Dumbing Down America

The War on Our Nation's Brightest Young Minds

James Delisle, James R. Delisle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000492279
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

At a time when the U.S. education system consistently lags behind its international peers, Dumbing Down America shows exactly why America can't keep up by providing a critical look at the nation's schools through the eyes of the children whose minds are languishing in countless classrooms. Filled with specific examples of how gifted children are being shortchanged by a nation that believes smart kids will succeed on their own, Dumbing Down America packs a powerful message: If we want our nation to prosper, we must pay attention to its most intelligent youth. With more than 35 years of experience working with and for gifted children, author James R. Delisle provides a template of what can and must happen in America's schools if they are to fulfill their mission of educating every child to the fullest potential. Dumbing Down America is a must-read for any individual who believes that the unfulfilled promises to gifted children must begin to be met in America's schools today, not someday.

CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING

DOI: 10.4324/9781003234722-1

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

—Cicero

Anyone who believes that identifying gifted children and providing educational options for them is a new idea or a passing fad has either a short memory or a limited grasp of history As Joanne Rand Whitmore (1980) pointed out more than 30 years ago,

In the early recorded history of various cultures there is considerable evidence that youngsters possessing exceptionally advanced mental abilities were recognized when rather young, were highly prized, and were segregated from the masses for special educational treatment, (p. 4)

Whitmore (1980) went on to point out that the philosopher Plato advocated testing children for potential giftedness (although the term itself, gifted, was not used then) and, once found, preparing them for leadership roles by providing advanced educational opportunities. Going against the grain of the time, when leaders were selected exclusively from society's aristocracy, this egalitarian approach recognized that high intelligence was due to something more than how wealthy or renowned your parents were. Clark (1997) added that similar quests for locating giftedness in children were sponsored by governments in ancient Egypt, Rome, China, and Japan.

This "talent search" continued in both the Holy Roman Empire and with the 15th-century Ottomans. Around 800 A.D., Charlemagne urged that the state look for high intelligence among all castes of society and, when found, that these children be educated at government expense. Ditto in Turkey, where a school for boys who were superior in strength, appearance, and intelligence was established at Topkapi Palace. And in 1648, the Czech educator and reformer, Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius) wrote The Great Didactic, a text that proposed 80 axioms that should guide a teacher's actions. Among the axioms?

• ⟐ We do not learn what we already know
• ⟐ Do not postpone the instruction of one who is ready to receive it

Both of these have relevance today in the education of gifted children.

The Renaissance brought attention to the need for patrons to support artists, sculptors, and musicians. Perhaps the greatest example of a patron recognizing the gifts of an individual and sponsoring his education is found in the life of Leonardo da Vinci (Gelb, 2004). Born to an unwed mother in 1452, da Vinci was not allowed membership in the Guild of Notaries, to which his father belonged, making him ineligible to follow in the professional footsteps of his father and grandfather. Instead, da Vinci became an apprentice with master sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio. The small inclusion of an angel and a bit of landscape painted by da Vinci in one of his mentor's paintings caught the eye of Lorenzo de' Medici—and the rest, as they say, is history: Leonardo da Vinci came to be recognized as one of the greatest geniuses of all time. A wise and generous someone—de' Medici—stepped in to help an individual whose gifts were recognized as being superior.

Another example of an individual whose interest in intellectual prowess caused him to support a child of promise can be found in the life of physician Jean Itard. In the late 18th century, Itard found a young boy, about age 12, in the forests of central France. This boy had no known history, and no language. His behaviors were crude, yet Itard believed that this boy, whom he named Victor, survived in the woods due to his instincts and innate intelligence. For many years, Itard tried to educate and socialize Victor, with little success. Eventually, Itard abandoned this social experiment—and Victor himself—leaving him under the care of the nursemaid who had watched over him for years.

Given the lack of success of Itard's experiment, what part does this play in the growth of educating gifted children? Plenty. For, in addition to trying to educate this feral child, Itard also kept a diary—a day-by-day chronicle of Victor's intellectual growth and learning patterns. Eventually published as The Wild Boy of Aveyron (later a movie, Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child), this social experiment became one of the earliest attempts to capture those elements that cause a young child's mind to develop. As I wrote in an earlier publication, "to this day, Itard's work remains the sine qua non of studies that have the goal of exploring the development of individual talents" (Delisle, 1992, p. 2).

