http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/4343263

Education of gifted children

"During the last few years the results of tests and measurement in the public schools have brought into relief a great variety of educational problems which had previously been overlooked or the importance of which had been insufficiently appreciated. Among these is the problem of the gifted child. Although experimental studies in the education of defectives have been made from time to time for almost a century, it was not until the results of intelligence tests began to come in, a decade ago, that the need of special educational provision for children of exceptional ability began to be recognized. One reason for the general neglect of this field of pedagogy has been the widespread belief that the apparently gifted child is merely precocious, and usually pathologically so. However, recent experimental studies have shown conclusively that this belief has little or no foundation in fact. All the scientific evidence at hand points to the conclusion that gifted children are superior to unselected children in physical and non-intellectual mental traits as well as in intelligence, and that they carry this advantage into adult life. We are coming to recognize that from their ranks, and from nowhere else, our geniuses in every line are recruited. Instead of working upon the "wonder child" as an individual to be pitied because of his supposed abnormality, and to be shielded from intellectual stimulation for fear of injury to his delicate nervous structure, we are beginning to see the problem in an entirely different light. The education of the gifted child has adopted a positive rather than a negative aim. We wish to know what educational methods will enable us to make the most of the superior raw material afforded by our gifted group; it is no longer a question of how best to defend a special type of pathologically tainted individuals from an imminent and unhappy fate. At the present time there are in progress scores if not hundreds of experiments in the training of gifted children. Unfortunately, few of these have been under way any considerable length of time and fewer still have been adequately reported. We are learning a great deal about the mental and physical traits of such children, but we still know very little as to the most effective methods of training them. The editor believes that Miss Stedman's rather detailed account of the methods she has found most useful in her five years of experience with such children is an important educational contribution. It should be of interest not only to teachers of similar classes, but to educators generally and to parents; for it is by no means improbable that the educational methods best adapted to gifted children will be found to have wide applicability in the training of all children. Normal pedagogy has certainly benefited from the pedagogy of defectives; it has far more to learn from the pedagogy of the gifted"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

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