Why Gifted Students Hate School, Part Three

I’m going to come out and say what someone should’ve come right out and admitted a long time ago: Lots of teachers just plain hate gifted kids.

I’ve been reading The Fountainhead lately.  Lest anyone think this is the moment when I whip off all disguises and reveal myself as Adso the Objectivist, Closet Alan Greenspan Fan, this is not it.  I’m not an Objectivist nor a passionate Rand acolyte: I disagree with significant elements of her economic and political philosophy and found myself shaking my head more than once at what I considered to be less-than-probable character motivations or situations in the novel.  That said, though, Rand was, by all accounts (even the hostile ones), a clearly gifted, clearly brilliant thinker, and she has a brilliant person’s intolerance — contempt, really — for mediocrity and incompetence that speaks profoundly to the condition of anyone who’s ever been a gifted student in a public school.

What Rand understands better than any other author I’ve ever seen is the concept of the meme: the notion that an idea, a thought, a way of looking at events or thinking about them can be spread almost like a virus. One person expresses an idea and it catches on as that person says it to another person who says it to another person until finally the point of origin is lost and the meme starts being just one of those ideas that “everyone knows.”  (Two brief examples: When did you first hear the phrase “bling bling” or “Rick roll’d”?  When did those first slide into your consciousness?)

Rand’s deep grasp of the idea of the meme is more astonishing when you think that the bulk of her writing took place well before television became a significant force in American culture or had more than three channels – and the mysterious tubes of the Internet, with its blogs and YouTube and “viral videos,” lay in the far-off, Jetsons-like future decades and decades away. Through the power of the meme, Rand understood, a way of conceiving reality could become reality: a meme could become “what everyone knows” or “what everyone says” or “what everyone believes.”

Whoever controls the meme, to paraphrase Orwell, controls the perception.

Rand’s archvillain, the improbably-named Ellsworth Toohey, reminds me a great deal of an adult version of The Family Guy ’s evil infant genius Stewie, and very much like Stewie, Toohey is a seemingly-harmless manipulator with dark dreams of world domination. Unlike cruder fascists of his and Rand’s time, Toohey has no desire to use such blunt tools as force or war, particularly since he desires a greater power than physical control: he wants control of the mind. As a columnist for an influential USA Today-like newspaper chain, Toohey has a subtle understanding of the force of the media and its power to generate memes. Put your finger on the crucial lever of the meme, Toohey suggests, and you can run the entire machine with the subtlest touch.

As the novel progresses, it becomes horrifyingly clear that what Toohey wants is not to control what people think.  After all, if you prohibit freedom of thought, as in Orwell’s 1984, people — even people who never particularly seemed to value freedom of thought before — tend to rebel despite the best efforts of the Thought Police.  Toohey is more insidiously brilliant than that.  Rather than control what people think, Toohey wants to prevent them from being capable of thinking at all. 

 To do that, Toohey argues, one must erase people’s capacity to make distinctions between good and evil, excellence and mediocrity. Lacking those crucial intellectual yardsticks, we can no longer distinguish the one from the other and the two become the same. To paraphrase Orwell again, freedom becomes slavery, war becomes peace…and ignorance becomes strength.  Mediocrity, in Toohey’s plan, must be elevated to the level of excellence, a plan he foreshadows in a discussion with an utterly crappy playwright named Ike the Genius, the author of the monumental theatrical oeuvre No Skin Off Your Ass:

“Ibsen is good,” said Ike.

“Sure he’s good,” [Toohey replied], “but suppose I didn’t like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you’re just as great as Ibsen – pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…and then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter – neither the authors nor those for whom they wrote….There’s no room in the theater for both Ibsen and you. You do understand that, don’t you?” (472).

What does this have to do with gifted kids?

Easy.

I made the point before that public schools select the most mediocre (or worse-than-mediocre) students to be its teachers and professors of education. It’s not a real insight to observe that students who do not do especially well at school do not particularly like the students who do. The students who need the same concepts to be taught and retaught before they can be adequately mastered generally resent the ones who get it on the first or second try. The students who struggle to grasp an idea will resent being tutored by “the smart kid,” even if “the smart kid” approaches peer tutoring with patience and compassion – traits which people still measuring their ages in single digits do not often possess in great measure. Some students who have achieved success in school by dint of sheer hard work harbor genuine – and understandable – resentment of the ones who never study, who never have to study. Life – or at least school – seems to come so easily to them…almost as if they had been, well, gifted.

When those struggling students become teachers in their own right, guess what happens when some of them have a gifted student in their own classes?

Is it any wonder that the reaction of too many teachers to a gifted pupil is not joy that they have a brilliant pupil who grasps a concept the first time she hears it, but a sense of vicious satisfaction that at last, they get to put that smartass knowitall in her rightful place?

