“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.

Damian Bariexca (@damian613) brings us the seventh in what is now an ongoing series of posts on the future of gifted education. Damian brings a unique perspective to this conversation from his experience as both a school psychologist and high school English teacher in New Jersey. This article is cross-posted at Damian’s blog, Apace of Change.

I’m a school psychologist, so my professional life is a minefield of labels and acronyms — FAPE, IEP, SLD, OHI, IDEA, PLAAPF, ICS, FBA, “gen ed >80%”, “gen ed 40%-80%”, “gifted”, “learning disabled”, etc. While labels like these are the reality for now, I have a vision of education in the 21st century that reduces or possibly even eliminates the need for these labels. Although my professional focus is on students with learning disabilities (giftedness is not a special ed classification in NJ), I believe that LD and giftedness fall under the same umbrella in that they represent atypical learning styles and abilities, and must both be accommodated accordingly.

My issue with labels stems, in large part, from my own childhood, when I was identified as a “gifted” child in grade 3. I remained in my district’s pull-out “Gifted & Talented” program through grade 8, when the program ended. While I did enjoy getting to leave class to work on more challenging projects, there were the constant comments of “there goes the nerd herd”, etc., whenever my classmates and I would leave. A friend of mine was recommended to the G&T program in 6th grade but declined; when I asked him why, he said, “Because everyone will think I’m a nerd like you guys!” At age 11, that cut me to the quick, and it’s awfully telling that I can remember that conversation and his response verbatim over two decades after the fact.

From early on, my “giftedness”* was a double-edged sword: it was seen as desirable in terms of school (was it a competition that I was “winning”?), but socially it became an albatross around my neck. I’ll spare you the tortured self-analysis, but suffice to say I’ve thought a lot about it over the years and have drawn some pretty solid conclusions that are probably better discussed over some beers than in a blog post. While I don’t think this is the only issue, consider, for instance, the physical removal from the general classroom: if my academic needs could have been met through in-class differentiation, perhaps that stigma would not have been so significant (and perhaps my friend would have gotten the challenging curriculum he deserved).

But forget about the academic implications for a minute; labels and categorization are detrimental to our students as people. They overwhelmingly inform students’ sense of self and their relation to others; they pigeonhole, they segregate, and they ultimately do more harm than good. Even when those labels are more socially desired, like “gifted”, I feel it’s still kind of like saying, “but saying all Asians are good at math is a good stereotype!”

My vision for gifted education in the 21st century is much the same as my vision for special education in the 21st century, which also happens to be similar to my vision of general education for the 21st century: to reimagine not only the curriculum, but also the physical and geographic elements of our schools. I wrote about this a few months ago, but to briefly re-cap: rethink the necessity of the 7.5 hour, Monday-Friday school day, rethink the role of the instructor as deliverer of content, and rethink the role of the student in terms of steering their learning in ways other than choosing a few electives each year once they’re in high school. My hope is that individualizing students’ formal educational experience as much as possible will reduce the need for labels such as the ones I describe above, either by allowing a wider variety of needs to be met within the traditional classroom, or by eliminating the traditional classroom completely.

In the initial email Gerald sent me to invite me to write this post, he indicated when he unveiled his new mission statement for his district’s gifted education program, “In among the many positive and encouraging responses, a few people commented that, while the statements were nice, aren’t these things we should be doing with every student?” Indeed, none of what I’m putting forth in this blog post is revolutionary; Vygotsky, Piaget, and Dewey laid the groundwork for this type of thinking a long time ago. Despite, or perhaps especially in light of, that fact, the question remains: why are we not doing this for all our students? Are the roadblocks physical, philosophical, geographic, financial, or other?

*Yes, I’m probably considered “smart” or “bright” by most academic measures, but consider: doing simple mental math is very difficult for me, I still take pause to consider my left from my right (bonus fun fact: up until my mid-twenties or so, I relied on a trick I devised when I was about 5 and owned shoes that had Winnie the Pooh on one sole and Tigger on the other), I must write down everything I need to do or it won’t get done, I can’t change the oil in my car, and the most basic of household handiwork tends to flummox me. Who’s gifted now?

