Were you in the "Gifted Program" ?

reply to post by Segwayguy


It's from a band's album.

link to album

I went through this aswell, they started me on it a few weeks after i joined nursery when i was 4 and it stopped when i was nearly 16 just as i left school

(Obligatory Disclaimer: I only read the first 10pgs.)

We moved every 2-3yrs, so I can't give a personal play by play of any particular program. But I can give an abbreviated overview of the start of these programs vis a vis the OP's key question,

"Was this an attempt to get the intelligent children on the books? find out who they are and watch them as they mature? ...I'm sure that we are in a record somewhere"

Yes.
Back in the old days (cough), we had plain old regular classes. Then came the Honor Roll, then Honors courses, then Advanced, & then Gifted programs. These programs largely grew out of the rise of Psychology in the 50s & 60's, & studies on nature v nurture, siblings & twins, intelligence testing, emotional intelligence etc.

Fundamentally (then) ground-breaking studies revealed that some children were naturally gifted, advanced faster than others, had abilities not adequately addressed in regular curriculum, & chiefly, that some children were being held back by their environments not their inherent ability. (This last reason later extended to children not just held back, but actually being disadvantaged by their environments, which led to the creation of HeadStart).

These programs were designed to meet those needs, & several long-term studies were undertaken. Most didn't know or care whether they were part of a study.

So definitively yes, there was an effort to identify & track these children, otherwise they wouldn't have launched the programs & couldn't gauge their effectiveness.

I'm sure some of these studies are probably online or published in Psych journals somewhere. And Educational Psych majors probably still read them. But I don't believe there was anything nefarious at the time, although now I wouldn't be so sure.

I was in a gifted program called GATE in elementary school, and moved on to honors and advanced placement in middle and high school.

They selected me (I think) because of my standardized test scores in 4th grade. I scored in the top 99% in every area. My parents discussed the program with me and essentially forced me to take it.

I'm glad my parents forced me to take the program, but I don't recall the GATE classes exercising any particularly creative forms of education. We didn't take any special field trips or do fun puzzles. The program basically consisted of much more advanced material than we "should" have been learning at our grade level. They introduced us to basic Algebra in 5th and 6th grade, and by the time I finished middle school I had completed Algebra and Geometry. That set me on a path to finally complete nearly a year of college credit by the time I finished high school.

We were definitely a segregated social group, and I really didn't like to be associated with my peers in the program because they were considered to be nerds and I wanted to be cool. Still, I stuck with the program because I understood that I would probably be bored in "lower" classes.

Most of the students in my class were from fairly affluent families (myself included), but we were probably more racially diverse than the student body as a whole. Our parents were generally doctors, lawyers, engineers, and professors, and they came from a variety of countries. The school fought hard to keep out unqualified kids. Parents would occasionally demand that their child be placed in the classes even if the child wasn't qualified, but usually the kid ended up failing miserably if they managed to get him in.

I don't think that I'm a "star-child" exactly, but I do know that I happened to be born with a much more active mind than the average person. I spoke in full sentences by age three, read many books for adults by age nine, and I can ace any class unrelated to mathematics with almost no effort at all. Math has always taken more effort for some reason.

When I got to college I think I had a sort of social void to fill. Because I had previously been isolated with my supposed intellectual peers, some part of me wanted to understand the vagaries of "normal" people. I know that sounds pretty weird, but it's true. I fooled around with fraternities and stuff for awhile, to the detriment of my grades, until I realized how truly boring the majority of highly social people are. They're like robots-- programmed to appear happy and benevolent and mostly resistant to perturbation, but either apparently or actually devoid of the original thinking that forms a "self."

I'm still in college, and I should be done with a bachelor's in Electronics and Computer Engineering Technology by Spring of next year.

I should add that I know that there WAS some level of information sharing about me that went on behind mine and my parents back... I know at least one time we received a letter from Johns Hopkins saying I had been identified as a potential subject for some study of gifted children they were doing.

Originally posted by INDOMITABLE
Everyone must read John Gatto's two books:

Dumbing Us Down

and

Weapons of Mass Instruction

The goal is to create a large underclass of workers, but everyone can't be the workers. You also need overseers and people who will perpetuate the system. Rockefeller is in this and a whole lot of other people and groups we know well.

Very good books, Weapons is the scariest book I have read. And I have hundreds of books.

Oh and the big secret is that there is no such thing as gifted and talented. Sorry guys. This guy was a award winning NYC school teacher and he realized that these labels are given for a reason. School is a 12 year prison sentence that stifle creative thinking in the young.

SCHOOL ALSO OCCUPIES 12+ YEARS OF A CHILD'S LIFE SO THAT THEY CAN'T DO ANYTHING ELSE. THESE STUDENTS CAN'T PROTEST, RIOT OR REBEL, THEY ARE TOO BUSY TAKING LITERATURE AGAIN. Read these books it will change your life. You will start to question everything. School is an occupation that isn't even constitutional.

edit on 3-6-2012 by INDOMITABLE because: (no reason given)

Star for you. i just read alittle bit of weapons and i can tell its going to be a good read. It makes a lot of sense

ETA: 13 pages full of special people well done guys we are all really proud of you and very impressed. We are watching and waiting for the time when you show us your powers so we can then lock you up in our special prisons were we have took the rest of the special kids.

