From:	Shaun Hately [drednort@alphalink.com.au]
Sent:	Monday, 8 January 2001 12:53 AM
To:	eet.sen@aph.gov.au
Subject:	Submission to the Senate Committee on Gifted Children
I am writing this as someone who had to grow up as a gifted child in
Victoria during the 1980s and the early 1990s. That is my perspective. It
is a personal one, naturally enough, and cannot be considered
representative of the experiences of all gifted children. Regrettably,
however, it seems that experiences like my own are all too common when it
comes to gifted children - that negative experiences as a result of
giftedness, while not universal, are all too common.

I write here as a survivor - I've been lucky enough to have made it. At
the age of 25 (as I write this) I am well on the path to building a
decent career in a field where my gifts are valued, and useful. I have
got this far for one overriding reason - my parents went above and beyond
all reasonable expectations to do everything in their power to help me. I
was lucky - first of all to have parents who were willing, and second of
all who were able to do whatever they could to help me.  Their sacrifices
were not minor ones. My mother put her own plans for her own future on
hold for me. My father died while still a relatively young man from
causes that I feel must be attributed, in part, to the stress of having
to constantly deal with the problems I placed upon my family. I mention
this so that people may understand that my survival and the future I am
now (hopefully) beginning to enjoy is not one that came easily for anyone
involved. I have a concern that some people could look at me and feel
that I am proof that my experiences weren't that bad, and that there are
not real problems with the experiences some gifted children have to
endure, simply because I have survived. I want it understood that my
survival only came at the expense of great sacrifices by others -
sacrifices that they should not have been expected to make - and even
with those sacrifices, a great deal of luck was involved. Though I have
survived and now look forward to my future, I did not emerge from my
schooling unscathed. I bear physical and emotional scars from my
experiences. Most notably I am a clinical depressive and the current
prognosis is that this condition may have to be controlled by medication
for the rest of my life. I spent a great deal of my adolescence suicidal
- though I never actually made an attempt at taking my own life, I
seriously considered the idea and came very close to doing so on several
occasions. Perhaps even worse, I contemplated doing harm to others on
many occasions - I was a victim of severe bullying, largely because of
the fact I was different from others, and there were times when I planned
the murder of those who tormented me. Even I am not sure how serious I
was about those plans - whether they were simply a release valve for the
pain I was feeling, or whether there was more to it than that - but the
feelings were real.

I wish to point out that though, as I will reveal, overall my school
experiences were quite bad, I would not wish to give the impression that
they were universally so. At times I was lucky enough to have some
excellent teachers who really had a positive effect on my life. And I
believe that most of my teachers, even those whose actions hurt me, were
honest, committed and decent people, but who were simply unequipped to
deal with a child like me. I would also point out that my experiences are
now part of history, and it would be unfair of me not to point out that
what happened to me should not be viewed as indicative of how the schools
I attended function today - they may have changed dramatically in the
time since I left them.

And I should also point out that, although my experiences were far from
ideal, and I firmly believe no child should ever be placed into a
situation where such experiences are likely, it is a fact that I could
have handled things far better. There was help available to me, support
available to me, opportunities available to me that if I had taken them
and made full use of them, would have made things considerably better. I
was a child and like all children I made mistakes, and I made some wrong
choices. However, the price I paid for those mistakes was far higher than
it should have been - and, in most cases, I do not believe I should have
been in the position of having to make those choices in the first place.

I am going to focus here on my experiences and what didn't work to help
me. I realize that it is much easier to criticize than to find solutions
to these problems, but there are people who are far more qualified to
come up with solutions to these problems than I am. What I have is my
experiences - as someone who, in the not too distant past, experienced an
education system that was not equipped in any significant way to deal
with gifted children. I think I can highlight some of the things that
didn't work for me, and perhaps, give insight as to why they didn't work.
But I do not claim to have the answers as to what should be done.

This should be viewed in the context of the 1988 Committee and Report. I
watched and my parents watched it in the hope it would do something to
help. As it was, while that report itself was excellent, there was little
meaningful response to it by the government. Good words and good
intentions are not enough.

My worst experiences relating to my giftedness were those associated with
bullying. If not for these experiences, I do not believe that I would
have experienced anywhere near the same level of problems. Naturally,
giftedness is not the only cause of a child being bullied, but in my
case, I do believe it was the most important one for a number of reasons.
And I believe that being bullied because you are gifted carries with it,
certain special aspects that set it apart from more general bullying.