MEANWHILE, IN AMERICA

These schools to be under a visitor, who is annually to chuse a boy, of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give the?n further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools, of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of the country, for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1784

OK, so his choice of the words "rubbish" and "residue" may be an inarticulate way to describe nongifted children, but Jefferson's mission is clear: to identify and educate intelligent children in ways that respect their fine minds. And by limiting his search to families too poor to educate their children, Jefferson opens up the doors to excellence by recognizing what his ancient Greek and Chinese counterparts knew centuries earlier: Giftedness can be found in all strata of society

So how exactly is one to identify potential genius? Must we rely solely on the observations of others, who may or may not know a gifted child when they see one? The answer (one answer, at least) lies in what began to happen in the latter half of the 19th century, when interest in intelligence coincided with the advent of a branch of ancient philosophy that became its own science in the 1870s: psychology.

Although educators and psychologists seemed to agree, in principle, on what intelligence looked like, no one was entirely certain that something so amorphous could actually be measured. So, the government of France asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a way to distinguish between children who were educable and those who were not capable of academic advancement. Instead of designing assessments tied in with specific content such as math or reading skills, Binet (and his colleague, Theodore Simon) devised tests that measured qualities such as attention, memory, and judgment—the underlying foundations of learning, if you will. After many test administrations in which children scored at widely varying levels of competence, Binet and Simon established cut-off scores for the following categories of learners: idiots, imbeciles, and normals. These terms were mere descriptors, not carrying the pejorative impact that they do in today's parlance, and thus began an era where children were ranked by a particular test score number—on the Binet-Simon Scale.

Enter Lewis M. Terman. As an undergraduate psychology major at Indiana University in the early 20th century, Terman became interested in the range of intelligence—from "idiot" on up. For his senior seminar project, he wrote two reports: one on mental deficiency and one on superior intelligence. Through this work, Terman became acquainted with the recently published Binet-Simon Scale. Once enrolled in a doctoral program at Clark University, Terman continued to explore the world of intelligence, comparing two groups of boys: those who were "mentally backward" and those who had high intelligence, as measured by the Binet-Simon Scale. In one of his retrospectives, Terman (1954) stated that "the experiment contributed little or nothing to science, but it contributed a lot to my future thinking" (p. 222). That would be an understatement!

Shortly thereafter, while on the faculty at Stanford University, Terman revised the Binet-Simon Scale and, in 1916, published the first Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, an individual test that resulted in an "intelligence quotient"—IQ—that became a measurement prototype so strong that it is still in use today, a century later.

In publishing this test, Terman achieved the "professional cred" he needed to pursue his long-held ambition: to explore the world of exceptional intelligence. So, armed with a grant from the Commonwealth Fund of New York City, he was challenged to locate and study children whose IQ's were in the "genius" range—140 and above. Terman found 1,528 such children—and he continued to follow their educational and life progress for decades, resulting in psychology's most eminent longitudinal study, the five-volume Genetic Studies of Genius.

Much has been written about Terman's legacy, and it is not all positive (Leslie, 2000), as his subjects were predominantly White and middle class, yet he applied his generalizations about intelligence to everyone. As time passed, the identities of some of his "Termites" (as they came to be called) were revealed, including Jess Oppenheimer, creator and writer for I Love Lucy, Edward Drmytryk, a film director whose credits include The Caine Mutiny, and Lee Cronbach, noted psychologist and former President of the American Psychological Association. Hundreds of patents, books, and inventions are credited to this august group of 1,528 and, as Terman (1954) reflected later in his career, "no one developed post-adolescent stupidity" (p. 227). This tongue-in-cheek comment actually is one of Terman's more important findings, as the 19th-century belief in "early ripe, early rot" (i.e., if you use too much of your finite mind too soon, you'll have nothing left: for the later years) was discarded into the bin of false truths. Intelligence, it seems, was a lifelong attribute—gifted once, gifted always.

AND THEN THERE WAS LETA

Thousands of miles away from Stanford, in New York City, another psychologist with an interest similar to Terman's emerged: Leta S. Hollingworth. Beginning her study of gifted children in the same year that the Stanford-Binet was published (1916), Hollingworth did what Terman did not: She examined the intellectual, emotional, and educational lives of the most highly gifted children of all—those whose IQs were above 180.

Her background was as a schoolteacher and principal and, although she eventually received a Ph.D. in psychology, her ties to the classroom were always obvious in her work. In 1922, she convinced the New York City School Board to fund a program for the district's most highly capable children. Years later, in 1937, she became a teacher at Speyer School, P.S. 500, where she worked extensively with children whose IQs ranged from 130-200. In a book that documents her work with these unique young children, Hollingworth (1942) stated that "the minds of these children are occupied primarily with exploration of the world in which they have recently arrived ... This is the golden age of the intellect" (p. 292).

