ETA--ah yes, last sentence: "This is reason enough to treat everyone as if they have the potential to reach full bloom."
I agree and I disagree, because I fear the real-world implications of such a belief system. It sounds perfectly reasonable and heaven knows I don't want to write anyone off, but in a classroom I think this belief, writ large, leads to everyone being given the same curriculum.
I think given current education realities, you might be right to be worried - but of course, what we want is for all children to be challenged at their readiness level whatever that is and however fast it moves, since that would be good for all children.
Something I'm curious about, and it came up in discussion somewhere else recently too. I'm sure we can all agree that late bloomers exist. (Whether this shows in IQ tests, or "only" in what they can do, is another question, and to my mind not really such an interesting one, so I'll leave it here.) Setting aside the deleterious effects that can arise from the gifted label itself engendering a fixed mindset, and from underchallenge, does the opposite really exist? That is, does it really happen that children appear to be highly gifted at a young age, and later turn out not to be, even though the child has had a good education and has not been labelled or encouraged into a fixed mindset? I think that in answering this question one has to beware of a "no true Scotsman" situation, since I'm immediately aware that I want to rule out children who have been painstakingly taught e.g. to read by their parents because they don't, to my mind, "really" appear HG, but there might be a danger of taking the later slide in achievement as the evidence to show that they weren't "really" HG earlier... Not sure how to handle that. Maybe it shouldn't really be any harder than the late bloomer side though. So, question for you all:
Have you ever (in your family or elsewhere) encountered a child who at a young age (say under 8) appeared to you to be definitely HG, who has had an education and upbringing you regard as appropriate, and yet who by the age of say 15 appeared to you to be definitely not HG?
I can't think of an example, although I can think of several examples the other way round - children who didn't appear HG before 8, but who seemed obviously so by 15.
I'm inclined to think that children bloom at different times, as the article eloquently says, but that once a child has begun to bloom one shouldn't expect the bloom to fade, barring serious adverse circumstances. What say you?
