Gifted Children Quotes

We demand: … an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand … the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education … We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents … The government must undertake the improvement of public health – by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor …. a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good.

The great aim of our education is to bring out of the child who comes into our hands every faculty that he brings with him, and then to try to win that child to turn all his abilities, his powers, his capacities, to the helping and serving of the community which is a part.

At 11, following comprehensive psychiatric and cognitive assessments, an educational psychiatrist appointed by my high school recommended that I attend a school for 'gifted and talented' children.

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

All children have gifts, some open them at different times.

You cannot imagine how it spoils one to have been a child prodigy.

What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts and cultivate these. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school, but a different way of looking at the world and learning.

High expectations weren't nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then - children weren't fawned over from an early age as 'gifted' and groomed for a prizewinning future; self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself.

When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.

The thing with kids is that you only get one chance to do it right. It's really important to share their gifts while they're discovering them. That's why spelling bees are such a compelling story. They stimulate them intellectually, they awaken their competitive spirit, but it's fun. There's something fun about words.

Child prodigy is a curse because you've got all those terrible possibilities.

There are many cases in which gifted children have done great things without special school programs. There are also gifted kids who have been to special schools and achieved nothing that has benefited the world as a whole. Without solid evidence, I have no confidence that funding school programs for the intellectually gifted would do more good than the most cost-effective programs to help people in extreme poverty.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

My parents homeschooled my sister and me for many years. Why? Because the local school insisted that I, being three, should go to preschool, and my sister, being five, should go to kindergarten. The problem? You learn your alphabet in preschool, and I was already reading chapter books.

People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine.

If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

We are all born with wonderful gifts. We use these gifts to express ourselves, to amuse, to strengthen, and to communicate. We begin as children to explore and develop our talents, often unaware that we are unique, that not everyone can do what we're doing!

Certainly parents play a crucial role in the lives of individuals who are intellectually gifted or creatively talented. But this role is not one of active instruction, of teaching children skills,... rather, it is support and encouragement parents give children and the intellectual climate that they create in the home which seem to be the critical factors.

The smaller and younger kids are, the more patient you have to be. But if they're gifted, then it's a wonderful present that you're given by having a child like that in your film... more so than in the case of actors because, for example, if you ask them to play a lion, they don't then play a lion, they actually are a lion. So, a gifted child is something very special. On the other hand, if a child has no gifts in that way it's absolutely hopeless and there's nothing you can do!

There are lots of different interpretations of the word 'prodigy.' My own is of someone who is talented and tries to help other children. So in that respect I could be called one, although I don't think I'll go off the rails.

Plenty of clever children have to pretend to be not clever or else they get bullied by the thick.

Any gifted child can potentially get in real trouble because of the way they are handled.