By Clint Von Gundy
In his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” The notion that gifted people are more emotionally fragile, more socially maladjusted, more prone to mental illness, or just generally more miserable than their non-gifted peers–what’s also known as the disharmony hypothesis–is a widespread one, reproduced almost constantly in popular culture and in the attitudes of teachers, parents, clinicians, and even in gifted people themselves (social media has made this worse, by the way). In this formulation, giftedness is a sort of curse; being extremely bright is a kind of tortuous psychological prison. We can identify several archetypes that have become baked into our collective consciousness about gifted people over the years.
I don’t have time to engage in a full on deconstruction of these stereotypes except to say that, while there are certainly real-life traumatized Bostonian math geniuses (Good Will Hunting), “autistic savants” (Rain Man, and too many others to count), child prodigies gone to seed (The Royal Tenenbaums–which I love, actually), and mentally ill and/or consumptive artists (Amadeus–which I also love), they do not represent the general reality of the day to day life of a gifted person in the twenty-first century.
Folks who believe in the disharmony hypothesis are myriad within the gifted education community, and they often openly or tacitly subscribe a definition of giftedness offered by the Columbus Group:
Giftedness is asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony increases with higher intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted renders them particularly vulnerable and requires modifications in parenting, teaching, and counseling in order for them to develop optimally.
But is the disharmony hypothesis true? Is being gifted really a burden? Simply put: probably not, at least at scale. Large meta-studies have routinely shown that being gifted is advantageous in terms of improving life outcomes, and that high ability people, on average, report higher self-esteem and higher self-concept than the rest of the population in general.
Being gifted is a lot like being tall, and the world tends to be more accommodating of tall people overall. Tall people can reach things on the high shelf without the help of a step stool. Tall people might be good at basketball. Tall people are generally even seen as more trustworthy by some strange quirk of evolutionary psychology. American presidents tend to be on the tall side. Tall people make more money.
That’s not to say that being tall is always great, just like being gifted can sometimes cause problems. A tall person may grow annoyed at always being asked to get things off the high shelf, just as gifted children may find themselves constantly having to act as assistant teachers being forced to help peers who are slower to grasp concepts. A tall person may not especially like basketball or feel clumsy because of the length of their limbs just as a gifted child may not actually enjoy learning in their area of strength, or may not be gifted in every area. Flying coach is terrible if you’re a tall person and so is being stuck in an educational environment where you already know most of the material being covered if you’re a gifted child.
If you’re extremely tall, say 6’5” or over, it may be very difficult for you to find the right size of clothes or shoes, just as it may be very difficult for a profoundly gifted child to find the right educational environment. That is all to say that when problems do arise because of a child’s giftedness it often boils down to a mismatch between the child’s intellectual abilities and the learning environment and expectations they find themselves in the midst of.
Yes perfectionism, anxiety, and underachievement can present as issues among the gifted, but they can often be alleviated by a responsive curriculum and instruction that are broad, deep and complex, by appropriately accelerated pacing, and by flexible grouping that allows for interaction with intellectual peers.
So what do gifted children really need?
There’s an old quote from Einstein that goes like this:
“Everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
This is an attractive sentiment for many because of its anti-elitist bent (Everyone is gifted, we just unwrap our gifts at different times! Or, maybe no one is gifted!) and reinforcement of the notion that a large portion of a child’s education should be devoted to talent development, but there are a couple of things we need to understand. First, Einstein never said this. Einstein, alongside Confucius, is probably the greatest victim of misattributed nonsense in the history of the human race.
Second, there are actually several species of fish that can climb trees; the most famous among them is the mudskipper. I’ll give you a moment to image search “mudskipper in tree…”
Good, you’re back!
The mudskipper is a fish like any other in that it needs the same things all fish need: food, water, and other fish to call its friends. In the same way, gifted children are, first and foremost, children. They need food, water, shelter, and the love of friends and family, just like everyone else. How gifted children differ from their peers is not unlike how the mud skipper differs from most other fish.
The mudskipper needs the challenge of a tree to climb, just as gifted children require academic challenge above and beyond the norm.
When it is provided, they tend to thrive. It really is that simple.
Gifted Education Family Network 