Online learning has the potential to vastly improve the educational experience of American children. And at the same time, it can empower families to be their child’s educational manager. There will come a day when families can design a portfolio for their child that includes a little of everything on the educational options menu: home schooling coupled with online courses, public or private school coupled with a virtual tutor, available 24 hours per day. The possibilities are endless.

Virtual learning environments are a great way to supplement (or in some cases, replace) your gifted student’s regular classroom setting. Check with your state or local school board to verify that virtual learning credits will count towards your district’s graduation requirements. This seems to vary widely even among districts in the same state, so YMMV.

Gifted children are special needs children; they have special educational needs that other children do not have. In general, they require a faster pace since they need fewer repetitions and less practice to master concepts. They also do best when they are able to explore a topic in greater depth than is usually found in the regular curriculum.

And yet, we still face the belief that all children are gifted.  I found this once again in Huffington Post article by Jennifer Evans Gardner on the gifted program in Los Angeles schools. She complains about the GATE program, whose mission statement says, “…all students are to receive an education appropriate to their individual capabilities, interests, and needs.”

The idea that all children are gifted is diluting the quality of gifted programs by lowering the standards whenever politicians, administrators, etc. get questions from families of non-gifted children about why their kid isn’t in the gifted program.

We need to make a distinction (as the author of this article does) between children being special (ie. unique individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses) and being gifted (academically or intellectually more advanced than their peers). Many people replace ‘special’ with ‘gifted’.

The writer of the article, Carol Brainbridge, implores readers to read a response to this idea by Michael Clay Thompson:

Michael Clay Thompson wrote a wonderfully eloquent response to the claim that all children are gifted. I wish Gardner and others who make that claim would read his response.

Please visit his site and read his response. Share it with everyone who thinks ‘special’ means ‘gifted’.