What Does it Mean to Be Gifted? w/ Ellen Winner

This week Scott is joined by developmental psychologist Ellen Winner. Scott and Ellen discuss Ellen's views on IQ and giftedness, the myth that gifted children are gifted in all subject areas, and the importance of artistic giftedness. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The ones who flourish usually have a parent or an
aunt or an uncle or somebody close to them who's
encouraging and enabling them, Because if you grow up with
no support system for your unusual gift, and it's not
recognized in school, and your family doesn't recognize it or
they don't care about it, it may just die out.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
On this episode of the Psychology Podcast, I had a
chat with the psychologist Ellen Winner about prodigies and gifted children.
This was a very meaningful chat for me, considering that
Ellen's book Gifted Children inspired me so much in college
that I credit it as one of the major reasons
why I became a psychologist in the first place and
decide to study what I do. In this episode, we

(00:48):
discuss Ellen's views on IQ and giftedness, the role of
parents in talent development, and how the needs of gifted
children can best be met. We also discuss a bunch
of myths, such as the notion that gifted children are
gifted in all subject areas or the idea that they
are all social misfits. Ellen argues for the importance of
artistic giftedness and offers a nuanced understanding of the nature

(01:12):
and nurture that causes the quote rage to master you
see in child prodigies and Gifted Children. So with great enthusiasm,
I bring you Ellen Winner, Ellen Winner, Wow, thanks for
being on the Psychology Podcast today with me.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Thanks for having me, Scott.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
What a personally meaningful situation. This is your book Gifted Children,
Realities and Myths in College is what is one of
the two big books that influenced me. Three I'm gonna
say three books that influenced me to go into this
field in the first place, your book, Howard Gardner's book
Frames of Mind, and Robert Sternberg's book Successful Intelligence. So

(01:54):
those three books, that's why I'm in this field. That's
why I do what I do. That's great, So thank
you for writing the book and for all the amazing
research that you've done over the years. How did you
get interested in studying gifted children in the first place?

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Children are gifted children?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Gifted children? Oh maybe did you start off? Did you
start studying all children?

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah? I started off. I'm trained as a developmental psychologist, Okay,
and that came about because I got before I went
to graduate school, I started working at Project zero. Do
you know what Project zero is?

Speaker 2 (02:32):
I sure do.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
In college, I was a big fan, a big fan of.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
The at Project zero, we do research on young children
and adults. But I was working with young children, doing
studies of their understanding of the arts and their ability
to make things in the arts. But I wasn't studying
gifted children. But that's what got me interested. That's what
made me decide to go to doctor. Did you get

(02:56):
my doctorate and developmental psychology rather than clinical psychology, which
I was first going to do. And then and the
more I did research on children in the arts and
how they develop, I realized that they were huge variations
and some children were extremely talented. And that's what got
me interested in studying children who were very gifted in

(03:18):
the arts. But then in the book I wrote Gifted
Children Missing Realities, I expanded it to cover giftedness in
other areas as well. Music, that's art, of course, visual art, reading, mathematics.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Did you were you an artist yourself?

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yes? I did start out as a child doing a
lot of art and I planned to go to art school,
but my parents said, go to college first, or regular college,
and then you can go to art school. I obeyed them.
I went to college and studied English literature, but then
I applied to art school, and I did go to

(04:01):
the Museum of Fine Arts school after college in Boston,
but after one year of it, I decided that this
was not for me, because to be an artist is
very isolating and very stressful, because it's very hard to
actually make it in the arts, and so I decided
instead to be a psychologist of the arts.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
No, it's wonderful. Thank God to the field of psychology.
You did. You know, there's a lot of misconceptions about
these kinds of kids, and I just really wanted to
dispel some of the biggest misconceptions and then talk about
what actually is true about them. I think that a
lot of people in their desire, like when they write

(04:48):
popular books that like talent is overrated, those kinds of
books which are very very popular. I think there's this
kind of they feel like there's this need to make
everyone else f feel good about themselves by kind of
sweeping under the rug the role of talent. It's sort
of like, well, you know their parents pushed them, or

(05:08):
you know they got they had all the opportunities in
the world. You know, anyone could do it if they
had those opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. And I just
feel like that's not at the level of nuance that
I that I like to swim in. So to talk
a little bit about what you actually what the data
actually shows, and what you see with your own eyes
as well.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yes, well, I think this idea that talent doesn't matter
got popularized by ANDREWS. Erickson, who wrote about all you
need is ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, which means
hard work to become an expert. He didn't actually say
to become a genius, but we're child prodigies, and gifted
children in the arts are not necessarily geniuses. And then

(05:52):
people started saying, these children who are prodigies in the arts,
they just had ten thousand hours of deliber practice because
they started at a very young age and they worked
really hard and it mounts up, and their parents were
actually probably pushing them too. So if you actually look
at young children who are gifted in the arts or

(06:15):
in any area, actually who are if you want to
call them child prodigies, those are the ones that are
extremely gifted. If you look at any of those at
a young age, you will see that they are not
normal kids. They are not typical kids at all. They
obviously have some kind of innate ability in the area
in which they are working so hard, and they drive themselves.

