"I have no statistics on the percentage of gifted children who are raised in homes where they have been constantly praised for being smart and at the same time have not been strenuously challenged academically. It should go without saying that this description does not fit all gifted children or perhaps even most. But it corresponds with the milieu in which many gifted children grow up, with the observed behavior of many gifted children in college, and with the current state of knowledge about the effects of praise.
There is a healthier alternative - healthier for gifted children and
for the society that some of them will run as adults. Since they are in
fact academically gifted, it is fine to tell them that. Trying to hide
their academic ability from them would be futile anyway. But they
must also be told explicitly, forcefully, and repeatedly that their intellectual
talent is a gift that they have done nothing to deserve. They
are not superior human beings, but very, very lucky ones. They
should feel humbled by their good luck.
At that point, praising them for actual accomplishment produced
by hard work does no harm. But even then, we know from our own
experience that the mentors who made a difference in our lives were
seldom the ones who praised us effusively but those who demanded
our best. At the end of it all, the praise may have been no more than
the mentor looking up from our last, best effort and saying “Not
bad.” That’s the praise we still cherish years later. That’s what
today’s gifted students will cherish if we give them teachers who
demand their best.
This healthier alternative also means making sure that at some
point every gifted student fails in some academic task. There is no
sadism in this, but an urgent need for our luckiest children to gain
perspective on themselves and on their fellows. As matters stand,
many among the gifted who manage to avoid serious science and
math never take a course from kindergarten through graduate school
that is so tough that they have to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.”
Lacking that experience, too many gifted graduates are not conscious
of their own limits. They may acknowledge them theoretically,
but they don’t feel them in their gut. They don’t know, as an established
fact, that there are some things they just aren’t smart enough
to figure out.
Everybody else knows that for a fact. Children of low academic
ability have to deal with that knowledge in elementary school. Children
of average academic ability have to deal with it in high school.
Children of moderately above-average academic ability have to deal
with it in their postsecondary education. Even the children with
stratospherically high academic ability who get deep enough into
mathematics have to deal with it. It is said that there comes a point in
every mathematics student’s education when he hears himself saying to the teacher, “I think I understand”— and that’s the point at which
he has hit the wall. Making sure that all gifted students hit their own
personal walls is crucial for developing their empathy with the rest of
the world. When they see their less lucky peers struggle academically,
they need to be able to say “I know how it feels”— and be telling
the truth."
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