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Gifted Children: Their Promise and Problems
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12219 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
5,437 Words |
| Author
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Steve Kaplan
Steve Kaplan is a widely published free-lance writer living in
St. Paul, Minnesota, who is also a contributing editor of St.
Paul Magazine. |
John Stuart Mill spoke fluent Greek when he was three years old, Mozart composed minuets at five, and Ethan Tsai looked up animal phyla in the encyclopedia before he entered kindergarten. Ethan, now a fourth grader in a St. Paul, Minnesota, target school for gifted children, may not be a child prodigy on the same order as Mill and Mozart, but he is undoubtedly facing many of the same problems as they. Ethan is a gifted child, one of the approximately 5 percent of children presently in school that have special talents and intellectual abilities.
Gifted students have special needs and special problems over and above the ordinary demands of childhood. Because they tend to become bored with classes that move too slowly for them, many gifted students develop behavioral problems in school. An unbelievable 30 percent of school dropouts are gifted children. It is estimated that 80 percent of the intellectually gifted in America have no chance to receive special training in those areas in which they excel.
Stories of bright children gone wrong are part of American folklore. Gerard Darrow, for example, was a radio star on Quiz Kids who appeared on the cover of Life magazine at age nine, yet later became an alcoholic. Harvard's celebrated math prodigy, William James Sidis - who wrote his first treatise on anatomy at the age of five, and by six was speaking seven languages fluently - devoted most of his life to collecting streetcar transfers from all over the world, after entering Harvard at the age of 11.
Gifted and talented girls have faced even greater problems than their male counterparts. The American educational system has traditionally
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