prokopetz:

What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.

What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’s not merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.

d. puts a target on their backs when they’re dealing with any adult that isn’t one of the aforementioned mentors. Do you know how many teachers I’ve run across who somehow feel threatened by “gifted” children? I’m not sure what their deal was, but there were adults that every gifted child knew they couldn’t trust in my school

e. Probably actively prevents some of these kids from being identified as on the autism spectrum, because the perception is that a kid who’s excelling in school can’t possibly be autistic, even though in my experience, about eight tenths of any class of “gifted” kids will be kids who exhibit many of the same behaviors – lack of ability to pick up social cues, interpreting conversations very literally, specialized interests, stimming, getting overstimmed very easily, etc. It’s just that the “gifted” population is often separated out from the so-called “normal” kids and therefore the lack of social skill is put down to that separation and the perceived higher intelligence, so we all end up thinking we’re either broken or weird instead of going “oh. There’s a name for the way I’ve been all my life.” Sure, there are “gifted” kids who are genuinely just isolated from their peers for the reasons mentioned above, but as a former gifted kid, I can tell you now that that’s not all of it.