We read The Little Prince and did science experiments outside. I remember writing poetry and creating a bound book. However, the thing that I remember most about that year was the transition back into the regular classroom at the end of the gifted program’s day. It was a strange sensation, going back into a room where a community of learners was being built without me, yet where I was expected to fit in. I often wonder what those students thought about those of us who left the classroom at 9am every morning and returned just before lunch.

Although I now homeschool my own children, I taught for almost a decade in the classroom. I got to see how gifted education has changed and how many times, being labeled as gifted was as damaging to a child as any other label. Now some may argue that a gifted label is a blessing or a boon, because it propels a child forward on a path of so called challenging education. I disagree. I think labeling and pulling a child to a gifted class hurts not only them, but the rest of the students in the classroom.

Imagine for a moment that you are ten years old. You are sitting in your fourth grade classroom and suddenly, the child at the desk next to you stands up and leaves the room to go to a special class. A class that you cannot go to. Why? Because you are not smart enough. Now, pretend that you are the child leaving. Everyone knows where you are going and why. Is it an awkward, uncomfortable feeling? Of course it is.

Instead of raising the expectations for all students, gifted education has suggested that the expectations should be lower for some students than they are for others. What does that say to the child who does not go to the gifted class about his potential? Should that influence how the gifted child is educated? I think it should.

Now, understand that I am not suggesting that a gifted child should not be challenged simply because his peers might feel bad. I am suggesting that gifted education move toward a place where all students are given the opportunity to excel within the regular classroom. I am suggesting that we raise the bar for everyone, not just those who have “gifted” stamped on their IEPs.

In Jerry Blumengarten’s article in this series on The Future of Gifted Education, he suggests that real life experiences are more valuable to the field of gifted education than traditional lessons. While I would agree with his statement, I also disagree that this is a method that should be used solely for gifted students. If an internship or a web project challenges and enhances the learning of a gifted student, will it not also do the same for a student without that label?

What would happen if we labeled all of our students as gifted? What would happen if we challenged them all in the same way as we do our gifted students now? While I cannot see the future of gifted education taking this path, I cannot help but feel that we are doing a disservice to all of our students when we do not challenge them in the same way and give them the opportunities that we now reserve only for gifted students.

Since then I’ve observed gifted education and its students, but always as someone at least one step removed from the process. I’ve been consulted on student selection for such programs, served as an educational leader in schools that had such programs, and watched as various nephews and nieces had the experience I missed. So, I only offer the following thoughts as an observer. There is no research base for my thoughts; they are merely a combination of what I’ve seen and what I know.

Have you ever looked beneath the bridge that carries you across the canyons in your commute? Sure, the elevated roadway is what you rely on to get from Point A to Point B, but under that roadway is a carefully constructed cacophony of support. Girders and struts make the main thing, the roadway across, possible.

Learning is like that; it has its own cacophony of supporting pillars. Of these, one that can be easily overlooked with gifted students is self-regulation. Self-regulation is the ability to consciously suppress or delay responses in order to work for a higher goal. (You’ve probably heard of the famous “marshmallow test.” Here are some of its subjects in action during a recent replication of the original study.)

If there is anything often (but, importantly, not always!) lacking in the gifted students I’ve observed, it’s a lack of self-regulation, specifically the ability to persevere when encountering challenge. For example, several years ago I led the development of an instructional reading program. The program emphasized thinking as the means to comprehension and trained students in various skills related to cognition. As schools implemented this program, I began receiving interesting phone calls and emails. “We love the new program and our usually struggling students are excelling,” the messages began. “But we’re concerned about our gifted students. They seem disoriented by the program’s emphasis on deep thought rather than the typically easy answers. In fact, many of them are earning grades lower than an A for the first time in their lives.”

