Ah, yes, New York, once again hits a home run, sending education over the back fence. In an article titled, “Schools Ask: Gifted or Just Well-Prepared?” we find the newest trend in education to be cranking out 4-year-olds who can pass admissions tests for entrance to gifted schools. In fact, the kids have become so savvy as a result of excellent tutoring programs geared at the tests, that the bar keeps rising. The tests just can’t keep up.
The creator of the test, Dr. Samuel Meisels from Chicago’s Erickson Institute, asserts that the test is used erroneously; the test was designed to detect early delays to enable skilled early childhood educators and parents to provide intervention for children who might not otherwise be successful in school.
One wonders what the definition of giftedness is, and why we need to identify giftedness so early in a child’s life? Is it just to skim the cream off the top so that schools can enroll homogenized kids? Or is giftedness more difficult to discern, as Harvard’s Howard Gardner has postulated? One who has worked with gifted students in middle school can see a profile of a student who hungers for more, requires uniquely tailored learning experiences, and is likely to be a quirky kid who is anything but homogenized! And as Gardner notes, giftedness shows up in many venues, among them: artistic, scientific, nature-oriented, social-emotional, few of which can be identified on a test given to children at the age of 4.
So let’s talk about 4-year-olds. Is it possible to train a bright 4-year-old to pass items on a test? Yes. Is it also possible that a gifted child might lack the focus at 4 to sit still for a test, lack the dexterity to use a pencil effectively, or might be more interested in taking apart the phone of the person administering the test? I’d think so. 4-7 year old children are what I describe as “popcorn.” They inexplicably develop along their own timeline, irrespective of cognitive potential, for cognitive potential is what most of these tests attempt to measure. Development is multi-faceted, and as children age and grow “into themselves” they reveal increasingly the kinds of bits of themselves of which Gardner speaks. Do 4 year-olds benefit from the specter of adults hovering over them to ensure they can meet marks meant for older children, children whose bodies have fully developed? What are we doing to the children whose giftedness is being cultivated like a prized rose? What will they learn about their value as human beings? What will they feel as they step forward into their lives?
Truly “gifted” students require specialized schooling. As a society we need to begin to address the education of children to discover the humane and nurturing response to the needs of truly gifted children. And what about the assumption that cognitive potential is fixed by 4? Why do we accept that assumption? The current process of training and testing 4 and 5 year-olds is off the mark, particularly to those of us who care about the well-being of children.
Wendy's World 