I've always had a unique way of thinking but I was never ever in any sort of advanced or gifted program haha. In High School I was in the lowest class of my year (not remedial, just like there would usually be a few different classes of each year with a letter assigned to them, from best to worst, and I was usually allocated in the worst one ) and then I ended up dropping out before I got my school certificate anyway.

Conclusion: I don't think there's a link with the gifted program and enjoying conspiracies.

I was in this program.

In my school it was a way to pacify the parents who knew the school's academics were severely sub-par. And also to occupy the kids who were causing problems by doing such heinous things as, you know -- asking questions!

It was a tremendous waste of time. We just sat around doing mental puzzles & crap like that.

Yes

LEAP
Learning Environment for Advanced Programming
IQ tests
highly intricate problem solving
5 children total
elementary school
I loved it, it quenched my thirst for knowledge and challenges, for a bit...
IQ ended up very high, but I've always had focus issues.

My school never had these programs, I remember being removed from class, but not those reasons. I do remember in first or second grade being given some common sense test, but we all took it. Unfortunately for my Elementary school, some really bright children were considered disturbances...They were cracking down on the kids who were asking questions.

Yes I was..... in my "Open School" program we met once a week... in a group called "Gifted and Talented" there was only about 5-10 of us from our grade. But we had our own teacher.... I cant really remember what we did in these classes. Advanced logic and critical thinking exercises, things like that. I was only about age 7-9 at the time.

I remember the teacher kept the small room very cold. She said cold helps you think better and not get sleepy. I remember being in this "program" for a few years then the program disappeared for some reason... budget cutbacks or something.

reply to post by Schkeptick


I just posted the same thing, asking questions was a no no. I always wanted to know the process, but got little answers or skipped. I wasted my school years by not caring enough, I got horrible grades, and slept, I never found what I was looking for there, so I self educated but in this society, self education accounts for nothing.

I was in the IGC in NYC for grades 4-6. It was an amazing time, the hight of society and my teachers went far and broad from the curriculum. We had awesome teachers! But then a social experiment happened, forced integration of black kids from low performing schools into ours. I'm not racist (I'm not!) but these kids were mostly animals and the truth is I was afraid of them and didn't want to go to school after that. WHY? They beat me up! I was even knocked out once and waking up in the nurses office, not knowing what happened and then putting the peces together is unnerving. This is all in the history books BTW. So here we were my friends and I (mostly white and spanish kids but two nice black geek kids) in peril. Well our parents kept us out of school for about a month but then were FORCED to send us back. # that, we didn't go. We had NYC transit passes for all the busses and subways and could travel at will wherever we wanted across the vast, great city. My education for the next two years consisted of museums, arboretums and Zoos as well as something new "Awilda" from Columbia my new best fiend Our blessed teachers gave us the corriculums and test dates; "show up for tests" was the unwritten rule and that we did. So ya, my IGC days were great and cut short. Fortunately my parents moved us out of queens and onto Long Island for my High School experience though I VERY much missed Awilda and never saw her again

Anyway thats the way life goes...

Light and Love in abundance to all of you! (just imagine it

Best Wishes

I mentioned a Bertrand Russell quote from "The Scientific Outlook" earlier and decided to dig around and pull it up. This excerpt pertains to the education of the governing class in a scientific society. Some of the things from earlier posters stuck out to me when reading this such as the post regarding some contributions to the world of students in a California "Gifted" program.

From the age of twelve upwards he will be taught to organize children slightly younger than himself, and will suffer severe censure if groups of such children fail to follow his lead. A sense of his high destiny will be constantly set before him, and loyalty towards his order will be so axiomatic that it will never occur to him to question it. Every youth will thus be subjected to a threefold training: in intelligence, in self-command, and in command over others. If he should fail in any one of these three, he will suffer the terrible penalty of degradation to the ranks of common workers, and will be condemned for the rest of his life to associate with men and women vastly inferior to himself in education and probably in intelligence. The spur of this fear will suffice to produce industry in all but a very small minority of boys and girls of the governing class.

Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements. As those upon whom all progress depends, they must not be unduly tame, nor so drilled as to be incapable of new ideas. Unlike the children destined to be manual workers, they will have personal contact with their teacher, and will be encouraged to argue with him. It will be his business to prove himself in the right if he can, and, if not, to acknowledge his error gracefully. There will, however, be limits to intellectual freedom, even among the children of the governing class. They will not be allowed to question the value of science, or the division of the population into manual workers and experts. They will not be allowed to coquette with the idea that perhaps poetry is as valuable as machinery, or love as good a thing as scientific research. If such ideas do occur to any venturesome spirit, they will be received in a pained silence, and there will be a pretence that they have not been heard.