"You'll just have to wait 'til we get there." "Show your work." "Show me the steps each time." "No, you may not work ahead; stay with the class." What is wrong with each of these statements is what troubles public education for gifted learners in America. We should be placing an ever-increasing importance on moving our brightest students ahead by using a pace appropriate to their individual needs—not asking them to wait until others catch up. Sadly, we stifle creativity and eagerness with these "worst practices." Readiness needs to be applied to all. Rethink it, America!

Ruthi Manning-Freeman, public educator since 1975, Breckenridge, CO

What sets Hollingworth's work apart from Terman's can be encapsulated thusly: She believed that to be precocious was to be vulnerable. When children have the intelligence of an adult but the emotions of a child, certain special problems might arise. They include:

• ⟐ problems of play and friendship, as the gifted child's vocabulary, preference for complicated games, and the importance of rules may not be appreciated by less able children of the same age;
• ⟐ problems associated with a lackluster school curriculum, as Hollingworth (1942) believed that children with IQs of 140 waste half their time in school, while those with IQs above 170 spend their time doing "various sorts of bizarre and wasteful activities" (p. 299) under the guise of "learning";
• ⟐ problems in becoming negative toward authority figures, especially when gifted children feel compelled to "make good" the mistakes or misperceptions of adults and are told to "mind their manners" instead of being taken seriously for their accurate, astute insights;
• ⟐ problems of using their intellect to take advantage of others, which Hollingworth labeled as "benign chicanery," or when gifted children laud their intellect over less-competent others to get their way. Hollingworth conceded that this is a skill mastered by many savvy adults, yet she is cautious when children use it to their advantage, as it may set them apart as loners, which gets back to her initial concern about play and friendships.

In her lifetime, Hollingworth's work never received the recognition it deserved and, being a female, she was seldom taken seriously by foundation directors who could have funded her projects. Still, in retrospect, Hollingworth's work is as groundbreaking as was Terman's. She was just born in an era when her achievements were hijacked by her gender.

THE EBB AND FLOW OF EDUCATING GIFTED CHILDREN

With two such powerful proponents of gifted children as Terman and Hollingworth, you'd think that the momentum to continue their research legacies would move forward in a straight-line, upward trajectory.

Well, guess again.

More than any other area of special education, gifted child education has been seen as expendable, not essential. So, when times get tough and money gets scarce, gifted programs are often on the chopping block for reasons alluded to earlier—elitism, racism, or being deemed as an unnecessary luxury. And whereas children with disabilities are a sympathetic group for whom to advocate, it's harder to advocate for a category of learner—gifted kids—who appear to be successful in school already.

In addition to an overall apathy that many people—including many educators—have about providing services for gifted students, proponents of gifted child education find themselves in a political maelstrom as well. So, when our nation is in a collective crisis mode, gifted child education thrives, while it declines when politicos aren't as concerned about our country's future.

There is no better example of gifted child education being used as a political football than the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. When this happened, America's dominance of everything scientific came into question. Was it even possible that those dreaded and feared Russians might, in fact, get to the moon before we did? Perish the thought! Seemingly overnight, a clarion call was made to upgrade the education system, especially in math and science, so that the United States would be second to none. Countless grants were written and millions of dollars spent to design curriculum that would challenge our nations most astute students and, in 1958, the National Defense Education Act (P.L. 85-864) was enacted by Congress— the surest sign yet that gifted children and their education were top priorities.

For a few years, anyway But when the Civil Rights Movement began in earnest in the 1960s, gifted child education became a back-burner issue. In the tug of war between equity and excellence, equity won. It became downright difficult to be an advocate f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE Three Reasons to Care
• CHAPTER 1 In the Beginning
• CHAPTER 2 The Upsides
• CHAPTER 3 The Battle of Equity Over Excellence
• CHAPTER 4 Is Giftedness Something You Do or Someone You Are?
• CHAPTER 5 Instructional Panaceas That Aren't
• CHAPTER 6 Legislative Absurdity... and the Organizations That Try to Rein It In
• CHAPTER 7 What Next?
• CHAPTER 8 The Big Picture: Fitting Gifted Child Education into the Broader Educational Landscape
• That's All, Folks!
• References
• About the Author
• Index