Gifted or Disabled?

In The Netherlands, some gifted children advocates got so desperate in trying to arrange any concessions for this group at Dutch schools that they now promote the idea of adding giftedness to the official disabilities list. In other words, the only way to make sure a Dutch schooling institution would change anything about the standard ways it goes about treating your bright kid is to label your kid disabled or handicapped. 

Among those labelled “gifted” or “exceptionally gifted” are often the children who are most unflinching in their refusal to push their beautiful minds into the system’s standard mould. They are probably our only hope in terms of out-of-the-box solutions for tomorrow’s imminent problems. It would’t be that much of an exaggeration to say that they are their country’s future. Especially in the case of The Netherlands who will have to come up with an ingenious solution against the rising sea levels and will have to do it fast. If the only way to go is to put our country’s future on the disabilities list, it says a lot about our country in just one sentence.

For our family, “gifted” or “exceptionally gifted” used to be extremely important words. They served as a pass to wave in the faces of school administrators, hoping to be granted a tiny bit more space, sliding along their crowded curve without raising any red flags: a little more leeway during circle time, a little more tolerance for our son’s quirks, a little more time in a smaller class with older kids and more challenging content (when we were lucky). 

We tried to share the real story, showing our son’s detailed book about the scale of the Universe that he wrote aged 5, making home videos to capture his learning process as he covered our Amsterdam street’s pavement in scientific notation and Greek letters, but no one seemed to be interested in what exactly made him come to life. All everyone seemed to care about were the things on the average development curve in which he lagged behind: he was too autodidactic, too reluctant in following instructions, too slow at getting dressed for gym and had no idea what to do during gym. “Gifted” was our waiver, yielding us a concession to get around special ed, as long as we found a “gifted school” that would agree to accommodate our weirdness. It was a close cut.

Two gifted schools and countless draining school meetings later, we gave up trying to have anyone see our son as the unique person he is and not as a bunch of numbers. It will soon be five years since we have moved abroad (pulling a kid out of school and homeschooling is illegal in The Netherlands), ditching both the curves and the labels. Well, in all honesty, it took us another couple of years of moral growth to really ditch curves and labels: parents take time to deschool, too. 

Environment Defines Fitness

It’s a quiet Halloween evening this pandemic year. My daughter and I are lying on the living room floor, immersed in a 2020 Royal Institution lecture she found. Researcher Kat Arney, a charismatic and humorous science communicator and the author of Rebel Cell, explains how fitness (as in the survival of the fittest) is defined not just by genes but by the environment. It’s the environment that can increase a cell’s or a whole organism’s fitness, enabling mutations to thrive or suppressing them, whether those are disabling mutations or mutations allowing for new wonderful traits.

We decide, which traits we want our learning environments to enable: will those be obedience, conformism, dependency on external motivation and external structures, competitiveness, hierarchic mindset? Or will those be critical thinking and problem solving, inventiveness, personal initiative and internal motivation, resilience and collaborative spirit?

In a setting that allows every child to explore their interests and embark on a journey to reach their personal peak - the best version of themselves, not a standard cooky-cutter version - no labels are needed to unlock extra funds or concessions. As Dutch writer Sanne Bloemink reasonably asks in her book Diagnosedrift (Diagnostic Drift), why does a child have to be officially labeled as suffering from a can’t-sit-still-disorder (ADHD) to be allowed to do an extra run in the school corridor when sitting still becomes unbearable? In a standard schooling institution, there doesn’t seem to be room for simple human compassion and trust. Does a child really need a gifted label to be respected and given a chance to take a more challenging course, even if they behave in an unusual manner? 

In our unschooled learning environment, I no longer care what my children’s IQ’s are or whether they officially meet the criteria to be considered “exceptionally gifted” in order to enjoy a higher educational standard. Why? Because I believe that no one deserves a standard education, even if it’s a higher standard. Just like no one deserves a straitjacket, even if it’s an advanced model.  

