Gifted children are only children, and they did not choose to be gifted. They can't help it. Gifted children are those who require a differentiated educational program if their exceptional needs are to be met. Their ability is not just a socially undesirable characteristic, an unfair advantage that they have over other children; it is often a disadvantage; it often creates serious problems. Gifted children won't "get everything on their own"; they need us to understand them, support them and provide differentiated instruction for them, just as other children with exceptional learning characteristics need our specific understanding and support.

Differentiation is the critical fact; gifted children are at risk; they need us to provide them with an education that is appropriate in rigorous, accelerated content and advanced thinking processes if they are not to wither in the muting and stifling environment of the regular, textbook-driven, age-graded classroom.

Look at the lovely ink painting by Rembrandt entitled A Woman Sleeping. With a softness that only artistic genius could employ, Rembrandt has made his image of the sleeping woman from the gentlest of strokes, as though by painting her too roughly, he would wake her up. The brushwork is so delicate and subtle that the painting seems almost Japanese. Look at the economy of brush strokes; with only a few dozen strokes, some of them barely touching the paper, Rembrandt has rendered the form of the woman's curled-up posture. Her face, closed eyes and hair are somehow real, paradoxically, in spite of the fact that they don't look real, at all, close up. She rests there, sleeping forever on her pillow of ink and paper, a sleeping woman whose peaceful repose will never be spoiled.

How did Rembrandt know to do these things?
He took an art course?
No.
Everybody takes an art course.
Not everybody will paint A Sleeping Woman.
How did Rembrandt know to do these things?

Well, he was Rembrandt. And if we look long at his lovely brush work, and try to understand how this real woman emerges as a misty visual average of unreal brush strokes, we can begin to see something besides the woman; we begin to see the genius of Rembrandt...

This is much more profound than it seems because the actual complete etching of Rembrandt's face in only the size of a postage stamp.

Rembrandt was gifted.

What would the young Rembrandt's experience have been if he had entered a school in the United States this year? Of course, it depends what school, but Rembrandt might have found a school that used to have a gifted program but has since mainstreamed all the gifted kids back into heterogeneous classes in a county that used to have thirteen specialists working in gifted education but now only has one, who is also halftime coordinator of system-wide faculty development. He may have entered the same class entered by everyone else who is his chronological age and have been assigned the same textbook exercises that everyone in the class was assigned, and if his extraordinary abilities were recognized, he might have been instructed to work in a cooperative group where he would have tutored other students.

If young Mozart went to Rembrandt's school as a second grader, having just completed writing his first concerto, would they let him take music? Or would they schedule him into some other "enrichment" class because all second graders "get" that class?

And if he did get put into a music class, would he have to fill out the big-print worksheets on the names of the notes because it wouldn't be fair for anyone to be treated special? Would Mozart have to sit in a circle and call out the names of the notes with his group? Would that be fair to Mozart?

Fairness.

If a child had a physical problem and had lost his legs or the use of his legs, would we require him to meet the P.E. requirement for height jumped, in order to uphold our equal standards?

Or would we make an exception because we are human beings and the requirement is impossible for the child?

If a gifted child had a specific learning disability and despite his enormous I.Q. could spell few words correctly, would we deduct points from all of his assignments and tests, ruining his grade average and self-image in order to defend our equal standards?

Or would we make an exception because we are human beings and the spelling requirement is impossible for the child, regardless of how hard he studies, and regardless of how much he learns about the content of the knowledge?

When the Russians launched sputnik, and the nation trembled, we called on our gifted children, and they responded. We went to the moon and threw off calculators and desktop computers as a by product. But The Wall is down, and the Russians are divided, and why should gifted kids get differentiated instruction now? Back to the workbooks, now. In the absence of the Cold War, the national mood has changed, and support for differentiated instruction to meet the specific learning characteristics of gifted children has diminished.

It has diminished in the name of mistaken concepts of fairness and equity. Steve Schroeder Davis has argued eloquently that our educational system is in the grip of "coercive egalitarianism," a spurious concept of fairness that leads us to abandon giving all children the appropriate education they need.

Fairness.

Welcome to the doctor's office. Doctor Fairness is in and will see you now. And good news: Doctor Fairness treats all his patients alike. Appendectomies, that's it. Everybody gets appendectomies. Got a broken leg? Appendectomy. Pneumonia? Appendectomy. Nearsighted? It's an appendectomy for you. Got to treat everybody fairly, you know... Give everybody what they need, and you'd have to treat every individual individually! We don't treat what you need; you get what we offer. When you wake up, you'll be in the recovery room with the 27 other patients, and you can all receive your post-appendectomy treatments in unison. Won't that he fun? Next...