(06:36):
They have what I call a rage to master. They
all they want to do is work in their area
of expertise. So, yes, they got they get a lot
of deliberate practice. But no child is going to do
that unless they already have a strong ability and therefore
love of working in this particular domain.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, you look at
you just look at like even sports stars like Kobe Bryant,
who I went to middle school in high school with,
and I said, you know, you see, they had this
rage to master, and you know it takes you know,
practice matters, but not everyone gets the same bang for
their buck out of the same training regimen that you

(07:20):
have to know how to practice.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
Right, So I really, I really discount that claim. I
think it's completely wrong, and I've written a lot about
how that's a myth that really should be dispelled. I
think it also comes out of a desire not to
be elitist. Everybody can get there. Yeah it sounds nice,
but it just is not true.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah. Well, you know, as you've probably been following a
lot of gifted programs are being cut in the name
of equity right now, Have you seen that? Have you
seen that or and what are your thoughts in that situation.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, I think it's really unfortunate because children who are gifted,
the more gifted they are, the more difficulty they have
in the regular classroom because they are way above their
age peers and they can't find anybody else like themselves.

(08:17):
So parents have a real problem because schools are meant
for the typical child. Our schools are not designed to
take care of the extremes at either end. So one
thing parents sometimes do is grades skip their children. But
that used to be more popular earlier, and now it's
frowned upon because people think that the child who's grade

(08:38):
skipped will have social problems. Another most often what schools
do is they provide a pull out Gifted and Talented
program where kids get pulled out of the regular classroom
maybe once a week, and they are with other kids
that are identified as gifted in whatever area. All different
areas may participate, and they work on projects that probably

(09:03):
all kids could benefit from, and then they go right
back to the regular classroom where if they're like five
years ahead in math, they're still doing boring math. Another
possibility is in individual education programs that get worked out
for each child, and I think that has a lot
of promise. Ideally, it would be great if we could
have I mean, in high school, we have advanced classes

(09:25):
in different areas and kids can select into them AP
classes for instance. I think it would be fine to
have advanced classes even in elementary school, but you know,
let children self select into them, because you're going to
be you can be sure that kids who don't feel
very competent at math or reading or writing are not

(09:46):
going to self select into a class that makes huge
demands on them. So I think that I'm not in
favor of testing kids to see if they get in,
because I think that creates stress. Let themself select. If
they can't handle the work, they have to get canceled out,
counseled out. I didn't say cancel counseled out.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Gotcha. In your experience, how much are over involved parents
involved gifted?

Speaker 1 (10:16):
It really varies. Some parents who try to put their
child on the public stage. If they're a music performer,
for instance, parents some parents want them to perform at
a very early age. Other parents don't do that, and
I do think it's a mistake for parents to push

(10:38):
too hard, because I think parents should encourage and enable,
but not push too hard because it does create a
problem because the child. Let's take a child who's performing
on doing a solo performance in an orchestra, in front

(10:59):
of the orchestra or just alone, that child is going
to get a huge amount of adulation for what he
or she is doing. And when they grow up, if
they're going to continue to be considered exceptional, they're going
to have to do something original and new in the

(11:20):
way they perform, for instance, to be to be considered unusual.
And because otherwise a lot of other say musicians, will
have caught up with them even if they weren't prodigies
as children. And I think this creates a real wound
in the child that they were so special and now
they're not special anymore. And that actually leads to the

(11:40):
issue of whether child prodigies become great domain changing artists.
You can ask that question of prodigies in any area,
and that's something we could.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
Talk about if you want, well, you know I do, Okay,
what is the stat what are the stats show? Are
they are some demeans where the conversion is more likely.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
I don't actually have quantitative data on this. I can
tell you that if you look at adults who are
at the highest end of say mathematics or writing literature,
or visual art or things that involve math like science,

(12:27):
some of them were child prodigies, but majority of them
were not. And so it's not necessary to be a
child prodigy to be a really creative person in your domain.
Most child prodigies end up being experts. So, for instance,
a math prodigy might end up being a math professor,

(12:50):
but not a mathematician making original discoveries. And there's really
no reason why we should expect prodigies to become major
creators because they are very few major creator They're not
that many prodigies, but there are a lot more prodigies
than there are major creators. So it's very hard to
make the leap because a child prodigy is mastering a

(13:12):
domain that's already been gift. This's been given to them,
like classical music or mathematics. But to be a major creator,
you have to invent something, and that's not the same
skill as being a prodigy.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
No, that's that's a very good point. In investigating from
my book and Gifted and when I investigated savants and
prodigies and other high forms of talent that seem to
appear out of nowhere. I try to really get to
the bottom of it and really just understand where does
giftedness come from?

Speaker 3 (13:48):
You know?

Speaker 2 (13:49):
And it does seem like there's a lot of what
I call implicit learning involved. There's a lot of soaking
up of regularities and patterns. A lot of these demeans
that you're referring to have have repeated regularities, and that
we have an on pus learning system that evolved.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
I would I would agree with that. I mean performers
in classical music or math, prodigies or drawing. Giftedness is
all these children are operating in a well structured domain.
And I can say that for drawing giftedness because kids
who are prodigious and drawing, they're drawing super realistically. There

(14:33):
are very few that that draw non representationally that we
would consider prodigies. There are a few, but these are
well structured domains. And so yes, I think these kids
that do pick things up easily. In fact, I say
they learn differently from their peers because they really teach themselves.

