suggesting there should be. But often these kids get hurt more deeply, more often and more permanently than necessary. Coercion can inspire creativity as the creative kid finds ways to rebel against it or work around it. But coercion can grind down and destroy as well. These kids need to hear from adults that resistance is not necessarily a sign of poor character!

“If I had it to do all over again” (something every single parent can say at some point), I would put supporting creativity way higher up on my list of priorities for any kid who has, in addition to a really fine, really capable intellect, a passionate imagination and a drive toward novelty. It was the nourishing of imagination that Einstein was talking about when he advocated reading fairy tales as a way to create future scientists. When he said that creativity was more important than knowledge, it wasn’t that he was dissing knowledge. But stuffing kids’ minds full of the knowledge we think they should have doesn’t make room for what is likely to be needed in a world we can’t predict that will be the world of their adulthood.

I prefer to look for positive possibilities. If some kids can nourish their imaginations with computer games (like the paper version of Dungeons and Dragons that briefly took over my son’s life) I say there is hope in that. But I also hope that anyone who can affect classrooms anywhere will keep in mind the need to provide some open spaces for the growing of imagination. And I would remind parents to value and trust it as Einstein did.

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Categories creativity, Education, Emotional/Psychological, Imagination, Parenting, Positivity, Schools

Schools are to Creativity…

15 Jul

…as Zoos are to Wildness.

This was the title of a talk I first gave before I entered the realm of giftedness. I’ve used that title many times since. But this morning, when I had been planning to start preparations for camp (Yunasa begins a week from today and I leave home on Wednesday), I found this article (Why Creative Geniuses Hated School) posted in the FaceBook group, International Gifted Education, and was motivated to write a blog post instead. If you haven’t already read that article, please, please click the link and read it before going on. (I’ll wait.) ***

I’m not writing here to bash schools, though that may seem to be the effect of this post. I’m writing because it is difficult to know what to do about this problem, and it’s a serious problem that too many people (including myself for a long time) overlook, ignore or just don’t realize or understand.

I don’t claim to be a “creative genius.” But I was not just a highly gifted kid, I was a highly creative kid. I didn’t, of course, know this prior to entering school. I had a vivid and constantly active imagination, but assumed everybody did. School gave me little to do with that imagination, but then it gave me little to do with the rest of my mind, either, so I guess I just didn’t notice.

In the early days school for me was mostly a place where we kids were asked to do things that didn’t make a lot of sense. I remember, for instance, cutting out words from a work book and pasting them under a picture–“apple” got pasted under the picture of an apple, “cat” under the picture of a cat. I couldn’t imagine a reason for doing this, but the teacher wanted us to do it so I did it, along with all the other apparently useless tasks we were given. And I got stars for doing it.

I was a girl from a family where authority counted, and it was the ’40s. I pretty much did what I was told and enjoyed the stars. The stars became S’s (for satisfactory–the only alternative being U’s for unsatisfactory) in grade school and A’s and the occasional B in junior high and high school, then in college and graduate school.

Long after my formal connection with school ended, Jane Piirto asked me to be part of a study she was doing of successful women writers. The participants were asked to fill out questionnaires about their school experiences, and I did that. My answers made it clear that not only had I been an excellent student, but I had pretty much loved school.

Years later, when I had become known as an expert in gifted education, I spoke at a conference in Nebraska that was organized in honor of the 50th anniversary of Leta Hollingworth’s death. During that conference a film about Leta’s life was shown in which a poem of hers was read over suitable nature images–I believe it was titled “The Lone Pine” and she had written it in high school. During the reading of the poem I began to cry. The poem was one I certainly could have written at that age myself, about how hard it was to stand out, to stand alone on the top of the hill taking the brunt of the winds instead of standing safely down on the hillside, sheltered amongst the rest of the forest trees.

By the end of the film I had put myself back together, but during the plane ride home from the conference I found myself crying again. The amount of pain that bubbled up over the rest of that day stunned me. And when I got back to my computer, I spent six full hours writing, retrieving the “real story” of my school experiences from second grade on.

The protective cocoon of repression had broken as I listened to and identified with the feelings behind Leta’s poem, and I gradually came face to face with what school had really been for me. In my own life, it hadn’t been other kids who bullied me–the bullies were defensive teachers who humiliated me, including the sixth grade teacher who arranged for the principal to denounce me as a liar and thief to the whole school over the intercom. I hadn’t managed to repress that singular event–I had just put it down to the teacher’s vindictiveness. But I had genuinely forgotten the others and the pain they caused. The cocoon had been largely constructed of all those stars and good grades, the dutiful accomplishments of a bright kid whose schools and family expected her to follow directions, to achieve and excel. How could I not have loved school when I was so successful at it? When I filled out those questionnaires, I had genuinely believed my answers.

There were bright spots, of course, and a handful of caring, supportive teachers. Luckily, I’d had one brilliant teacher at my highly academic school who taught me English all four years of high school, and gave us wonderful literature to read and had us do free writing known as “journal entries” every single week. Luckily also, the school had a powerful drama club and I’d done theatre as an extracurricular activity throughout.

I majored in creative writing as an undergraduate, writing stories, poetry and plays–and again focused all my non-academic attention on theatre, surviving the “core curriculum” by getting through it as fast as possible and spending most of my time focused on my passions. But as a graduate student I was not allowed to write a creative thesis (the volume of poetry I’d intended) for my Master’s degree and was required to do a work of literary criticism instead. When I read today that Einstein had “found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful” for an entire year after forcing himself through his examinations, I was reminded that my Master’s degree in English Literature very nearly stopped me writing entirely. I have never darkened the door of a school (as a student) again, in spite of pressure to get a doctorate in order to keep a university teaching position.

Over my thirty years in the gifted field I have regularly been called “Dr. Tolan” by people who simply assume that an “expert” must have a doctorate. And there was a time when a competetive colleague suggested that a “mere children’s book writer” could not possibly have the credentials to function in the academic world. I’m not against doctorates–most of my closest friends and colleagues have them–but acquiring one can be harmful to imagination and nearly poisonous to creativity! The words “terminal degree” still make me chuckle. It could have been that in my life!

This post is not meant as a personal complaint. I’ve had a wonderful life doing multiple things I love to do. The main reason for writing here is not because my own creativity was damaged or at least thwarted by school, but because I bought into the education paradigm so thoroughly that I failed to make my own son’s immense creativity the primary focus of our attention when he was growing up. I was seduced by his amazing mind. I wrote about that a bit in my “who/what” post in this blog here. Luckily, he never convinced himself that he loved school, and he wasn’t seduced by the demand for multiple degrees as the only doorway to success or fulfillment.

I was moved to write today because it isn’t only the “creative geniuses” who are hurt by school (and of course because when they’re children we don’t yet know who those geniuses might be.) It’s all the kids whose innate creativity goes unsupported in school.

How many kids are out there with vivid, passionate, creative imaginations and also extremely able intellects, whose “success” in the academic realm (good grades, high achievement) is masking severe malnutrition in schools that don’t make their imaginations a priority and their curiosity an organizing factor in their education? (Especially in this era of high stakes testing!)

How many kids might one day claim as I did (like kidnap victims exhibiting the “Stockholm syndrome”) that they had loved the schools that nearly destroyed the essence of who they were? And how many rebellious, angry kids are that way because such a huge piece of who they are is ignored after kindergarten or first grade, as kids’ stuff?

Einstein said that if we want to raise fine scientists we should read them fairy tales. Given how few schools these days follow that advice, one must hope that computer games are filling some of that need…

Comments 14 Comments
Categories creativity, Education, Emotional/Psychological, Imagination, Schools

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