As the year progressed, these schools saw these students rise to the challenge, but not until the students recognized that greater thinking, and therefore effort, was expected. The students were not singled out; they were failing to meet the expectations of the regular classroom because the challenge increased, and many were not accustomed to having to work to learn.

No one is born knowing everything, though sometimes it can seem that way with gifted students. Learning always requires effort. What often distinguishes gifted students is the ease with which they appear to learn in the typical school structure. If they are not challenged at a level that requires effort, they can develop misconceptions about intelligence, and they can fail to develop critical self-regulation capacities.

Self-regulation is much like a muscle. It can be developed and strengthened. By engaging students in activities that require delayed gratification or perseverance, we provide a self-regulation workout. Just like exercising yields slow but steady results, gradually increasing the amount of self-regulation required for tasks slowly builds capacity. It is just such experiences that gifted students often lack due to their remarkable abilities.

I was recently talking to a student who is currently participating in his school’s gifted program. We were discussing how easy school was for him, and I asked him if he thought there were any drawbacks to almost effortless learning. “Yes,” he remarked. “I’m pretty good at running 50-yard dashes, but I don’t have the perseverance to run something like cross country.” From the mouths of perceptive gifted students…

All students need to develop supporting capacities, such as self-regulation. Without it, even gifted students will never reach their potential—a real loss because the solutions to many problems lie beyond the 50-yard finish line.

When Gerald asked me to guest blog, he posed the question, “How are we going to meet the needs of the gifted population as we continue moving into the twenty-first century?” My initial response was that we need to be changing the way we deliver instruction for all kids in much the same way. I told this to Gerald and he said I needed to think it through more thoroughly. So I did, and the truth of the matter is, I really don’t know. There are a couple of things, however that I am fairly certain of.

I believe the answer lies somewhere within the concept of Connectivism. New technology, to me, is not about the machines, the applications, or the search engines; but about its ability to connect us to others. Most experts I have read talk about the importance of grouping gifted students as a means of providing them with increased learning opportunities. They also talk about connecting gifted students to experts in their fields of interest. Not only do current technologies increase our capacity to connect gifted students to one another, but they increase our capacity to connect our students to other great teachers and experts in a variety of fields. I believe I have begun doing this on a small scale and I believe my job is to continue to try and increase the scale at which I connect my students with each other, to other great teachers, and to experts in a variety of occupational fields.

The second thing I began thinking about last night is sometimes it seems in education we focus more on what we need to be doing differently instead of what we are already doing right. I believe most teachers really want to do what is right for kids, but every year, no matter what happened in the previous year, it seems it has never been enough for some people, usually people who haven’t been in the classroom since last century. So, teachers who are reading this: you did a great job last year, and keep up the good work. I am certain that in some way, you touched a kid’s life.

Finally, I love connectivism and having a PLN. I connect to my PLN in a variety of places including twitter, blogs I read, and second life, among others. I believe that without it (my PLN), I would be lost and extremely unsure of how to approach issues like the one that Gerald asked me to guest blog about. I think it is important to continue looking at and discussing how we can improve the way we deliver instruction to our students. Having a strong PLN and a willingness to be a little reflective gives us the ability to accomplish that very important goal.

One of the greatest learning experiences that my son had was while working on his Westinghouse Science (now Intel) project. He had the opportunity to work directly with scientists once a week at a Science Institute. I did not mind carpooling until he got his license, because I saw the great value in this connection between students and specialists working in the real world. Local businesses and medical facilities could provide students with hands-on training and internships and the professionals there could act as mentors. On a Middle School level, my school had a Health Careers Program that gave our students a wonderful opportunity to do community service while learning along with medical and support staff in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and senior centers.

We should be taking this same approach with our gifted students. We can easily accomplish this with the plethora of great web tools and our ability to connect with Skype, etc. Distance learning has to be revived with the latest tech tools. We should also be making better associations with higher education institutions. Provisions can be established for gifted high school students to earn college credits with colleges. We have to do more to join our students with experts outside the traditional classroom walls. I can envision Elluminate sessions with experts in a wide range of fields addressing and answering questions from students. This should be standard procedure in classes. It would also be nice to have students shadow professionals in different fields We also have to examine how individual students learn best. Some need structured learning environments where others need less structured learning experiences.