I would argue that, like most hatreds, this one also comes out of a sense of fear.  Some teachers cannot tolerate the idea that they’re not the smartest person in the room…nor even the best-educated one.  Teachers who majored in education instead of some version of Useful Content are particularly vulnerable to having their levels of education probed by the kind of gifted kid who’s been exposed to more mediocrity than is good for him or her.  I have a student like that right now.  Like a teenage version of Oscar Wilde (complete with raised eyebrow and utterly devastating power to use words as a weapon), he constantly tests me to probe what literature I’ve read, what philosophy or art I’m familiar with, shooting somewhat obscure cultural references over the net of conversation to test my intellectual backhand.  I enjoy his presence thoroughly.

I have a feeling, though, that this opinion has not been universally shared by all of his teachers — and that, if pushed, he would easily unleash the mental hounds and expose a teacher who pissed him off as an intellectual fraud, kind’ve like this scene from Finding Forrester:

In real life, of course, kids usually get the verbal smackdown and stop there.  They tune out, they act out, or they don’t come, just like Mr. W. mentioned in his comment from a few weeks ago:

I really don’t understand teachers that dislike the smart kids. One of my brightest and most interesting, although proportionately lazy, students from last year has an English teacher this year who can’t stand him, has declared him arrogant, and doesn’t think he should be in an honors class. The kid was challenged in English last year, and this year he’s disrespectful because he’s bored. I’m sad for him.

It explains in large part why, when parents of a gifted child advocate for acceleration to a higher grade, this kind of teacher seizes with evident glee on pointless, irrelevant, worthless skills like shoe-tying, skipping rope, or handwriting to “prove” that the child should remain precisely where she is.

This backlash that takes place daily in classrooms around the country is the only theory I can offer for such intellectual blights as “multiple intelligence theory” or its prevalence in schools across the country. Under multiple intelligence theory, everyone is gifted in some way, whether that be by the traditional standards and measurements of giftedness, or for more (shall we say) esoteric forms of intelligence.

My second favorite “intelligence” of all is naturalistic intelligence, where you really groove with leaves and trees and name your first child Rain even if he’s a boy, but my all-time personal favorite must certainly be intrapersonal intelligence, the idea that one excels at knowledge of oneself.  How that’s actually to be…you know, measured or compared in the manner of legitimate definitions of intelligence is really beyond me – really, what are you going to say?  “I know myself better than YOU know YOURself”?  Then again, I’m not very intelligent in that regard.

Multiple intelligence caught on in pretty much every classroom in America and became a staple of education college theory. Many, if not most teachers, are required or expected to include lessons tailored to the many different intelligences present in one’s classroom. For the kinesthetic intelligences, teachers could have students move around while learning; for visual learners, teachers could show a movie instead of having their kids read the book; for musical learners, teachers could have students do a rap song for their Romeo and Juliet unit instead of writing some boring old paper analyzing the author’s point. You get the picture.

Multiple intelligences goes beyond that, though. If its only power were to suggest that teachers break it up a little and find more than one way to communicate a concept, that would be a sound piece of commonsense advice for many teachers to take – not exactly a concept that’s world-shattering in its novelty, but good practice overall.

But no, there is more, much more that multiple intelligence theory actually does in a classroom.

Multiple intelligence has a lush and irresistible appeal to anyone who has ever felt that their own intelligence is somewhat mediocre. So muddled and murky is the understanding of “intelligence” in this theory that almost any talent, quality of personality, personal preference, or simply existence can be defined as a form of “intelligence.”  When I was in the College of Education, we learned about this theory and again when I was getting my endorsement to teach gifted.  The ed. professor passed out little self-quizzes so we could all find out what kinds of intelligence we all had.  (According to those results, I myself am quite good at linguistic-verbal thinking, logical thinking, and despite my scorn for this form of “intelligence,” naturalistic thinking. This is because I can identify a maple tree and tell it is not a tamarisk.)

For some formerly mediocre students learning of this theory in education classes, the multiple intelligences self-quiz is a moment of joy, a time when they find out that yes, they really WERE gifted the whole time, because literally, under MI theory, everyone is gifted.

We’ve all heard that, haven’t we? It’s become common knowledge – it’s what everyone believes and knows to be true, even the experts in education. How many times have you heard PTA parents, school administrators, or yo momma saying, “All students are gifted,” or “I don’t really believe in giftedness because everyone has a gift”?

The last statement amuses the crap out of me: it’s like saying, “I don’t really believe in the color purple because everyone is purple.”

It’s the logic of the first statement that is truly dangerous. You see, if I assert, “All students are tall,” that basically erases the whole notion of “tall,” doesn’t it? What if I asserted that “All children are fat”? Presented with a child whose BMI was dangerously low, I could merely assert that all children are fat in their own way and this child was on the obesity spectrum regardless of the fact that I could sink my fingers between each of his ribs.

If all children are gifted, of course, then no one is. Not you, not me, not the kid who can do calculus at age 7. It’s “Harrison Bergeron ” all over again. It is Ike the Genius raised to the level of Ibsen until finally, no one can tell the difference between the two.

Wow. Talk about a meme which worked.

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~ by adsoofmelk on April 11, 2008.