The History of the Gifted Label

The whole idea to label some students as “gifted” stems from Francis Galton, a brilliant industrial age polymath who made numerous important contributions to math and science (correlation, variance, regression to the mean, weather maps, to name a few) but got a little too carried away in trying to apply his math to humans. His name largely forgotten, in part out of remorse (he also happened to coin the term eugenics and dreamed of a utopian society breeding fitter and smarter humans), his idea of measuring people’s deviation from the average to determine their superiority or inferiority continues to serve as the cornerstone of today’s narrow metrics of academic success. Just like Galton’s predecessor Adolphe Quetelet’s ideas that the average is a reliable index of normality continues to serve as the basis of mental health and personality evaluations*. 

Galton came up with the idea of rank. He came up with fourteen distinct bins to sort humans into, ranging from “Imbeciles” through the “Mediocres” and all the way up to the most “Eminent”. Furthermore, Galton was firmly convinced that the higher ranks in his classification were eminent in everything.

It was Galton’s notion of rank that was later embraced by the founder of the American standard education Edward Thorndike who designed a well oiled machine that would efficiently sort out a limited number of students as the future managers, the bulk (the average) as the future factory workers and the slow learners as the category no one should waste their resources on. A similar resource allocation pattern, supported by industrial age scientific management, was adopted in many other countries, both capitalist and communist. To this day, we continue to distribute educational resources to fit not the young person’s individual needs but their “bin” -  their rank and label.  

Ranking is an indispensable part of how institutions function. Prisons, factories, the army all rely on ranking. But children’s learning process doesn’t have to resemble prisons, factories or army bootcamps. Developmental studies don’t have to be based on bell-shaped normal distribution and the average. Not in the digital age, when dynamical system modeling is increasingly applied instead. We now have enough computing power to approach every child as a dynamic system, as a unique individual on a unique learning journey, no bins needed**. 

Just Right

Just like a broad medical condition and a standard treatment that has been approved for most patients in that broad category is no longer enough to come up with the treatment that would be just right for a specific individual, no standard educational approach is just right for the individual child. The standard educational system is just an infinitesimal point that misses out on a whole cosmos of children. Only a personalized educational approach would be just right.

Coming up with a growing list of exceptions from the average educational standard doesn’t resolve the educational system’s crisis. We can continue adding to that list, until virtually every child in the class is suffering from some kind of “disorder”. For a personalized educational approach, no labeling is needed, unless you use as many labels as there are children. You just need to be you, not the person adapting to what someone wants you to be in order to get ranked, but you. And for that you will have to find out who you really are: the most vital question of your life. 

Some parents argue that labeling their kids is literally the only way to get any help, resolve practical difficulties and gain understanding. While that may be true in rare medical cases, most of us who think that way are simply feeding the well oiled machine that demands more and more ranking. The price we pay by remaining conformist and not speaking up for our children as individuals is much higher than the short-term logistic advantages we may be gaining: labels produce self-fulfilling prophecies. Labels don’t promote understanding of your child’s uniqueness. Their label becomes their main identity. What is even worse, labels prevent children from getting to know themselves. The label becomes the answer to everything, masking the child’s true self, that is much more complex, dynamic and multidimensional and cannot be squeezed into a definition or an IQ score. We should all be free to grow up outside the bin. 

What I do care about is that my children are seen for what they are, for what they are good at, and that some beautiful collaborations arise from there. Even more importantly, what I care about is that my children get enough breathing space to see what they are, what makes them feel just right and come alive. As Howard Thurman famously put it, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

As I’m writing this, my son still can’t tie his shoe laces. He means to do it though, applying knot theory. He has helped me to edit this text and is just finished programming a bot that can play math games with him. At bedtime, we’re reading Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 about AI safety research. Tegmark describes how “intelligent intelligence researchers” disagree about what intelligence is and about how soon human-level AI (AGI) will emerge. Don’t label the future. It’s undefined.

*The history of our addiction to the average and the perspectives to overcome that addiction is the subject of The End of Average by Todd Rose at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (definitely one of my biggest heroes).

**Children as dynamic systems is something I discussed in great detail in my essay Joyfully Sorting Out the Disorder.