What does it mean to unschool a gifted child?

The question isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. Like beauty, the meaning of the question will depend in large part on how we understand the terms: What does it mean to unschool at all? Aren't all children gifted? In the home, don't labels such as "gifted" lose their meaning?

As the parent of a home-educated gifted child, I do believe that unschooling gifted children is different in some important ways from unschooling in general, and I do know that the gifted child comes with personality and learning differences that result in special needs. Just as for other children, unschooling can be the optimal educational environment for the gifted child, but only if those special needs are acknowledged and understood.

Gifted by Any Other Name

The word "gifted" is fraught with emotion and controversy, especially if people equate “gifted” with “special.” All children are special. All children have talents. “Talented” is the preferred word among many educational professionals these days, but "talented" does not adequately describe the gifted child’s true nature and makes me think of talent shows with scrubbed, smiling faces and big blue ribbons--a not entirely benign misrepresentation. Perhaps “gifted” does not adequately describe these enigmatic children either, but other phrases such as “high ability children,” “intellectually talented children,” and “highly intelligent children” serve us no better and are certainly less graceful from a writer’s standpoint. It’s interesting that the use of the word “homeschooling” is similarly problematic, with “home schooling,” “home learning,” “world learning,” "community-based education," and "unschooling" some of the alternatives. But these terms are not true synonyms. Like the Eskimos' xxx words for white, each term carries with it a slightly different meaning.

I have finally decided that “gifted” is as good a term as any other perhaps precisely because of its ambiguity. Gifted students are, after all, by no means a homogeneous group. Gifted students may be obviously above grade level in most or all subjects or may struggle to learn to read at age seven. They may be reflective in thought, giving the impression of being “slow,” or they may be impulsive, making them seem flighty. They may be physically strong or stereotypically bookish.

What sets apart the gifted child from his classmates is his intensity and insight, his self-determination and drive to learn about his world, his perfectionism and sensitivity. These traits are intricately and magically woven into one complete and complex child who may or may not achieve according to the world’s timetable or standards.

Who Is the Gifted Child?

According to Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, gifted children, from an early age, exhibit these three traits: 1. Precociousness, 2: A Rage to Master, and 3. A Creative Nature. To these I would add a fourth, Overexitability. Together these four traits are what make unschooling a gifted child a unique but joyful challenge.

1. Precociousness. Whether it is talking, reading or addition, the gifted child will learn on her own at a rate faster than predicted by normal time tables (even if she doesn't know here times tables by fourth grade!). This does not mean that all gifted children learn to read early or can add at age four, but there are some areas in which the child is significantly ahead of age peers. For some children this precociousness will be most notable in the area of language. For others it will be numbers or spatial relationships or inter- and intrapersonal communications.

For the unschooling family, it is important for parents to understand that this does not necessarily mean that they are pushing their child! It also means that the scaffolding that all unschooling parents provide is often at a different level and intensity. A "normal" day of answering questions and probing intrinsic interests will often leave you exhausted and overwhelmed.

For example, when our eight-year-old son became interested in politics and government because of the 2000 presidential campaign, his questions ranged from the supreme court appointments to the history of political parties, from the difficulties faced by third-party candidates to issues of human rights and capital punishment and gun control. His need to know the world in which he lives was intense, but as a parent, I also had to keep in mind his relatively young age and sensitive nature. Books about government and politics written for his age level do not adequately address the questions he was asking, but books that do address the questions are designed for older children who have a firmer grasp of some of the more unpleasant realities of the world. Helping him to learn what he wants and needs to learn in an age-appropriate way is often my greatest challenge.

2. A Rage to Master. Howard Rowland writes in No More School: An American Family's Experiment in Education that his son Seth was, like most children, "predisposed to learn, but unlike most, he was self-propelled." In very young children who are free to explore the world around them, their self-propulsion automatically guides and regulates their curiosity, but this challenge from within is then hindered and threatened by the structure of classroom education.

From this perspective, the problem of providing appropriate challenge--the buzzword of gifted education programs--is a problem that we create by constantly directing children's interests. This is a problem for all children, but the gifted child feels it and often fights it to a greater degree.

Unschoooling parents can find ways to encourage the gifted child to recognize and use his sense of self-determination, to see himself as "inner-directed" rather than "stubborn" or "controlling." They can also realize that the gifted child will challenge authority, may have little concern for the opinions of adults, and may be unaffected by the use of rewards and punishments. Knowing how to use these characteristics as strengths rather than weaknesses then becomes a large part of the unschooling challenge.

3. Creativity. I believe that all children are creative. We all have the ability to produce novelty, to think is new ways, to forge new paths and fashion new combinations. What is different about the gifted child is that creativity is more infused with the whole being, harder to "turn off," and more of a challenge to understand and accept.

Children who are highly creative usually score lower than their less creative peers on standardized tests. This is because highly creative children are drawn to the unusual answer, not the "correct" one. They will see novel possibilities in otherwise straightforward questions. They are the students who cannot follow step-by-step instructions without embellishment, interpretation and revision, much to the dismay and frustration of the adults around them!

Unschooling truly celebrates the creative nature of the gifted child. Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, author of Flow and Creativity, writes that creative individuals seek to move beyond dichotomies such as introvert and extravert, or fantasy and reality. Rather, creative people embody seemingly mutually exclusive traits, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in alternation, causing much confusion and misunderstanding on the part of parents and teacher. In the unschooling environment, a child has no need to fit a mold or to "live up" to who we think she should be. She can simply be, in all her dimensions of complexity.

4. Overexcitability.

Finally, the gifted child is an over excitable child. According to Kazimierz Dabrowski, these overexcitabilities can be psychomotor (fast talking, love of fast sports, "acting up"), sensual (heightened senses such as taste, touch or hearing), intellectual (love of intellectual word games, puzzles or reading, introspection), imaginational (daydreaming, intense and prolonged fantasy life, dramatic reactions), and emotional (cries and laughs easily, sense of empathy, embarrassment and anxiety).

This is the area that has the most impact on a gifted child's relationship to the world around him. Parents of gifted children may have to look harder for friends who understand and accept their child's intense nature. And overexcitable children are well served by being aware their often extreme reactions and emotions. Only through acceptance and understanding can they eventually less overwhelmed by their very selves.

Bibliotherapy--using books to address everyday problems and issues--is a wonderful tool of emotional development for the unschooling family. Parents can look for books that portray overexcitable characters, such as Rosemary Wells's Shy Charles (emotional) or Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (sensual and imaginational).

Perhaps the greatest gift an unschooling parent of a gifted child can offer is time. By doing away with traditional notions of grade levels and artificial standards of achievement and progress, the gifted child need not accelerate through grades in order to stay challenged. David Elkind, author of Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk, argues that gifted children may actually need a prolonged period of self-discovery, what we normally think of as a child-centered preschool or kindergarten environment, but at a higher level. The child naturally finds and chooses the level of learning--high or low--at which he is comfortable, which will surely change by the day.

Unschooling is radical deceleration for gifted children in the sense that no one else's foot is on the gas pedal and the children are given back the steering wheel. They have the control and freedom to speed up or slow down, to back up to revisit favorite spots and to meander along a country road before zooming past vast landscapes, to forge their own paths through uncharted wilderness, or to stop completely for awhile just to enjoy the view.

If we're lucky and resist the temptation to be backseat drivers, we'll be invited to ride along.