The idea of giftedness – possessing outstanding talent or intelligence at a young age – is, and always has been, controversial. Parents, teachers and psychologists have long argued over the nature of childhood precocity and whether labelling it does more harm than good. Many worry that designating children as gifted places undue pressure on them to succeed, setting them up for unbalanced and unhappy lives.
Yeah, my experience is that is just leads to endless Imposter Syndrome and a huge amount of depression because you watch 90% of the world fail at the most basic tasks and turn everything to shit.
Kids who are praised for their intelligence solving math problems do worse in the long run, because if they fail at something, they think it means they’re stupid. They stop taking risks and they’re plagued by anxiety.
Kids who are praised for working hard on math problems do much better, because they know they can solve anything with enough time, and their entire social and self worth isn’t on the line with every problem.
Ditto musical talent.
Believing deeply in the inevitability of in-born traits can be absolutely debilitating.
“Far from growing into troubled adults, many gifted individuals appear to flourish later in life. Long-term studies suggest they are more likely than average to achieve professional success and, contrary to popular stereotypes, often enjoy better mental health.”
I was a “gifted” child and am solidly in the blue zone. But I’m not surprised that this isn’t true for everyone.
Former “gifted” kid, turns out when you’re gifted and have AuDHD, people treat you like shit. So you end up a depressed adult with missed potential.
high-gifted-five!
we should make a club or something.
Fully ignored because shit head kids got all the attention, high five!
Yup 🙃
Gifted children turn out to be astoundingly mediocre-to-bad in a lot of things. It’s me, I’m gifted children.
whats gifted? I was in accelerated classes and regular ones and got some ap credit. If I was in a regular class I tended to do A/B and in accelerated I was B/C. That was high school though. My catholic grade school did not have sperate classes as the classes were way to small to begin with.
Gifted was always just a proxy for wealth. The article never mentions economic circumstances but it does manage to take a swing and mischaracterize Zohran Mamdani randomly.
I grew up poor as ahit and i was labeled gifted, not sure what you mean by proxy for wealth.
When it’s used as a proxy, an average kid of wealth could find themselves in a gifted program usually due to the motivations of their parents.
In private school circuits it was used to isolate kids from other kids, often along a specific line that was not academic. (Race.)
Well at least in NYC in the 90s it did not work like that at all.
I am glad it wasn’t the case in your situation. But it wasn’t necessarily a universal thing either, which I think works both ways here.
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/metro-learning/spoils-whiteness-2019
It even references ACORN studies from the 90s that were able to identify it.
Well im not glad, i wish i was labeled gifted because of my parents wealth lmao
No, it’s very complicated, im hispanic and i clearly remember how asian students were like 90% of my classmates, but even as a child i always felt it was fair. Those asian kids a lot of them were from very popr households and they got good at math because their parents stood over them while they did practice problems.
Math is math, if you want to get into Stuyvesamt you need to do math better than the other kids. The answer was never to massage the results of the tests, the answer is to invest more in those elementary schools in poor neighborhoods so theyre prepared to handle advanced classes in high school.
How does it mischaracterize him? It doesn’t talk about his character at all.
The statement about overhauling the system is portrayed in the same light as the UK scrapping the programs.
Mamdani’s statements were about overhauling how students were separated from their peers under 3rd grade. Whereas the UK was facing backlash over Labour proposing to tax private schools.
The Fox News pundit angle has been to link them together as identical and interchangeable.
They’re mentioned close to each other, but I don’t see the connection at all when they use the different words “overhauling” for NY and “scrapping” for the UK programs.
Then perhaps the whole brouhaha over those two topics was just coincidence. I only noted it since it was the direct comparison being made in the Murdoch pundit world when it was doing the rounds a few months back, so it stood out that they’re in this article as an example.
Ah, that’s fair. It was my first time hearing about the changes to those programs so I didn’t think they were similar.
It’s one of those things where it’s really weird seeing the news feeds bleeding into stories that are likely just trying to be relevant to the algorithm.
