Kvmum, I have funny feeling that training is responsible for a good deal of what we later observe as giftedness, but that not all of it is conscious. I think gifted parents probably can pass on a lot of traits, like perfectionism. But in addition I think children respond to feedback at a very young age. So even a look at a baby in a certain way, even if the child just understands "I'm trying to communicate with you right now-- pay attention", is an educational and growth-stimulating event. I think that's one reason parents that sing and speak to their children often find that their children have better verbal skills later on. Of course, children tend to do better when they feel loved as well. But a key part of those early learning moments is the child being encouraged to grasp at what they don't yet understand, as hard as they can.
But I'm not really disagreeing with your statement about hothousing, which seems to be pretty nebulously defined anyway. I would go along with a definition "pushing your child further than she wants to go", which I think is destined to fail in the long run, at least in terms of producing people that reach peak achievement.
The thing is, I think you can teach things like courage, honesty, drive, etc. perfectly well, even if there is a biological basis for some or all such traits. I don't find anything wrong with teaching, and in my opinion the end result-- a highly effective person-- is all that matters, not really brilliance. I love to tell my child stories of people overcoming obstacles to achieve great things. It's that heart of the lion that I think is most important. What does it matter if it's innate or taught, as long as it's genuine? The truth generally lies in the middle, I suspect; training accentuates traits that we all have in some measure.
I'm not getting across much of what I'm feeling right now, and think I've probably blathered enough here. But my strong feeling is that one could train anyone with adequate biological hardware (myelination or what have you) to perform at a genius level.
In terms of biologically driven ability, I suppose that learning or processing speed might be driven in large part by the hardware. If one person forms more connections during the same educational process, they will at least recognize connections between things more often, a key problem-solving skill. But even forming those connections (at least the high-quality ones) is also driven by experience; one can be taught to sift out interesting details in quite subtle ways.
So I really think that an ordinarily biologically gifted child (without denying the existence of biological gifts in general) could be taught to do high-level math at a young age, for example. There must be a best way to teach math concepts, whether or not it needs to be tailored to the individual. And if they have long practice in doing high-level math by young adulthood, in the flowering of their full biological development-- and if they have consistently been exposed to the full fruits of human intellectual development in the proper way-- they will be creative, because humans are creative, unless their growth is stunted somehow by a physical insult or bad training. So at that point you will have someone poised with the foundational knowledge they need to make a discovery, the drive to do it (which is easily teachable in my view), and the problem-solving skills to do it. And a number of such people will do it, although nothing's guaranteed, just as not all DYS kids will go on to great achievements.
I would bet that if there were proper research done for a million years on teaching, and you were to drop an ordinary infant of today far into that future, the people there could turn the baby into what we call a "genius" today. If I knew the perfect teaching methods that will surely be discovered, I wouldn't give a hoot for labels from other parents; I'd teach my son all day long and into the night. But I wouldn't be hothousing, because he, through natural inclination or learned inspiration, would be eating it up.
I guess that a biologically more gifted child with super-training would be even further ahead, compared to children of today. But I, layperson, still have a hunch that training is more important than biology.
Now I've blathered enough.
Last edited by Iucounu; 06/04/10 07:56 AM.