The first of these special aspects relates to the idea of self esteem.
Being gifted - being smart - should be something that is positive in a
persons life. It should be a good thing. When I was bullied because of my
intelligence, there were two choices that I could see available to me.
The first was to alter my behavior to hide my intelligence - to
deliberately under perform so that nobody would realize I was
intelligent.  This was not good for either my academic performance, nor
for my self-esteem. The other choice was to not hide my intelligence -
which meant that the bullying continued, and that I was constantly under
pressure from the attitudes expressed by the other kids around me - and
gradually I came to wonder if they were right and if there was something
wrong with me. Again, not a good thing for my self esteem.

I also found that there were other special aspects to being bullied
because you were gifted. And, regrettably, the second of these largely
came down to the attitudes of my teachers and how seriously they took
bullying, and attempted to prevent it.

I am well aware that, all too often, schools do not take bullying of any
sort at all seriously. There are people out there who regard it as a
normal part of childhood. There are some who even regard it as a positive
thing in many ways, helping a child to develop a thick skin, for example.

Things weren't quite that bad during my education. Bullying wasn't
ignored - I do not believe it was handled particularly well but, for the
most part, some protection, some help was available to the victims.
However, for one type of bullying - that of being bullied because you
were more intelligent than others - there was far less protection
available.

When a child was bullied because of a physical infirmity, or because a
child was 'slow', or because of race, or height, or weight, there was
likely to be action taking to try and stop the bullies - and rightly so,
because no child should be bullied for any reason. However, when I was
bullied, when I was teased, either directly because of my intelligence,
or indirectly for some other excuse, help and protection was far less
likely to be forthcoming. I was viewed as the problem - not as the
victim. I was accused of antagonizing the bullies by doing better than
them in class, or by showing off by reading books. On occasions I was
even punished for allowing myself to be bullied, while the bullies got
off scot-free. It seemed that there was a real double standard in
operation - bullying was wrong only when the victims had an 'acceptable'
reason for being a target.

The bullying I experienced took many forms. Verbal taunts, by individuals
and by groups of thirty or more people, physical assaults including some
quite serious attacks. The routine theft and destruction of my homework
by other students. Deliberate attempts to humiliate me. These were not
occasional and isolated instances that could have been missed by my
schools - it was systematic and deliberate. And largely ignored because
in the opinion of at least one school, it was all self inflicted because
I would not hide what I was. A child who was being teased because of
their race, would not have been told to 'act white'. I was told,
implicitly and explicitly to 'act dumb' so that other students wouldn't
tease me. I was told this by teachers who were also telling me to always
do my best for the sake of my marks.

Bullying, teasing, always needs to be taken seriously for whatever reason
it occurs. My own experiences lead me to believe that there is a special
need for vigilance when the bullying occurs because a child is gifted -
not because they have any more right to protection, nor any more need for
it. But because they have the same right and the same need, and
regrettably, there are cases where this does not occur.

Bullying aside, the most significant reason my experiences as a gifted
child at school were largely negative related to the rigidity of the
education system, and its attitudes towards gifted children. Throughout
the bulk of my schooling I had the misfortune to be educated in Victoria
where the educational system was based on such ideas as 'equality of
outcomes' and that 'learning differences among learners are quantitative,
not qualitative in nature'. Making special educational accommodations for
gifted children was seen as elitist or unnecessary.

This does not seem to be unusual - although, it also does not seem to be
unusual. But I think it does point to one of the reasons my educational
experiences were far less successful than they should have been.
Educational practice was based on political theory or, at the very least,
only on educational theories that came from politically acceptable
sources. My own experiences have lead me to believe that decisions on the
education of gifted children should be made on evidence and studies based
on gifted children. An education system that has already eliminated these
children from specific consideration before any decisions are made has
little hope of making decisions that will meet their specific needs.

Drawing on my personal history, several cases of this type occurred in my
opinion. Cases where decisions were made that directly affected my
education, but where little consideration was given to my needs as
compared to the needs of the hypothetical average child.

One of these concerned group work - the idea of getting children to work
in groups rather than individually. I should say that I am not totally
opposed to this idea. I think it can work well. But it seems to me that
it was used in such a way during my education that it was often
counterproductive.

The simple fact was that, in most cases, my abilities exceeded those of
my classmates. In part this was because I don't think enough thought was
put into the group assignments - if they had been designed to require a
variety of skills to complete, then there would have been a far better
chance that there would have been some benefit to me being in the group.
But, for the most part, they were not like that at all. They were simply
larger versions of a normal assignment that was designed to require only
a few specific skills, and those skills were the ones I had.