Bertrand Russell - "The scientific Outlook" pg 185 - Education for the governing class

I pulled this from Brent Jessop's Knowledge Driven Revolution

The site no long exist to my knowledge but the articles have been preserved in the link above.

Thoughts?

I can't help but laugh to hear the comments about the "enrichment" programs being part of a study.

Ours was called STEP (student talent enrichment program).

I resented being pulled out of recess once a week to do mind-numbing math problems and busy work like book reports. Most of the kids from my school dropped out because it was the blue collar neighborhood school and we paid a price for the stigma involved. Looking back, I notice that the kids who stayed on all came from upper class families that drove their kids very hard academically.

Chalk another one up to socioeconomics!

The lady who ran the class was a complete flake and I remember challenging people on what the value of the program was when we still had to go back and drag our feet with everyone else 95% of the time. That didn't go over well.....

The program was totally math oriented in a very bland and abstract way, and the teacher was derisive if I didn't do well. I remember the teacher saying it was my time to shine when we had to do a report on a former US president. I was assigned Andrew Jackson and remember being very upset when I learned how much of abastard he was. The report ended up being a muckrake which infuriated the teacher.

Rather than enriching talent, they were clearly trying to enforce some norms and values for the glory of the district rather than for the benefit of the child.

I guess being smart enough to challenge authority just wasn't part of the syllabus.

Here is a study they should have run instead: let the high IQ kids develop at their own advanced pace according to heir strengths. If a kid is tested at beyond a 12th grade reading level in elementary school, why are you making them slog it out rung by rung for 12 years? One recess a week does not undo the stunting the system inflicts on smart kids.

Suddenly, some of us are challenged in college and our grades shoot up. So what is the problem, the student or the system?

At some point in time, there were questions raised about sharing information. Not sure if it was based on gifted status, special ed status or something totally social in concept, but we do have laws that govern what can be shared and what can't.
I know that working for both a HS and a University that the interchange of information is very guarded and documents have to be filled out and submitted concerning who we can discuss what with. In order to share the dual credit information with parents, a FERPA form has to be filled out, otherwise, the University can't give the academic information to the HS or to the parent, only to the student and that defeats the purpose of dual credit.
Sometimes, I think it's just extra paper work to give someone a "cushy job", and other times, I see where it has importance.
Here's the site that explains it: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

www2.ed.gov...

i was in honors in highschool. never heard of a gifted program. honors was defiantly a waste though. i could of #ed off in regular class and still be in the same position

I do know that we were followed at least 'a bit' because they stopped the humanities program because our 'outcome analysis' showed that we were not prepared for highschool English. It was true. The 'one paragraph a week' model was a lot of fun and I felt I learned a lot, but I got to highschool with no clue as to how to start diagramming a sentence.

They should have followed us on through college though - most of us ended up doing so well on the SAT that we exempted at least freshman English. (So we easily caught up.)

reply to post by DeadSeraph


That's interesting as i was in the SOAR program from 5th grade to 8th grade and par took in the same activities you described, and i live here in the states. As i recall SOAR was an acronym for something which im trying to remember now. I enjoyed the program personally as i got to miss an hour or two of 'regular class' a day to go to SOAR.
As well as also went on field trips weekly, IQ tests, 1 on 1 discussions with the teacher or director as she was called, as well as some additional testing out of these workbooks i cant remember the name of, traveling to other schools, and they even made us do some competition each year called the Knowledge Bowl. It was an interesting program to say for sure however i have no idea whether there's any conspiracy in it!
I'd like to think i was part of some conspiracy. But the only thing that struct me really odd about it all was testing and the way the program just up and ended in 9th grade. I thought i had just been left out that year due to myself not being bright enough anymore or something, but talking to other classmates who were in the program nobody i knew was in it any longer in 9th grade. But hey, it probably was just disbanded due to lack of funding.
Idk, but Star and Flag to you OP for an interesting thought.

The elementary I went to is now a gifted program - it became one not long after I left. When I went to it, it happened to get interesting programs.

For example, I have touched Moon sand because a sample was sent to my elementary and I was selected as a student to get to touch it. Feels like very dry fine talc.

I was streamed into an immersion program to cut the difference between my social issues and testing scores being out of sync, so that my social development could be in sync with my age related peers. This was an attempt to engage keep me engaged academically while trying to give me access to social development that was inline with my age related peers. Whoever came up with this fantastic idea has never actually met 12 to 15 year olds, and should be kicked in the nards.

I was the kid who spoke in full sentences at 9 months, was making words with magnetic letters and making people yell at my parents for "pushing" me (they were too into partying to push me into anything) at 1.5, and I was reading chapter books by 3.5. I read Genesis at 5. Genesis is very hard for 5 year old to get through. I gotta tell you how BORING those lists of whom-begat-whom are. Who thought that stuff up?