All preservice, graduate and leadership education programs should include specialized training for teaching and mentoring gifted learners. Emphasis should be focused on differentiated education of gifted learners

Teachers must also reach out to local museums. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example, has the Wachovia Education Resources Center that helps teachers use art and art images to enhance lessons in core curricular areas. The Exploratorium in San Francisco provides tools to make your work easier and more enriching, including things to do at the museum, hands-on activities, and a wealth of Web features about important science topics. Each year more than 10,000 educators take advantage of The Field Museum’s resources for professional development.

Reflecting on my own education I felt that the best classes I had on the undergraduate and graduate levels were ones that were taught by people who actually worked in that field or were called in as experts.

I feel that there has to be a strong commitment to gifted programs, the ongoing training of gifted teachers as well as all school staff members, and follow-up research on children who have gone through these programs. Counseling and guidance services must be provided on a continuous basis for gifted students.

More support services not only for the children but their parents to help them deal with their children are also needed. Every school district should have a gifted education school committee.

Much should be done to improve the delivery of education for our gifted students to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

[Please check out Jerry’s Gifted and Talented page: http://cybraryman.com/gifted.html]

What excites me about the shift in education away from the classroom-centric model we have all been a part of over the last century, is the fact that students are less dependent upon the teacher and/or the system for all knowledge.  Students no longer have to attend school to attain their knowledge, they are as Nagel describes, “free agent learners”.

Because of that, students have the opportunity to break from the long-standing categories we so often use in education.  Terms such as “slow learner”, “hands on learner”, “troubled student”, “active student”, “solid student”, “middle-of-the-road student”, “talented student”, “straight A student” and yes “gifted student” are simply constructs of our educational system and they most often only provide clues as to how the student learns within the narrow confines of that system. The “straight A” student may be intelligent, but I’ll bet they are also also very compliant and diligent in getting their homework done and being attentive in class.  They are very good at playing the part of the industrial model school student that the “conspiracy” of school was intended to create but are they good at solving problems, being creative, unlearning that which they have previously learned so they can be relevant?  Do we really challenge these students to use their gifts to their fullest potential or do we simply moved them along the conveyor belt, sending them off to college with the tools to continue to be “good” students?

The “active” student is one that doesn’t fit our system well, yet fits in the world’s chaotic and unpredictable system very nicely.   To make that student fit within our educational model, we drug, punish, and belittle the student until they either comply to a degree in which they can be tolerated, or are pushed out of our system all together.  The real shame here is that many times there is an assumption that these students are not gifted, when in fact they are, they simply don’t play the game by the industrial model rules that were established a century ago.  Our choice has been to change the student to fit the model instead of changing the model to fit the student and by doing so, we have missed an opportunity with a whole bunch of gifted students.

How often do we work to control our students?  Think of that student who challenges our systems.  Think about your reaction to that student.  Now think about your reaction to that student when you know they are right and our system in wrong.  Unfortunately, most of us squelch that student and often without a true explanation as to why.  We say that it is, “complicated” or “for their own good” or “they will understand when they are older”, instead of embracing those students, their ideas and their input.  Instead of acknowledging that they are rightfully challenging the way we educating them because our system is not working for them and they want it to.  Their “challenges” are pleas for help, not the acts of betrayal we so often portray them to be.

My point here is that we have so narrowly defined what it means to be “gifted” in our system of education, that we fail to either see the gifts within each student, or we fail to push students beyond the model we have been a part of for so long.  I fear that as long as we define “school” and “learning” so narrowly, we will continue to miss the the opportunity to cultivate the gifted student found in all students.  As long as we continue to define what it means to be “gifted” by the system which so narrowly defines how we learn, we will not truly find each of our students’ gifts.  It is why this shift toward free agent learning, with the categorical freedoms and the power to self-define our gifts, is so intriguing.

What I want to express in this blog post is not anything new or innovative. It is nothing that hasn’t been said before.  However, it is something that’s been mulling about in my brain while I was drinking my morning coffee and watching the Twitter stream from the Discovery Educators Network Leadership Council Symposium.

A video kept getting re-tweeted in the stream so I figured I’d better check it out.

You can watch the 2 minute video, Microsoft Labs 2019 Vision:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQdGvfV4WnU

As soon as it started I felt like I was watching a car commercial. It was flashy, well-produced and fast-paced. I honestly was not that impressed. I guess what people felt was that it was a window into what the future holds for technology and digital devices.

That I won’t deny.

The name on the video is “Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision Montage.” This is the vision that Microsoft has for our future.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Many things.

For one, why are we letting Microsoft dictate what the future of digital life will look like? We could make the same statement about Apple or Sony or any other companies who manufacture digital products.  Many of these companies do use customer input and feedback to improve their products, but in reality we are all consumers of what these companies feed us.

What does this mean for education? It means that we need to be putting our students to the task of deciding what THEY want their future to look like. We live in a time unlike any other in history. Our natural resources are disappearing, we have devices that are more powerful than ever before and we have tools that allow us to connect with people thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds.

Companies like Microsoft are not in the business of planning for the future of our children as members of society or for the future of our global community. We must empower our students with that charge. It is they who will inhabit the future. We must also ensure that we empower ALL students to take part in the building of future society, not just the ones who are privileged and can afford it.

There are many obstacles to overcome when we begin to ask our students to solve real world problems. Solutions to real world problems don’t fit on a standardized test. Solutions to real world problems take time to understand and even more time to solve. Solutions to real world problems require a restructuring of school as we know it.

I have been having various conversations (and sometimes debates) about what it means to be a teacher and a learner in the 21st Century. Some of the conversation has been focused around guiding students to understanding rather than delivering content, creating learning environments where learning is a connected and social experience, and infusing technology into learning when it can transform the learning experience.  The world our students will inhabit will require them to collaborate with peers, understand social media tools and be problem solvers within their own communities and the larger world.  We need to prepare them for that world.

Schools need to allow for tinkering. Tinkering with ideas, tinkering with materials, tinkering with students’ perceived limitations. Tinkering teaches children how to learn from failure. Tinkering teaches children how to think about a problem or a project from many perspectives. Tinkering allows children to build self esteem and feel pride in what they do. Students who tinker are the students who build our future.

Some examples of what I’m talking about:

• The Tinkering School teaches children how to build and guide their own learning. While it is not a true ‘school’ it is a model that could be replicated on a smaller scale within the school curriculum. (Listen to the founder’s TED talk here.)
• Philadelphia High School Students Design the Car of the Future
• Project Based Learning motivates students to solve real world problems–Edutopia article
• Sylvia Martinez writes extensively about tinkering on her blog, GenYES

There are those who will look at these words as a ‘pipe dream,’ ‘utopia’ or ‘fairytale.’  To them I would argue that we must have a Vision. If Microsoft can construct a vision of what it thinks the world will look like in 2019 then we as educators, parents, community members, lawmakers and general stakeholders in the world need to have a vision, too. Even more importantly, we need to let our children begin to build their own vision for their own future and give them skills to make it real.

Gifted education has been around for over a century. Researchers have studied what it means to be gifted, and what are the best methods for educating the gifted. It has been an uphill journey for many reasons. A great number of people believe that there is no need to provide gifted education, that it is elitist and unfair, and that gifted kids will do fine anyway, so why waste energy and resources on special programs for them?

It is not my purpose today to engage in this debate. But I keep coming back to a comment that was made to me recently in connection with a project I’m doing at work. My district is in the midst of a comprehensive review and analysis of our gifted program. As part of that review, we have created a new vision and mission statement for the gifted program. (For the curious among you, it is posted here)

I shared the draft of that document with my administration, then unveiled it publicly for the first time at a school board meeting. In among the many positive and encouraging responses, a few people commented that, while the statements were nice, aren’t these things we should be doing with every student?

