We pledge to “leave no child behind,” but in American schools today, thousands of gifted and talented students fall short of their potential.
In their best selling book, Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds, Jan and Bob Davidson describe the “quiet crisis” in education: gifted students spending their days in classrooms learning little beyond how to cope with boredom as they “relearn” material they’ve already mastered years before.
There are hundreds of thousands of highly gifted children in the U.S. and millions more whose intelligence is above average, yet few receive the education they deserve. Many school districts have no gifted programs or offer only token enrichment classes.
Education of the gifted is in this sorry state, say the Davidsons, because of indifference, lack of funding, and the pernicious notion that education should have a “leveling” effect, a one-size-fits-all concept that deliberately ignores the needs of the gifted. But all children are entitled to an appropriate education, insist the authors, those left behind as well as those who want to surge ahead. Read the rest of this entry »
