Gifted Education Is Not a Wall Street Bailout

“Unfair.”

That is the word that I have often heard used to describe the 2008 bailout of Wall Street finan­cial firms. The think­ing of detrac­tors is that these are com­pa­nies which already have amassed obscene amounts of prof­its, and have exec­u­tives who get paid more in a day than the aver­age worker earns in a year. And then they have the nerve to run to the gov­ern­ment for free cash when some of their high risk gam­bles turn out to be—surprise—unwise and they are in dan­ger of mak­ing a smaller profit than they hoped.

Sup­port­ers of the bailout, of course, argue that it was a cri­sis sit­u­a­tion, and that they were “too big to fail.” They say the con­se­quences of allow­ing all of those firms to fail would have been cat­a­strophic, rip­pling down to thou­sands of small busi­nesses that depended on the big ones for financ­ing and insur­ance, poten­tially caus­ing the whole econ­omy to collapse.

I’m not here to argue either side of this par­tic­u­lar debate, but it strikes me that the tone is not far removed from the con­ver­sa­tions I hear around gifted education.

While no one argues that we shouldn’t edu­cate gifted students—that would be an awfully rad­i­cal posi­tion to take—I do hear peo­ple argue that we should not be doing any­thing “spe­cial” just for gifted stu­dents. After all, they already have had so much handed to them, they are already priv­i­leged to be smart, and now we are going to give them even more? It’s the bailout all over again.

The counter to this is usu­ally some­thing along the lines of argu­ing that gifted stu­dents are the future lead­ers and inven­tors and job-​​creators, so to do any­thing short of max­i­miz­ing their poten­tial is to short­change our entire soci­ety. In short, they say, gifted kids are too big to fail.

This is the wrong argu­ment, how­ever. For one thing, under­ly­ing the debate is the assump­tion that gifted stu­dents are supe­rior to other chil­dren in some way, which log­i­cally implies that other chil­dren are infe­rior. The argu­ment that gifted stu­dents are des­tined for great­ness pre­sumes that such great­ness will elude all other chil­dren. I do not believe this.

What I do believe is that dif­fer­ent peo­ple learn dif­fer­ently. Some peo­ple have a capac­ity for learn­ing more and faster than oth­ers. This is not an elit­ist thing. It is sim­ply a recog­ni­tion of the vari­a­tions in human beings. Just as some peo­ple have a nat­ural capac­ity for sports or music, oth­ers have a tal­ent for math or lan­guage or under­stand­ing human relationships.

These capac­i­ties do not develop on their own. Pey­ton Man­ning has an unde­ni­able tal­ent for foot­ball, but he did not reach the high­est lev­els of the sport by coast­ing on that tal­ent. He works very hard to hone his skills, to iden­tify his rel­a­tive weak­nesses and improve them, and to keep his nat­ural abil­i­ties at the absolute peak of performance.

Edu­ca­tion is not a zero-​​sum game. Pro­vid­ing some­thing to one group of stu­dents which helps them to grow does not some­how deny it to another group, unless you explic­itly build it that way. Rec­og­niz­ing high abil­ity and nur­tur­ing it does not mean that we ignore the needs of stu­dents who strug­gle to learn.
Instead of a bailout metaphor, then, I sug­gest that gifted edu­ca­tion is more like infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment. The growth of our country’s econ­omy is depen­dent on hav­ing suf­fi­cient infra­struc­ture to allow it to func­tion. Roads, bridges, util­i­ties, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems aren’t sexy, but they allow us access to peo­ple, resources, and ideas out­side of our imme­di­ate neighborhood.

Every child has the poten­tial to become an adult with some­thing valu­able to con­tribute to our world. Each one’s con­tri­bu­tion will be dif­fer­ent, how­ever. I do not pro­pose we should begin try­ing to iden­tify in sec­ond or third grade what a child’s des­tiny is; how­ever, we should begin try­ing to iden­tify what a child’s capac­i­ties are and to find out how they learn best. Is that not what school is about any­way? And if a child learns more effi­ciently, then pro­vid­ing that child with the right match of con­tent and instruc­tion to allow them to develop fully is not giv­ing a hand­out to a rich CEO, it is rec­og­niz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties in an untapped region and build­ing the infra­struc­ture there to allow it to fully develop.

And here is the really excit­ing part about it. If we shift our focus from “what’s best for all” to “what’s best for each,” then it will ben­e­fit not only gifted stu­dents, but every stu­dent, and the out­come can only be good.