Highly gifted Imagine a child entering 4yo kindergarten. She taught herself to read when she was two and a half, and she walks into her ‘meet the teacher’ interview with a copy of The Boxcar Children under her arm. She is very excited about beginning school as she fully expects that it will be some kind of 'career training institute'. She wants to be both a paleontologist and a deep_sea diver. She has worked out her weekly schedule (including time to be a mother, as well as a career woman), and she is sure that school will give her the tools and knowledge she needs to succeed. The first week brings several rude surprises. The other children don't want to be 'bosom buddies'; they don't even know what a bosom buddy is. Some of them just stare at her blankly when she talks to them. She tries writing secret notes to the girl she particularly likes, and is crushed to find out that her new friend can't read. She cries all afternoon. What's the point of a secret note, if you have to show it to an adult to find out what it says? By the first teacher's conference, her mother is being informed that this child is 'a challenge'. She talks too much. She asks too many questions. She cries over dead bugs and uprooted flowers. She's too sensitive, by far. This child is highly gifted, she might be profoundly gifted, but we don't know. The IQ test she took doesn't measure that high. She's also my daughter. We will have to make some very difficult decisions when she approaches first grade, and full time school. Kindergarten is workable right now because it is only a few hours out of her day. When she comes home she 'home schools'. She reads voraciously in the areas of Science and History, she's learning to touch-type with a computer program, and she’s independently researching, writing and illustrating a picture book on the History of the Earth. She also takes classes in gymnastics and swimming. She used to enjoy visiting the park, but since she started school all she wants to do when she gets home is bury her nose in her books. She told me rather sadly the other day that she doesn't think she's learned anything at all in school this year. But we can't skip her into a higher grade yet, because she's still a very young child with immature motor skills, small attention span, and a limited ability to deal with frustration. The right program for her would be entirely unsuitable for most ordinary children, even for most bright and gifted children. Imagine a kindergarten reading and discussion group based around Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. Imagine kindergarteners working on volume and area, plotting the geometry of triangles, doing addition, subtraction, and multiplication in their heads. Imagine kindergarteners investigating drought in Africa, and the internal structure of a cell. This sort of program, if it existed anywhere, would hardly threaten the education of the rest of the children in the school system. It takes nothing away from them, and would be completely inappropriate for the vast majority of them. There are so few profoundly gifted children (though I believe that they are more numerous than Ellen Winner's book says), that they would have to be bussed from all across the region to fill one small classroom. Even in these days of Special Education cutbacks, that would not be likely to break the school board's budget. In the long run, remaining in a regular classroom is unlikely to be a good solution for my daughter. Her teacher can hardly be expected to individualize a program just for one child, when she has 25 other children with special needs of their own. I've seen how hard she works; she's a very good teacher. It's just impossible to adapt the curriculum that much. Home schooling full time may very well be in our future. Many, possibly even most, families with highly gifted children end up home schooling them at some point in their school career. And that's fine. I look forward to the challenge with real pleasure. But, even though all children ARE gifted (and who could disagree with that statement?), highly and profoundly gifted children DO have very real, very different, educational needs. Perfectionism can paralyse them. They are at a significant risk of becoming underachievers. They may suffer from depression. They are often victimized in schools by peers and teachers. And they are disproportionately likely to drop out. It is not elitism to ask that their needs be accommodated!