Exceptionally Gifted Children
I gave a talk on exceptionally gifted children at the Reproductive Frontiers Summit at Lighthaven this June. I believe the subject matter is highly relevant to the experience of many rationalists (e.g. one of Scott’s surveys has put the average IQ of his readers at 137, and although that’s not as extreme as 160+, I think many of the observations generalize to the merely highly gifted). The talk is on YouTube:
I also adapted the talk into an article for the Center for Educational Progress. It has now been published: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/exceptionally-gifted-children
I’d say the talk is more fun and more rationalist-focused, while the article is a bit more serious and meant for a wider audience. But mostly just pick whichever format you prefer.
The central policy proposal is that schools should allow students to progress through each subject at whatever rate fits them, and the cheapest implementation is to let them take placement tests and move up or down grade levels as appropriate (so a child might be taking 3rd grade math, 5th grade English, 4th grade history, etc. at once). I think this would benefit children of all ability levels, and have some systemic benefits as well; but obviously it makes the largest difference at the extremes.
I fully support this proposal, but I fear you’re ignoring the part that’s going to prevent it becoming popular enough for anyone to implement. Decision-makers and populists on the topic of education are focused on the oppression axis, and support of “disadvantaged” groups and individuals, and do not want to accept the model that some kids are inherently variant in ways that can’t be applied to all/most.
Personalized/customized programs are generally discouraged for cost and philosophical reasons, and especially so for gifted/advantaged students.
A lot depends on scaling issues—if it’s really one in 10k, that’s about 7400 kids in the US (there are ~74 million under-18 total). This is feasible to privately fund their education, with some mix of charity, parental payments, etc. Ideally, Robin Hanson’s earnings futures would be available—these are great credit risks, if it were legal and acceptable to get them under contract.
But even more depends on the identification problem. Terence Tao wasn’t 1/10K, he was 1/10M. Those will almost always take care of themselves—people around them will notice and behave mostly-appropriately. Making it more common to get them into accelerated programs and fund private tutors would be good, but probably isn’t the sweet spot for advocacy. The lesser geniuses are less clear, especially early, and especially if there were programs to get them better support and education, such that parents of average+ kids work hard to make them appear to qualify.
True, but I think a lot of them also at least theoretically subscribe to the idea that there are “multiple intelligences”, and are willing to believe that some kids are really good at subject A as long as they’re also deficient at subject B. Therefore, I don’t think they should be able to muster nearly as severe opposition to the proposal of letting kids move up and down in individual subjects, as they would to full grade-skipping. (We know that the empirical result will be that actually there will be plenty of kids who end up moving ahead in every subject, but they officially don’t believe that, and arguing that would probably undermine their position.)
Philosophical is addressed above. Cost seems negligible: administering placement tests and then letting kids move between already-existing classes. (Also, letting kids accelerate reduces school costs overall.)
Yes. As I say, it’s important to discover them early, because otherwise they’ll probably start facing major social rejection as soon as they enter school; if you discover them at age 12, there has likely already been quasi-permanent damage.
Three of Gross’s kids were in the 200+ IQ range. Terence Tao and “Christopher Otway” were treated quite well. “Ian Baker”, however… Gross said that his math ability might be on par with that of Terence Tao. He was the first-grader who was temporarily permitted to do 8th grade math. Let me quote the book on him...
More details on Ian Baker
Ian Baker entered the Reception class at his local state elementary school two months after his fifth birthday. Ian’s phenomenal abilities in number and language, and his remarkable gift for cartography, have been described in this and previous chapters. During his first few months in school no allowance was made for his mathematical abilities, and only after his parents had gently informed the teacher that he had just finished reading E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web was he permitted to forego the reading readiness exercises undertaken by the rest of the class.
Ian was bored, deeply unhappy and restless at school, but his parents were not informed of any serious behavioural problems. However, as was described in Chapter 1, after Ian had been at school for some eight months, the school administration asked for a meeting with Brock and Sally Baker. In this meeting the parents were rather brusquely informed that Ian was uncontrollable in class, that he was displaying bouts of frightening physical violence towards other children, and that the school wished to have him psychometrically assessed with a view to transferring him to a school for behaviourally disturbed children. This special school was attached to the psychiatric department of a large children’s hospital. ‘We were totally devastated,’ says Brock Baker. ‘We felt as though we had managed in five and a half years to bring up a violent criminal who was about to be expelled from school before he had completed one year.’
In some ways, however, the news of Ian’s aggressiveness at school confirmed a concern that Brock and Sally already had about aspects of his behaviour at home.
Ian was assessed on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Test at the age of 5 years 11 months and was found to have a mental age of 9 years 10 months and an IQ somewhere in excess of 169. (Subsequent testing at the age of 9 years established a mental age of 18 years and a ratio IQ of 200.) To complement the Stanford–Binet testing, the educational psychologist administered a test of reading achievement and found that Ian’s reading accuracy and comprehension were at the twelve-yearold level – an advancement of more than six years. The psychologist confirmed Brock and Sally Baker’s belief that Ian’s emotional swings were directly related to the amount of intellectual stimulation he was receiving, and emphasized the importance, for the emotional health of such an exceptionally gifted child, of providing him with academic work at sufficiently challenging levels, and with the companionship of children of like abilities and interests. He referred Ian to the State Association for Gifted and Talented Children, and recommended to the school that it establish some form of enrichment and extension program to respond to Ian’s intellectual and social needs.
At first, the school, and Ian’s class teacher, responded to the challenge with enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, this situation was relatively short-lived. Shortly after the start of the year in which Ian entered Grade 3, the elementary school principal retired, and the school was led until the end of the year by a temporary ‘acting’ principal. The pull-out program for gifted and talented students, which had been happening less and less regularly during the last few months of the old principal’s stay, was finally disbanded. During the first semester, Ian’s teacher permitted him to work on an individualized maths program using a Grade 7 mathematics text; however, he received no guidance or assistance, and no other children to work with, and during the second semester, with little encouragement to continue, Ian gradually reverted to the Grade 3 maths curriculum of his classmates.
The new principal was a politically alert young woman who was aware of the hostility of the Australian teachers’ industrial unions towards special programming for the gifted, and the disapproval of gifted programs openly voiced by a number of influential senior administrators in the state Education Department. She was also made aware, by her new staff, that they had ‘had enough of gifted children and special programs for the gifted’, which they felt had been foisted upon them by the old principal. The Bakers sought an interview to ask her if something could be done to alleviate Ian’s boredom and frustration. She was not unsympathetic, but was adamant that Ian should not receive any special program or provision that was not offered to the other children in the school. She stated frankly to Brock and Sally that it would be ‘political suicide’ for her to establish gifted programs within her school.
Ian completed Grade 3 in a quiet fury of anger, intellectual frustration and bitterness. The verbal and physical aggressiveness returned in full spate; however, as he was now two years older than he had been in Grade 1, he was able to maintain a tighter control on his emotions while at school, and his teachers remained quite unaware of the emotional toll levied on the child. At home, however, he released all his frustration and resentment and he became, in Brock’s words, ‘almost impossible to live with’.
This situation lasted for the remainder of Grade 3 and through the whole of Grade 4. The Bakers made regular visits to the school to plead with the teachers and the principal to provide some form of intellectual stimulation for Ian, but they were met with vague promises of enrichment that never, in fact, materialized.
During his Grade 4 year, Brock and Sally decided to have Ian reassessed by an independent psychologist with a special interest in intellectually gifted children. Accordingly, at the age of 9 years 3 months Ian was assessed first on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC–R) and subsequently on the Stanford–Binet L–M, the scale on which he had first been tested at age 5. Ian ceilinged out on the WISC–R, scoring scaled scores of 19 (the maximum possible) on all subscales of both the verbal and performance sub-tests. On the Stanford–Binet Ian, in the words of the psychologist’s report, ‘sailed through all the items through to the highest level of all, Superior Adult Three. Here he did start to fail on some tests, but nevertheless his IQ came off the top of this scale also.’ Ian scored a mental age of 18 years 6 months, exactly twice his chronological age, and thus a ratio IQ of 200. In addition, the psychologist administered standardized achievement tests of maths, reading and spelling. Ian’s reading and spelling were at adult level, and on the British Ability Scales maths test, he scored more than five years above his chronological age.
The psychologist was appalled to hear that a child of such exceptional talent was being forced to plod through a lock-step curriculum with other Grade 4 students. Her written report, reproduced in part in Chapter 1, expressed her extreme concern that Ian was required to undertake the regular curriculum with age-peers, and recommended, quite unequivocally, that for his educational and psychological welfare, he urgently needed acceleration, especially in the area of maths. The report was ignored.
Half way through Ian’s Grade 4 year, it became clear to the Bakers that there was little hope of his school, under the new principal, ever re-establishing its programs for, or its interest in, highly able students. Brock Baker wrote to me describing his frustration:
Despite its assurance that Ian’s academic needs would be addressed, his new school was at first slow to make appropriate provision and, in Sally’s words, ‘we had to do our fair share of reminding them of the promises they made before he was enrolled, which were the basis for our decision to enrol him!’ A request to the principal that he be permitted to take maths with the Grade 7 class was met with the response that there would be little point in this as his achievement level was already many years ahead of Grade 7! However, during the first semester of Grade 5 he was permitted to participate in pull-out programs for mathematically gifted children in Grades 5–7, and when his Grade 5 teacher admitted, with commendable courage and honesty, that she simply did not have the skills or knowledge to extend his phenomenal maths capacities within the regular classroom, the school sought, and found, a mentor for him. This was a maths teacher from the senior school, who has authored several maths texts and is regarded as extremely able in his field. This teacher worked with Ian in a mentorial relationship for the rest of the year, taking him through the Grades 8 and 9 maths curricula, and filling in the gaps in his knowledge. The target was to bring Ian up to the Grade 10 standard in maths so that the following year, 1990, he could work with the Grade 10 students in a program of subject acceleration.
This indeed occurred. In 1990 Ian, aged 10, was based with the Grade 6 students but undertook maths with the top stream of Grade 10. The school swiftly recognized the academic and emotional benefits that arose from his maths acceleration, and proposed to the Bakers that Ian should skip Grade 7 and go straight into Grade 8 at the start of 1991. To complement the grade-skip, the school, with the Bakers, designed a program of subject acceleration in Ian’s areas of particular strength. This found him, at the age of 11 years 10 months, based in Grade 8 but taking maths and computing with Grade 11, science with Grade 10 and social studies with Grade 9.
In 1989 the school entered Ian, along with other mathematically gifted students, in two Australia-wide maths competitions. Normally students are not eligible to enter these competitions before Grade 7; however, in recognition of Ian’s phenomenal abilities, he was permitted to enter while still in Grade 5. In both competitions he out-performed all other entrants from his school. Ian was jubilant but slightly dazed.
The Bakers have been relieved to note that certain unpleasant physical symptoms that plagued Ian for some time dissipated with the disappearance of the intellectual frustration. ‘As the anger and aggressiveness lessened,’ says Sally, ‘so did the blinding headaches, and the nausea and the stomach pains. He is a different child.’
Ian Baker’s mathematical ability is certainly on a par with that of Christopher Otway and may well equal that of Adrian Seng. Unlike Adrian and Chris, however, his astonishing potential has largely been ignored by the education system; indeed, for a substantial proportion of his elementary schooling, his progress in maths has been deliberately suppressed. It is unfortunate that he had to suffer through four years of appalling educational mismanagement before his astonishing intellectual abilities were at last acknowledged.
And both Terence Tao and “Christopher Otway” got lucky via having a principal who was quite friendly to gifted education. This is a relevant data point:
I think it is very far from true that “those will almost always take care of themselves—people around them will notice and behave mostly-appropriately”.