(14:55):
They don't need to be explicitly taught very much. You know.
I studied one child who learned to read at two,
and the way he learned to read was he asked
his mother to read him the same book every day
for one week, pointing to the words as she read.
And then he chose another book and they went through
the same routine, and after that he had just cracked
the code of reading. That's implicit learning. But if you

(15:18):
take an ill structured domain like biology or you know,
writing novels, you don't very You really don't find prodigies
in these ill structured domains. It takes a long time.
Or composing even composing music, it takes that comes later.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, I'm just I wish we had we really could
wrap our heads around more about the role of genetics
in this stuff, because I don't think the heritability twin
studies tell us much about the mechanism involved. It just
tells us that there is a heritability efficient. But I
want something deeper. I want to know the mechanism by
which proteins that are coded can, somehow, through gene expression,

(16:10):
cause such high levels of expertise which are not directly
encoded in the genes. There's no genetic blueprint for some
of these evolutionary novel things that that these don't mean
that these producties are earning that were never that never
operated on evolutionary timescale, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, I'm not sure that we could answer that question
for the genetics of anything except perhaps a disease, right,
but something very specific. I mean, do we know the
mechanisms by which genetics affects intelligence? You know, the biochemical mechanisms.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
All we know is that that many, many interacting genes
are involved.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
That's all we know exactly, right.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
But anybody that says there's no genetics involved in extremely
gifted to kids is just fooling themselves because it has
to be. There has to be an eight component. Yeah,
but not all of these children have first degree relatives
who have that kind of talent, but they often do.

(17:11):
One child that I'm studying right now is very gifted
and drawing. Neither of his parents draw, but he has
a grandfather who became an architect. And I spoke to
the grandfather and he said he drew precociously realistically at
a very early age.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
So that's something that stuck out for me when I
read Deven Henry Feldman's book on prodigies. I'm sure that
you and him are have talked before, Yes, yeah, and
he's such a great guy as a human as well
as a researcher. But in his book that really stuck
out to me that a lot of these prodigies did

(17:46):
have someone going back even far enough where you say, ah,
the great great great great grandfather.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yes. And also to get to the non genetic part,
the ones who Flora usually have a parent or an
aunt or an uncle or somebody close to them who's
encouraging and enabling them. Because if you grow up with
no support system for your unusual gift and it's not

(18:14):
recognized in school, and your family doesn't recognize it or
they don't care about it, it may just die out.
I remember in my son's school when he was growing up,
there was a child prodigy. I thought in drawing he
was just amazing. And I told his father that and
he said, I'm not interested. He was an immigrant from Haiti,
and the father said, I'm not interested in his drawing.

(18:35):
I want to know how he doesn't math. I could
understand his point. He wanted a son to grow up
and earn a living. But I don't know what happened
to that child, but I may it may well, that's
the kind of child which may just stop gir awing,
who may just stop drawing because it's not encouraged.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
That's a bit heartbreaking. Yeah, when anyone, whenever, anyone has
a passion, at whatever age.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Some people overcome their parent. Leonard Bernstein supposedly his parents
wanted him. His father wanted him to go into some
business that he wasn't in the slightest interested in, and
he pursued. He just did what he wanted to do.
But he's not your he's not your average adult who
used to be a child prodigy. Though I'm sure he

(19:21):
was a prodigy. You know, he's one of the select few.
You have to have a certain personality to make the
leap from prodigy to creator. You have to be very
strong willed and really have a desire to shake things
up and to do something new. And that's a kind
of personality characteristic.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, that's an additional source of genetic variation that yeah, yeah,
you have had that into the interacting mix, right. Yeah,
well it's let's just think this through for a second.
So are there is there a benefit to because you
can kick off that rage to master process at any

(19:58):
age in your life. I want to start that with
that postulate, so you can be seventy years old and
suddenly become captivated by something. It seems to me what
happens with a lot of these prodigies is that, you know,
while other two year olds are out there trying to
you know, like screaming and trying to get food and water,

(20:18):
there are some two year olds who are trying to
consume books and like water, you know, and and and
that is so that's that's what is an anomalists anomalists
about about prodigies. But they still are starting, you know,
that they're starting the mastery process like anyone would start
the mastery process who hasn't maybe a little bit of

(20:39):
a knack for something. Is there a benefit? So I'm
not gonna actually ask my question. Is there a benefit
with what we know about you know, narrow periods uh
where where we can soak up knowledge at certain ages
easier than other ages? Is that? Why is that? Why
does that help explain a little bit why starting with

(21:02):
that rage to master at a very very young age
might bring better long term dividends than when you start
later in life.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Well, of course I can't answer that question scientifically, but
I can just speculate that doing that, there's something very
special about the young child's mind and the way the
young child, typical or gifted learns so effortlessly and rapidly.
Think of how children learn language. So I think when

(21:32):
a child is showing a rage to master at a
very early age, they're consuming a huge amount of information
and processing it in their minds, and it may well
lead to them being better eventually in their domain. Then
somebody who starts doing this in adulthood I mean, of course,
or in late adulthood, and of course the child has

(21:54):
the benefit of all the years ahead of that child,
whereas if you start something late, you have less time
to develop that talent.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Well, that's assuming that you live a long life. Yes,
you know, every everything's just I feel like everything's kind
of like up to luck.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
There's a lot of luck involved, a lot of luck
in the genetic and in combination and environmental And that's
one of the things David Feldman talks about, is the
the co occurrence of many things that lead to a
child prodigy.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
That's right, Well, how how important is that co occurrence
of IQ. I know that's a very contentious topic, and
one which have you heard of Howard Gardner's work?

Speaker 1 (22:47):
You know what? Oh, you know, he's my husband.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
I know, I know, I'm joking. Okay, yeah, I was
going to say, have you heard of your husband's work?
But then I thought i'd you know, so he's, you know,
obviously done a lot of work trying to expand our
news of what intelligence means. But I think that he's
I think he would admit that he's. He's often misunderstood.
His theory is often misunderstood. You know, he's he's still

(23:11):
he's you know, he expanded multiple intelligences, but still each
of those intelligences have their own giftedness and talent associated
and there's still individual differences. It's just amazing to me
how people take his theory like it meant therefore we
all can be geniuses, all.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Children are gifted. And he never said that.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
He never said that. I get it. I get him,
I get him, and I understand his theory. So when
you're in your own work with prodigies, to what extent
do you really see that multiple intelligences play out?

Speaker 1 (23:47):
You know?

Speaker 2 (23:47):
With your own eyes.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Well, I think if you look at the domains where
we see prodigies, they are they constitute some of the intelligence, logical, mathematical.
We see mathematical prodigies. There's linguistic, and we see kids
who speak early and read early, and there's musical, and
we see that there's visual spatial and that I think

(24:09):
I would put our visual art prodigies in there. What
about the other intelligences? Do we find prodigies there? I don't.
People haven't really reported prodigies in interpersonal like understanding other
people or intrapt personal like understanding yourself. Those may be

(24:29):
harder to detect. And there's no reason to think that there.
I mean, I know some children are precocious and empathy.
I heard about one child who used to cry when
people were in her family were sad because she was
so or she cried from sad music because she was
so overwhelmed by other people's sadness. You know, that could

(24:54):
be some kind of interpersonal intelligence. And as for nat ruralism,
you know, the naturalist intelligence, probably Charles Darwin was a
prodigy in naturalist intelligence. He went around collecting beetles of
all kinds and was fascinated with them, but we don't

(25:15):
really hear reports of kids in these less structured domains.
And that doesn't mean they're not out there, we just
don't haven't had reports of them. Now, there is a
myth that a gifted child is gifted in everything, and
that does actually go against the idea of multiple intelligences,
which argues that these intelligence are separate from one another.

(25:41):
That doesn't mean you can't have all of them and
be at a high level. It just means that you
can also have just one and not be at a
high level in others. And so that comes out back
to the question of IQ. In the visual arts, there
are several pieces of data showing that kids who and
adults too who are visual artists do not have above

(26:06):
average intelligences. Of course some do, but on average they
don't IQ. Yeah, IQ, because yes IQ, thanks for correcting me.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
If you.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Remember the I. If you if you think about savants
who are low in IQ and also autistic, they can
do amazing things in visual arts and in memory and
in music. And people like to say, well, they're not

(26:43):
they're they're just like machines. They're not creative. But there
have been some studies showing that actually musical savants are
they are doing their improvising, they can improvise, They're not
just machines. Clearly, these kinds of talents can exist without
IQ with that a high IQ. Now as for math
and verbal and linguistic intelligences, well those are really part

(27:06):
of the IQ test, so I doubt you could have
You might have a savant prodigy in math who doesn't
have a high IQ. But what savant prodigies do is calculation.
That's a very narrow area of mathematics. But if you
have a child that's really good at grasping mathematical concepts,
it's likely that that child will have a higher than
an average IQ, since IQ involves numerical reasoning. So I

(27:31):
think it depends on the domain. There's a lot of
controversy about music too, whether musical talent musically gifted children
have a hireman an average IQ. There's some evidence yes,
But there's also some evidence that children who are have
a high IQ tend to gravitate to music. Maybe they
like the structured part of it. But we don't know

(27:53):
anything about kids who are musically talented in rock and
roll or garage bands, so it may be that kids
who want to do classical music, maybe that those kids
come to it because they have i Q or it's
correlated with it. But we can't just say musical giftedness
is correlated with higher IQ because we haven't studied We've
only studied one kind of musical giftedness, which is classical performance,

(28:17):
classical music performance.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Why do people get so fixated on IQ? I think
there's this kind of thought that, well, anything that's not
IQ is learnable, whereas IQ is fixed. But that's like,
that's not true out of look if you if you
don't have the arts gene as well.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
And also IQ is somewhat learnable because we know that
our IQ scores have gone up over the over.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
The decades, that's true flin effect.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
And you know that children's IQ drops after their summer
vacation and has to go back up again during school.
So there certainly are environmental.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
Influences, that's right.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
They are both biological and environmental influences and everything and
every psychological trait. Get over it, people get over it already,
move on because people got so fixated on on IQ.
So I'm really glad that you you know, I'm just
going down this list of realities and myths, and you've really,

(29:28):
you're really organically covering so many of them. So thank you.
One that I think a lot of people think about
when they think about gifted children, they think of them
as psychological and social misfits. What has been your own
experience and working with these kinds of kids.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
I think that I would make a distinction between moderately
gifted and severely gifted. The more extreme the gift, the
more social problems the child has. But it's not because
the child is gifted. It's because the child is so alone,
because there's not others like that child for that child
to associate with. And so I think if that child

(30:09):
were in a class of other kids just as gifted,
they wouldn't have problems. I think the problem comes because
you're there's so few like you. And I always say
to parents, the most important thing you can do for
your child is find that if you have a prodigy,
is to find at least one other child like your

(30:30):
child so they don't feel so isolated.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
There was a a researcher, her last name was Hollingsworth,
who really yes, she talked. She she wrote you know
above one e d I Q you know kind of
children she studied, She found that a lot of their
social awkwardness disappeared when she allowed them to kind of
talk to each other. Now, I think that, like, on

(30:59):
the one hand, this could be kind of like an
excuse for my awkwardness, But I also think we can
we need to also be careful to not get into
that mindset. We're like, oh, the reason why I feel
awkward around ordinary civilians is because they're just not at
my level of intelligence. Now, I don't want to get
into that mindset, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Right?

Speaker 2 (31:23):
So, how can we you know, how can we raise
these kids by being honest about you know, Wow, there
is a certain you know, it's really good to be
around like minded and really like minded you know literally
literally like minded people. But also to not look down

(31:43):
on others, not think that because you know, because you
have a particularly high Q, that you're better than others. Right,
these are seemed to be lessons that we should instill
in these children. Do you agree?

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yes? And I think that that's why I don't particularly
like the label gifted or prodigy to be used with
the child. I think it's much because that can lead
to feelings that they're better than other people. I would
just say, you're really good at this, and you really
love this, and other people are good at other things.
But if your child is feeling, you know, like bullied

(32:16):
because he's so different, or just lonely because he doesn't
have anybody to talk to because nobody's on his wavelength,
that's when I say to parents, try to find one
other child. Now with the Internet, there are all kinds
of more They are more opportunities, but it's not the
same as face to face. You can't have play dates.
But I would say that as kids get older, the

(32:37):
problem is lessened because when you go to high school
there are more opportunity, opportunities to take advanced classes, and
you might find other kids in those classes. And certainly
when you go to college, people self select into colleges
which are of you know, which some colleges demand extremely
high ability, so they when they come to if you

(32:59):
go to you know, am I T Or Harvard or
Princeton or Yale or Stanford, you're going to find other
Not that everybody there is like that, but you're certainly
going to find more atypical kids at the high end,
and therefore you're less likely to be alone, but in
kindergarten and in elementary school it can be really difficult.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Well, it sounds to me like you advocate an acceleration
grade skipping program above a pull out classroom gifted program.
Is that fair?

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah? I think the pullout program is like a band aid.
It may be nice because kids meet other kids who
are gifted that they might not be gifted in the
same area doesn't so it might be good socially, but
I don't think it's going to help their board of
in school, so I would ideally it would be great
if there could be instead of grade skipping, there could

(33:50):
be domain specific skipping, so that let's say you have
a math whiz, why can't that child go to during
regular math class go up to the math class of
kids three years older. Of course, schools have to be
organized by this so that they have vertical organization of classes,
so that all the math classes are at the same time.

(34:12):
I think that would be a nice solution. I think
that would be much better than taking a child and
putting them in a grade three or four years older
in all areas. I do know of several children whose
parents have managed to figure that out, and that kids
were in a school which had an elementary school and

(34:34):
a middle school and a high school on three different campuses.
This child was busted to the high school for math
class and then bust back when he was in elementary
and middle school.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
Well, I agree about pull out programs. I think often
there's more money that school districts spend on identification than programming,
and they get to the point where they spend ninety
nine percent of their money for finding the right IQ test,
and then they just stick them all together and say,

(35:09):
go be gifted, right, And that doesn't seem very promising.
I also like the idea of elevating the standards for everyone.
What's wrong with that? What's wrong with you?

Speaker 1 (35:21):
I think it's great, it's just pie in the sky.
But that's the first thing I would say, and I
do say this in my book. Elevate the standards for everybody,
expect more. And then kids who are just moderately gifted,
you know, they maybe one or two years in advance,
maybe they'll be just fine, they won't be bored, but
so you still have the issue for the extremes. And

(35:43):
by the way, even in schools for the gifted, and
I studied one school in California called the Nueva School,
and I wrote about that in my book. Even there,
parents of the extreme gifted complained that there were too
many moderately gifted kids and their kid was still too extreme.
They were still born in school. And when you have
that problem, then I think you have to be flexible

(36:06):
and give that child more advanced work, individual educational programs
worked out for individual children.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah, I like that. I like that. It just seems
like at the end of the day, we're just talking
about helping all children self actualize in their own way, yes,
and to the best of their potential. And I kind
of like that framing a little bit better. That's how
I kind of frame it. I just I'm not in
love with these labels like moderately gifted, exemplarly get what

(36:36):
is it?

Speaker 3 (36:37):
What does it?

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Ex severely disease severely sound makes it sound like a
disease severely severely you know, gifted? Because gifted. This is
not an essence, right, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong,
But it's not an essence of a person. It's a
characteristic of a human, of a human. You know, they're

(36:57):
humans first, yes, and it's.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
A continuum it's a continuum, you know, yeah, from typical
to more and more and more gifted. And you know
when where's the cutoff for a prodigy? You know? David
Feldon says it's when they can do adult work by
age thirteen or below. That's his cutoff. I don't really

(37:22):
care whether we can classify a child as a prodigy
or an almost prodigy. I think we just have to
think of this as a continuum. And if children are
not getting adequately stimulated in school, something needs to be
done because we don't want them to get bored and
turned off of school. And I know a child right
now who's in second grade who's experiencing that, and I

(37:45):
worry about it.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
I worry about that a lot too. And I worry
about the pressure to achieve that these kids feel, and
the shame, the shame they may feel.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
That's right, and that's why I don't think it's a
good idea for parents to put their kids on the
public stage, whether it's performing music or being on Spelling
Bee programs or whiz Kid programs on TV. I just
do not think this is good for children. It's stressful,
and it may make them feel they're better than others,

(38:20):
and it may make them feel like that's what their
parents love them for and nothing else.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
That's a great point. That's a really, really truly great point. Yeah,
it's almost like there's this sense that a lot of
the kids feel like the only reason why they have
worth in this world is because of their talent.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Right exactly, and that they should stay in that area
as they grow up because they have to kind of
make a commitment to it. And that's not fair either.
They may well go want to go into something completely different.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
I mean, one of the kids that I studied in
my book was a math prodigy. I called him a
number boy because he called himself that. He's now in
law school.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Can you be accomplished, not even accomplished, but can you, like,
can you become gifted? I'm not saying prodigies because I
understand prodigies has a specific age limit. You can't be
a fifty year old prodigy. I get that, I get that,
But can you fifty year Can you be fifty year

(39:32):
old and suddenly become gifted at something?

Speaker 1 (39:35):
Well, maybe you didn't realize that you had a gift
in some area and then you find that area and
you find that you're gifted in it. I think it's
I don't believe that you can work in music all
your life and then suddenly become and not be more
than typical, and then suddenly at age fifty become gifted
in music. Because I do think of gifted as an

(39:57):
as part of you. It's not something think you said
it's it's not an essence, but uh, what is it?
What would it mean to say you've become gifted? If
we're saying that giftedness has a genetic component, a biological component.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
Well, the way that it's often presented in these talent
is Overrated books is these best selling books, you know,
like Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, et cetera. They the way
that they view that situation is that what this is
what they'll say. They'll say, what appears like some innate
talent is really so many years of hard work and

(40:38):
that and that what you don't see is all the
boring tasks that they do and all the hard work
they do. So that's their narrative they're putting forward about
the situation.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
That's when I'm right, and what I'm saying is that
it takes any typical child is not going to work
that hard. I mean, what typical child is going to
sit down at the piano and practice for four hours day?

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Leave an adult. I'm tking about adults too, yeah, fifty
year olds. I'm talking about adults as well, Like.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
Fifty Okay, what typical adult is going to do that?
You have to you have to experience that. It has
to come easily to you, and you have to get
flow from it. And if it's not something that you
particularly get good at, you can work at it. But
I think working hard without talent is not going to
get you that far. In my book, I have a
child who drew trains obsessively as a very young child,

(41:30):
pre K, and his trains did get better, but they
were nothing on the level of what child prodigies in
art do. So I think it's it's just yeah, that's
can work hard on things, but you're not going to
get to the level. You're not going to get to
be a Yo yom not just by working hard. You've
got to have some kind of proclivity to music.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Logical mike mike drop, mike drop. That's an expression they
used to say, you drop the mic, you last, you
have the last word on the situation that's.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
You want me to turn the mic off.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
There's an expression, there's okay, okay, Obama's Obama's last speech.
He he did his mic drop he's he he said
his last thing that was amazing, dropped the mic ellen. Okay,
of course, Well so that is amazing what you just said,

(42:33):
and so so profound because there really that really isn't
that the majority narrative. That really isn't the majority narrative now.
But I will say this, and uh, I'm sure you'll agree.
It's possible to have the absorption and interest not have

(42:56):
the talent, and that can still carry you pretty far. Now,
maybe there are limits on how far that can take you.
But you know, I've recently gotten into magic at this age.
I'm older, you know, but I've gone down the rabbit hole,
and I don't know if I have a talent for it.
I don't know, but I tell you I love it,
and I just get in the flow state by trying

(43:18):
to master master all sorts of methods that I'm learning.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Well, you know, we don't know anything about prodigies in magic,
but I would guess that if you're really drawn to
it and you're working hard, at it, and of course
all self driven. No teacher is giving you this as
an assignment. We do have a talent. I'm not sure
what intelligence is it takes to be a good musician magician,
but certainly inter personal would have to be very important

(43:46):
because you have to be able to fool people. M
and maybe spatial because you have to be very deft
with your hands.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Psychology too, Yes, right, you have to.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
But that's what I meant by inter personally. You have
to kind of understand other people's minds and understand how
you want them to believe what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Right, right, that's right, that's right. Yeah, I'm a I'm
a mentalist, which is a form of magic where you
read people's minds. Oh, it's called mentalism. I love it.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Oh yeah, you pretend you get people to believe you're
reading their minds, or you really do read their minds.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
I think it's a combination.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Well, you have to pay very careful attention to the
little subtle cues, leakages in their face, you know, leakages
of their If they're they're tapping their foot very quickly
while they're smiling, you might think there that that's a
sign that's leaking out of them. That shows they're really stressed.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
That's right, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. But back
to you, back to you here. You've written two additional
books about arts education and an Art in the Psychology
of Art. One is called an Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse,
Art Education from Colonial Time to a Promising Feature, and
How art Works a psychological exploration. So I just want

(45:08):
to be thinking, Okay, studio amazing, Well, your body of
work is incredible. So what what makes something art?

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Well?

Speaker 2 (45:18):
What a question? That is right?

Speaker 1 (45:19):
What are the first chance? I know, I know it's
my first chapter. And how art works? And that is
that basically, don't confuse the question of what is art
with what is good art? If I put it in
a museum, it is functioning as art. You may think
it's junk, but it is called art. So whatever art is,

(45:40):
it's something that we set aside and put a special
put it in a special place, and ask people to
respond to it. And it's a socially constructed category. You know,
it's not like tree, which is a biological category. It's
something that humans have constructed.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
Well, yes, I mean there's so many thousands of years
where all we had were aesthetic can axes that were
they got more and more aesthetic. But that's that's it
didn't dawn on until culture was created. It didn't dawn
on us. We could do more with our creativity than
more ornamental.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
Hand in don't forget the cave paintings.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
That's true that that came a little bit later, but no,
you're absolutely right, you're absolute right. And also the cave
paintings show our our human drive for significance because you
see a lot of a lot of people, you know
that you see there they're signing their their names in
the way that they have at the time, you know,
trying to get some posterity, you know. So there's also

(46:39):
that drive that's shown in the paintings.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
But are you saying the cave paintings were signed.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
Well, what you do see our handprints.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yes, and sometimes considered the artist's signature.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
That's the way I personally, That's why I said, in
their own way, you know, signed in their own and
whatever that meant in there that I think that's the
that humans were trying to get out, you know, like
the Chavelet Cave. You know, they found all.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
These Yes, I've seen those.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Well, you know, people have debated the function of those
cave paintings for a long time, and I don't think
we're ever going to know. Is it to inspire people
to go out for the hunt? Is it to make
themselves admired so they'll get a mate? You know, that's
what evolutionary psychologists might say. So we can speculate, but
certainly the artistic urge was there from the very beginning

(47:31):
of being human.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, that's that's for sure. Why do we seek out
and even share it sorrow and fear from art when
we don't go out of our way to experience those
things in real life.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Yeah, that's a very puzzling question psychologically and philosophically, but
we certainly do. So we can look at a painting
depicting war like Wernica by Picasso and think this is
powerful and even beauty full, and it makes us also
confront the sadness and the painting. But we don't mind

(48:07):
doing that. And you know, Winfrey manning House has written
about this from he was the former head of thenox
Plank Institute in Germany. We put an esthetic frame around
it so it's not happening to us, so there's a
certain distancing, aesthetic distancing, and so we can savor these emotions,

(48:29):
these negative emotions, because we know that they exist. They
exist in our lives personally, and so we want to
understand them. And we can find beauty in the formal
properties of the arts that convey sadness. Plenty of very
beautiful sad music that makes you feel sad, but it

(48:50):
also is beautiful. So I think it's it's the concept
of being moved. We really like to feel moved, and
we get moved, particularly by sad art, by tragic art,
because it's so strong and it gives us a feeling
of meaning and understanding. It's it's kind of surprising that

(49:18):
humans will pay money to feel sad, or to even
feel horror. I might feel horror by looking at Guernica.
Have you run away from that in your own life,
because it's not distanced, it's happening to you.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
It's true. Does art help us increase our empathy towards
others that are very different from ourselves.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
That's a really interesting question, and it's a very feel
good claim that art makes us more empathetic. I'm skeptical, though,
I have one study showing something very specific in that area.
But I'm skeptical because there's so many examples of people
who are not empathetic who understood art and loved art.

(50:04):
And the best example is the Nazis. They loved art,
they collected it, and they listened to music, classical music,
and they loved Wagner. And yet look what they showed
no empathy. So my feeling what the study that I
did on this, I said, I think we can't just

(50:26):
we have to look at a specific kind of art
about a specific issue and it might lead to empathy.
So what we looked at were a story about immigrants
who had been brought over as children and who were
not did not have citizenship, and they were living in

(50:48):
huge amount of stress, and we showed and we wanted
to find out whether people who read that book as
opposed to newspaper clippings about the plight of immigrants, whether
the book people would actually change their attitudes towards undocumented
immigrants in a more empathetic direction. And we were able

(51:11):
to show that, but we did not show that it
changed their behavior because we couldn't test their behavior. All
we showed is it changed their attitudes, and that lasted
for several months because we tested them again and their
attitudes remained change. But that doesn't mean that art in

(51:32):
general can do this. It may be specific to narrative
art about a specific issue, and maybe it can change
your mind about that issue. But I think it's very,
very difficult to change people's minds towards and make them
more empathetic by a one shot thing. There has to
be a long process, and it probably has to involve

(51:55):
talking and discussing with the say children who are being
shown artworks. There's no good evidence that looking at works
of art improves people's empathy. What works of visual art
or listening to sad music improves their empathy? Those kind
of general empathy. The only thing I can pinpoint is

(52:17):
attitude change in the direction of empathy. If it's if
the artwork is connected to that attitude change.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Well, I really appreciate that honesty, but that makes a
lot of common sense as well. You know, context matters
is basically what you're saying, right, is art making therapeutic?
What do you think of art? I mean, our art
therapy is a whole business.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Yeah, and there is quite a bit of evidence on that,
and I know, you know, Jen Drake and her her
work has shun her that making art, even very simple,
making a simple drawing, improves mood into a more positive direction,
whether it's children or adults, and that may be part

(53:09):
of the basis of art therapy. Of course, art therapy
is different because it involves a therapist who's talking to
you about your art and interpreting it. And but what
Jen has shown is simply making art improves mood for
at least some amount of time, and that it improves
well being. She also showed that people have turned to

(53:30):
the arts during the COVID pandemic, and I think that
certainly tells you something about people trying to find comfort.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
I'm still getting a little I'm still getting a little
hung up on what art is and what art isn't.
What isn't art? What isn't art is? Why is science
not art?

Speaker 1 (53:51):
Okay, what isn't art? This glass here? If I put
this in a museum and gave it a title like
glass half full or whatever, yes that's art. You may
think it's of no interest at all, but it is art.

(54:13):
But by itself it's just an object. Now. Nelson Goodman,
who was the founder of Project Zero, was very interested
in the difference between symbols used in the arts and
symbols used in science. And he said, you could take
the same zigzag line, and in the context of a

(54:33):
electro cardiogram cardiograph, that would be a scientific symbol. But
if you take that same line and put a frame
around it and put in a museum, people start attending
to certain features that they didn't attend to in the
scientific graph. They attend to the color of the line,
the texture, whether there are any variations in thickness. So

(54:54):
he called that repleteness, that the symbol becomes replete when
we think of as art, but we look right through
it when they think of it as science, because we're
not interested in the texture of the line. We could
translate that graph into numbers and get exactly the same information.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
I see, I think, I get it. I mean, well, so,
but I mean science can be art, then, I mean
data itself can be art in the right context, in
the right presentation, I should say, in the right presentation
of it.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
I mean, if you put your scatter plot in yes, yes,
then people will The argument is that then people will
actually look at differently and they will start to perceive
properties that were not important? Got it when they were
looking at it as just a plain scatter plot.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Got it. Thank you for giving me the clearst answer
to that question of why is science not art? Anyone's
ever given to me in my entire life. So thank you.
And why is that important? Why is art important in schools?
Why are they cutting arts programs? And what are your
thoughts on what we should be doing about that?

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Well, of course I think that's a very sad thing
that we're cutting art in schools, or that they're always
the first thing to be cut when there's a budget crunch,
because art is important for people's well being, and I
think it's There are all kinds of reasons. One, it's
important for students' well being. Two, students might be talented

(56:22):
in an art form and never know it and may
not be good in academic subjects. And if there's art
in school, they may discover their talent and realize that
they could go on in a career somehow related to
visual art or music. And the other reason is that
art is a fundamental part of being human, and if

(56:46):
kids in school should be I think that schools should
be teaching kids about the most important things that humans
have ever done. And that includes science, but it also
includes the arts, and if you leave that out, I
think they're getting a lopsided education. Yeah, it's also the
only it's probably the only area in school where they're

(57:07):
doing something which doesn't have right and wrong.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Answers, divergent thinking.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
Yeah, pash forbid.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Now, not all art education is creative. There's some very
bad art education. And in our several books called Studio Thinking,
where we have new editions of them, but we called
it studio Thinking the Real Value of Visual Art Education,
and we study the best teachers and visual very strong
teachers in visual art, and we found that these teachers

(57:38):
were teaching their kids artistic dispositions or artistic ways of thinking,
learning to look really carefully, learning to express themselves, learning
to reflect on what they're doing and take criticism and revise.
Very important thinking dispositions that can be taught in strong
arts education programs. And it may well be that those

(58:02):
skills transfer to other domains, like you may become a
better observer in science if you learn to observe closely
in art. But that should never be the justification for
having art classes, because art should be considered important in itself.
We don't talk about the value of math because it
might transfer to understanding musical skills. We just assume that

(58:23):
math is important on its own.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Love that. Well, you make a good case for why
we shouldn't cut these programs in schools, and and concominantly,
And I don't think I just invented that word concominantly,
but I don't think it's a word. But anyway, similarly,
along similar lines, we shouldn't cut gifted programs for similar reasons. Yep,

(58:47):
because we have a lot of kids who are going
to be even if they don't become the most high
achieving artist in the world, they still are going to
contribute great, great things to culture and even art class.

Speaker 1 (59:01):
I would say in art class, you may not need
a gifted art class because kids work at their own
pace in art.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
Cool and good point.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
So yeah, good point.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
I was just trying to tie everything up in a
neat bow at the end of this interview. Well, let's
not cut gift You will agree, though, let's not cut
arts programs. Let's not cut gifted programs.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
Absolutely, But I think that most parents would say, yeah,
let's not cut art programs. But if you say to them,
would you rather have art classes cut or would you
rather have math classes cut? They'll say, Matt, I'd rather
have the art classes cut. But generally there's public approval
of keeping art in our schools. But the idea of

(59:44):
gifted programs is very controversial because people worry that it's
keeping out minorities, and unfortunately that may sometimes happen. So
we have to search hard for kids from underrepresented groups
to be put into these programs. But it's an unpopular
view because it's maybe considered elitist.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
All right, the answer is to expand the search, not
limit women excellence exactly. Ellen Winter, thank you so much
for being on my show today and for the legendary
work that you've done in the field and for personally
inspiring me to do what I do.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
Thank you so much, Scott, it's been a pleasure talking
to you, ask great questions.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
Glad we finally got this one in the can.