August
17, 2005
Thomas Sowell
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Bright children and their parents have
lost a much-needed friend with the recent death of Professor Julian Stanley of
Johns Hopkins University. For decades he not only researched and ran programs
for intellectually gifted students, he became their leading advocate in books
and articles.
His efforts were very much needed.
Unusually bright children are too often treated like stepchildren by the
American educational system.
While all sorts of special classes
and special schools are created for various categories of students, there is
resistance and even hostility to the idea of creating special classes or
schools for intellectually gifted students.
Not only are such elite public
schools as New York's Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of
Science rare, they are under political pressure to admit students on other
bases besides pure academic achievement. So is San Francisco's Lowell High
School, where ethnic "balance" affects admissions decisions.
While it is well known that the
average American student does poorly on international tests, what is not so
well known is that gifted American students lag particularly far behind their
foreign counterparts.
Professor Julian Stanley pointed
out that the performance level of gifted American students "is well below
both the level of their own potential and the achievement levels of previous
U.S. generations." In other words, our brightest kids have been going
downhill even faster than our average kids.
Part of the reason is undoubtedly
the general dumbing down of American education since the 1960s but what has
also been happening since the 1960s has been a preoccupation with the
"self-esteem" of mediocre students and a general hostility to
anything that might be construed as intellectual elitism.
Even classes in so-called
"gifted and talented" programs are too often just more of the same
level of work as other students do, or trendy projects, but not work at a
greater intellectual depth.
Sometimes, as Professor Stanley
has pointed out, it is just busy work, in order to keep bright students from
being bored and restless when classes are being taught at a pace far too slow
for very intelligent youngsters.
It is not at all uncommon for the
brightest students to become problem students in their boredom and frustration,
to develop negative attitudes towards education and society — and to fail to
develop their inborn talents.
Julian Stanley did not just
criticize existing practices. He created special programs for unusually bright
high school students on weekends and during the summer at Johns Hopkins
University. The success of these programs has inspired similar programs at
Purdue University and elsewhere.
Such programs have not only
produced academic benefits, the gifted students in such programs have expressed
an almost pathetic gratitude for finally being in a setting where they are
comfortable with their peers and are viewed positively by their teachers.
In regular public school
classrooms, these gifted students have been too often resented by their
classmates and their teachers alike. Some teachers have seemed glad to be able
to catch them in occasional mistakes.
Given the low academic records of
most public school teachers, it is hard to imagine their being enthusiastic
about kids so obviously brighter than they were — and often brighter than they
are. No small part of the gross neglect of gifted students in our public
schools is the old story of the dog in the manger.
Julian Stanley made a unique
contribution to the development of gifted children, both directly through his
program at Johns Hopkins and indirectly through his research and advocacy.
Fortunately, he is survived by collaborators in these efforts, such as
Professors Camilla Persson Benbow and David Lubinski of Vanderbilt University.
The effort must go on, both to
stop the great waste of gifted students, whose talents are much needed in the
larger society, and for the humane purpose of relieving the frustration and
alienation of youngsters whose only crime is being born with more intellectual
potential than most of those around them.