This echoes similar sentiments I’ve heard for as long as I’ve been teaching. Of course the answer is yes; though the emphasis for the general education curriculum and program will be on different kinds of things, the “stuff” that for so long was the core of gifted education has become part of the mainstream 21st century emphasis.

It got me thinking about what gifted education should look like in today’s schools. Is it still necessary in an age when high level thinking and problem solving, collaboration, technology, differentiation, and inclusion are growing in their importance and reach in our schools? I believe it is, but my thoughts are continuing to evolve about what it should do and how.

So what should gifted education be in the 21st century? I don’t know. Yet. But I’ve invited a collection of people who have had a tremendous influence on my learning and thinking to help me answer that question. Over the next several weeks, eleven people who I consider colleagues and friends will be guests on this blog, wrestling with that very question. I am looking forward to reading what they have to say. I hope you are too.

Posts in this series:

Empowering the Future, by Mary Beth Hertz
What Does It Mean to Be Gifted Now? by Tony Baldasero
The Future of Gifted Education, by Jerry Blumengarten
I Don’t Know, by Jeff Agamenoni
Gifted but Lacking?, by Kevin Washburn
What If Every Child Was Gifted?, by Brandi Jordan
Gifted Education in the 21st Century, by Damian Bariexca

Earlier today, Tony Baldasero posted this:

As his posts tend to do, it got me thinking about what I’ve learned from the show, not about history, but about teaching and learning.

For those readers who haven’t seen Pawn Stars, it’s a reality show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas. In each episode, customers bring in various objects they want to pawn or sell. The shop owners have to appraise the value, negotiate, and sometimes spot the fakes among the real items.

At first blush it seems like an odd fit for the History Channel. But the items that people bring in are such things as antique firearms, historical documents, sports memorabilia, even Jimmy Hoffa’s photo album (in the Backroom Brawl episode). As the series star and store owner Rick Harrison says, “Everything has a story.”

The stars of the show are a collection of not-so-sophisticated guys who are more likely to trade an item for a new tattoo than to appreciate the cultural significance of a native artifact.

But there is no denying that these guys know their stuff. Rick, his dad (the “Old Man”), and his son “Hoss” all have a depth of knowledge about history and antique objects that never ceases to fascinate me. In one episode, a customer walked into the shop with what looked like a rusty hunk of metal, and Rick immediately identified it as a set of 19th century Froggatt Plug 8 handcuffs.

A few semi-random thoughts that came to mind as I considered the show:

1. Learning is not the same as academics. Rick Harrison dropped out of high school in tenth grade, but he probably knows more about history than most college graduates. Rick has obviously learned an incredible amount in the years he has been in business. He works in a particularly unforgiving field, too—if he’s wrong about an object or its origin and pays more than it’s worth, no one is going to buy it from him out of pity. He’s out of luck. The only way to be a success in his business in the long term is to know what you’re doing.
2. You can’t know it all. Despite the extensive knowledge and expertise of the pawn shop staff, they don’t pretend to know everything. When an item comes in that Rick questions, he calls in a specialist. He has a collection of experts who he asks to examine items and verify their authenticity. He’s not afraid to tell a customer, “I have no idea if this is real or what it might be worth.”
3. There is no “proper” expression of an intellectual gift. Some might say that the Harrison family’s talent is “wasted” in such a low class operation as the pawn business. But who are we to judge the value that this shop and its owners contribute to the community or society? Who or what determines if someone is a success, or is achieving at his or her potential? Rick seems to love what he does, and he is good at his chosen profession. If we have a student who is a talented writer, who’s to say that we have to guide that writer to producing “great literature?” What if his or her passion is to write slapstick cartoons? Isn’t South Park just as valid an expression of writing talent as Mansfield Park?

I believe we spend a lot of time in education trying to cram students into the molds we have predetermined are best for them. While we do have an obligation to take raw talent and shape it, perhaps we need to look at it the way Michelangelo looked at sculpture: