So I was channel surfing Saturday morning and caught the end of C-Span's Washington Journal in which the guest, Pratik Chougule, talked about his article in TheAmericanConservative.com titled How America Turned Against Smart Kids. It was an interesting interview and an interesting article. For a sampling of the topic, a highlight from the article summarizes research on gifted children. As follows:
Still, the literature to date supports a number of generalizations on intellectually talented children. As measured by IQ and other measures of general intelligence, America’s gifted children:
- Inherit at least some of their cognitive edge. The vast majority of experts now acknowledge that intelligence is partly hereditary. There is no consensus, however, on the precise extent to which intelligence is inherited or how much intellectual ability can be manipulated at different ages.
- May lose IQ points through various environmental inputs. The following have been linked to reductions in IQ among children: corporal punishment, disease, formula feeding, scheduled rather than on-demand breastfeeding, and secondhand smoke.
- Have IQs that can be cultivated and channeled through environmental nourishment. The two most important factors, according to psychologist Joan Freeman, are material provision and parental involvement.
- Are overrepresented in certain ethnic and racial groups. Indian-Americans, Jews (particularly Ashkenazi Jews), and northeast Asians are consistently overrepresented in U.S. samples of gifted children.
- Are predominantly male in mathematical reasoning ability. At the high end of the distribution, boys, by age 13, outnumber girls by a margin of 13 to 1.
- Exhibit outlier behavior in such areas as their high capacity to feel empathy and their tendency toward sexual conservatism.
- Have limited ability to engage with peers due to their unique combination of emotional immaturity and superior intelligence. Hollingworth, for example, found that ordinary leadership patterns hardly develop when gifted children are in the presence of peers with IQs of more than 30 points below theirs.
- Have unique emotional vulnerabilities, including alienation, intensive sensitivity and perfectionism.
- Are significantly more likely to achieve professional success later in life. In a longitudinal study, children who were identified with 160+ IQs at age twelve were more likely by age forty to earn doctorates, academic tenure, patents, and high-level leadership positions at major organizations.
- Do not necessarily face an “ability threshold” beyond a certain point of intelligence. Judging by their achievements in middle age, the extent to which children in the top .01 percent of intellectual ability outperform their peers in the top 1 percent (the typical cut-off in talent searches) suggests that the two groups are on a “different developmental trajectory.” Longitudinal studies show that the top .01 percent are more likely to be vice presidents of major corporations, lawyers at prestigious firms, financiers, tenured faculty at research-intensive universities, and STEM leaders.
His penultimate paragraph tells how parents of gifted children have adapted to the challenge of getting them an IQ-appropriate education:
Parents of gifted children are able today, with unprecedented ease, to pack up and pursue new opportunities. With remote offices and online businesses, they can move across state lines for less restrictive homeschooling regulations. Rather than bothering with the Sisyphean task of “education reform” one PTA meeting at a time, parents now have the liberty to opt for individualized regiments with private tutors and coaches. This is among the reasons why top American students, notwithstanding the United States’ middling standing overall, have started to prevail in international math competitions after two decades of Chinese, Russian, and South Korean dominance. The accelerated-math community is abandoning public schools and turning to private enrichment camps, creating, as a recent report in The Atlantic described it, “a new pedagogical ecosystem—almost entirely extracurricular—that has developed online and in the country’s rich coastal cities and tech meccas.”
Anyway, read How America Turned Against Smart Kids to get the full picture.
Finally, in the C-Span appearance he touched on the distribution among ethnic groups of gifted children. Not three minutes later a caller to the show accused him of racism. What a shame that a research finding of differences among races is called racism these days. But that's life in a country in which a major political party thrives on identity politics.
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1:49 PM 5/20/2017
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