Ellen Winner - Gifted Children: Myths And Realities

For Howard

ix

./Lla aac~ .can a and to ignore its most gifted members, and all must give serious thought to how best to nurture and educate talent. While psychologists have long been interested in the issue of giftedness, the study of giftedness has taken a back seat to the study of the typical and the pathological. In addition, a number of unquestioned assumptions are often made by researchers, educators, and clinicians in this field.

I have organized this book around nine misconceptions about the nature of giftedness. There is nothing magical about the number nine. I might have come up with ten, to make the number even, but the nine that I have identified struck me as the most pervasive and the most problematic. I have tried to synthesize and evaluate the best scientific research on giftedness in the areas of art, music, mathematics, and verbal ability. I begin with nine myths and conclude with what I hope are nine more informed views, which I have bravely called realities.

The children described in this book are real children, but some of their names have been changed. All the children that I studied came to me by word of mouth. I found that all I had to do was mention the topic of my study, and friends and colleagues immediately thought of children who would be good case studies. They were almost always right. The children who people these pages are used to illustrate and make vivid what researchers have learned about giftedness.

Many people helped me in this project. I must begin by thanking the children whom I studied. Except where indicated, the names are real: David (a pseudonym), Michael Kearney, KyLee, Rahela, Peter B., Jacob, Stephen (a pseudonym), Hillary, Peter S., and Alex. I owe a great deal to the parents (and in the case of Hillary, the grandparents) of these children, all of whom provided me with extremely detailed and careful observations about their children's development. Peter S., a seven-year-old described in chapter 9, helped to copyedit the pages devoted to him! Bill Eldridge, Jacob's guitar teacher, and Nina Grimaldi and Judy Ross, Stephen's music teachers, provided me with insights about the musical learning of these children. Robin Schader, from the San Francisco Music Conservatory, put me in touch with students to interview. Anabel Jensen, the director of the Nueva School, and other Nueva staff members Anne Bennet, Alison Barta, and Jo-An Vargo spent much time with me talking about the Nueva School and setting up interviews for me with students. Cynthia Kosut was also very helpful in discussing with me the experience of her sons at Nueva. Al Hastorf and Eleanor Walker opened up the Terman files to me at Stanford University, and they patiently answered many questions for me about the Terman project. They also helped me contact two Terman subjects, Russell Robinson and Beulah Fabris, who graciously agreed to be interviewed.

I wrote most of this book while on leave at Stanford University during 1994 and 1995. John Flavell invited me to join his developmental research group at Stanford and gave me an office, and I am most grateful to him. When I was not at the psychology department at Stanford, I worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where my husband was a fellow. I wish to thank Neil Smelser and Robert Scott for making it possible for me to work at the Center, monopolize the laser printer, and have so many interesting lunch discussions.

I am grateful to my editor, Jo Ann Miller, who provided excellent comments about both substance and style, who urged me to weave case studies of gifted children throughout the chapters, and who pushed me to keep psychological jargon out. I thank Juliana Nocker and Karen Klein at Basic Books for skillfully overseeing the book's editing and production. I owe thanks to colleagues who read all or portions of the manuscript and provided me with important and wellused feedback: Philip Adey, Jere Brophy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Bill Damon, Elliot Eisner, Lynn Goldsmith, Claire Golomb, Francesca Happe, Helen Haste, Mardi Horowitz, Kay Jamison, Tanya Luhrmann, Constance Milbrath, Robert Orn- stein, Dean Keith Simonton, and Robert J. Sternberg. I am also grateful to colleagues with whom I have had profitable discussions about giftedness: Joe Campos, Neil Charness, Anders Ericsson, John Flavell, Howard Gruber, Robert Hogan, Jeanne Lepper, Hank Levin, Ellen Markman, Ruth Richards, Linda Silverman, Annemarie Roeper, John Sloboda, and Joe Tecce. Maria Ortiz and Lorrie Kirchner, my research assistants at Boston College, spent countless hours digging up articles from the library for me and compiling references. I thank Stephen Vedder, Assistant Director of the Audio Visual Department at Boston College, for photographing most of the figures. Finally, I thank my husband, Howard Gardner, who not only read the entire manuscript in several versions and commented on it but also argued with me about the issues over the course of the book's writing.

Talented, gifted, creative, prodigious-children with these labels have always intrigued us, inspiring fascination and awe, as well as intimidation and envy. Gifted children have been feared as possessed because they know and understand too much too early. Like retarded children, gifted children have been feared as strange, as oddballs, as freaks. They have been rejected as nerds. Their parents have been derided as overambitious zealots living vicariously through their children's achievements and depriving them of a normal childhood. Our schools often refuse to alter the curriculum for such "extreme" cases and insist that they adapt to the existing pro- grams.When parents get upset about this, they are seen as people who have lost all perspective, people who do not realize how lucky they are to have a child with high, rather than low, abilities.'

Deviant people-whether atypical in personality, intellect, or both-have always interested psychologists, especially if the deviance involves negative personality traits or severely limited abilities. We know far more about psychopathological aspects of personality than about ideal traits such as compassion, moral courage, or leadership ability. A similar focus on deficits can be seen in psychological studies of cognition. While standard journals in developmental psychology publish articles on retardation, they rarely publish studies of giftedness. Such articles are relegated to less prestigious journals that specialize in giftedness. This state of affairs reflects the mistaken assumption that giftedness does not have much to tell us about the typical. I believe it is also due to the fact that retardation, like psychopathology, has been seen as a problem in need of solution, while great strengths have been seen as privileges rather than problems.'