I was often faced with the reality that if I allowed the other people in
the group to do any of the work, we would get a lower mark. So either I
had to do all the work (which defeated the point of the group assignment
in the first place), or I had to accept that my marks were going to be
lowered by the rest of the group. In an academic sense, they would
benefit from my presence in the group, but I would suffer because of
theirs - I was expected to make my rights subservient to theirs.

And this was a significant problem because of the educational
philosophies in place. The idea of equality of outcomes meant that it was
often considered a good idea to place the most academic students with the
least academic students in groups because it would help to even out the
marks. If the grouping had been by ability, or even randomly, it might
have been less of a problem for me - but as it was, all I could see was
that I was expected to put up with an education that didn't meet my needs
for the sake of others. And I was in private schools, isolated from the
full effects of the political decisions that affected education in my
state - so it could easily have been worse than I experienced.

Different grouping methods were used. I was grouped with the slowest
students - on the principle I would help them to achieve better marks,
without any real consideration being given to my own academic needs. I
was grouped with the kids who bullied me on the principle that this would
help us to get along better (in fact, it's only major effect was to give
them the opportunity of intimidating me into doing their work for them). 
We were allowed to group ourselves with our friends - with no
consideration of what this meant for the students like myself who often
had no friends and were put into the position of being forced into a
group where everyone else was friendly and nobody wanted you there. Not
once was a group ever formed with any consideration of my needs - because
the needs of the gifted child were not considered important - certainly
not in comparison to everyone else's.

And, as a result of this, the work offered was only rarely at all
challenging. It was aimed at the supposed average standard in the class
that often meant it was material I had been capable of years earlier.
Even when a new concept was introduced, in arithmetic for example, it
rapidly became boring again as we were required to perform more or less
identical problems over and over again as practice to ensure we
remembered how to do it. It didn't matter if you answered the first ten
questions perfectly - if there were twenty questions, you had to answer
all twenty. And if you happened to finish all twenty of them before
everyone else, well, then, you could do another twenty. Other kids got
given extra problems as a punishment for talking in class - I got them
for working too fast and too well. I rapidly came to view this as a major
disincentive to working to my potential.

There were other problems with the work being too easy as well, of
course. One is that it became much harder to develop a decent work ethic
or decent study skills, because I was not being exposed to any need to
have these skills. How is somebody supposed to learn to study when they
never need to do more than ten minutes work to know everything that is
expected of them? The problem is, that this doesn't last. At some stage
(and in my case, it happened around the age of 13 or so) work does become
necessary and unlike other people in my classes, I had not had the chance
to learn this gradually. Most of them had gone from doing fifteen minutes
homework to half an hours to an hour to two hours gradually. I went from
having to do no more than a few minutes up to an hour almost instantly.
Viewed objectively, the work was still easier for me than other people -
but the learning curve required was much steeper and much harder to deal
with.

As I understand it, children are meant to go to school to learn. If that
is the case, surely it should be required that they are actually taught
at a standard that consistently requires them to learn something? Aiming
classes at the average student neglects everyone but the average student.
Somehow or other - through genuine individualized instruction, through
special accommodation in a regular classroom, through ability grouping,
through acceleration, or through some other method - it seems to me
critical that an effort is made to ensure that all children have an
education that is targeted to their needs. I didn't get that - and though
I have made it through, a person should succeed in life, because of their
education, not in spite of it. Education should not be a handicap race.

There were some opportunities available to me - opportunities that, in
many cases, I didn't take full advantage of. Some of the problems I
experienced were partly self-inflicted. But, even acknowledging that, it
seems to me that access to those opportunities were based on
fundamentally flawed ideas about education.

If I had been willing to work harder in my regular classes, it would have
been more likely that I would have been offered access to more advanced
work - the work that I really needed. But there is something illogical in
requiring success in an inappropriate environment, before you are
provided access to an appropriate one.

A gifted child who is placed in a regular heterogeneous classroom with no
special support is in an environment that is not designed to meet their
needs. Requiring them to perform in that environment as a condition of
access to a more appropriate environment makes about as much sense as
throwing an eagle chick into the ocean, and requiring it to learn to swim
before you let it try to learn to fly. After all, there are a lot more
fish than there are eagles. 

The education of gifted children should be based on what works for gifted
children - surely that makes sense. It seems to me that, in too many
cases, decisions in education are based on how the decision makers would
like the world to be, and not on how it is.

Theories have to be changed to fit the facts - not facts changed to fit
the theories. It's not an easy life, being one of the facts that need to
be changed to fit the educational theories.

Shaun Hately
(03) 9785 7820
45 Moreton St
Frankston North
VIC 3200

Shaun Hately |http://www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
             |drednort@alphalink.com.au
             |ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. 
They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to 
fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the 
facts that need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil