Interesting Quotes, Vol. 5
Excerpts from "Theories and the Good" by Grant and Piechowski
In November 2022, I attended the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. I participated in two sessions—“Risks of High Achievement” with Nicole Mattingly and “Overexcitabilities: Important, Irrelevant, or Imaginary?” a panel with two academics from gifted education, Drs. Anne Rinn and Erin Miller.
The reading I did to prepare for those sessions is informing this post today because, you guessed it, I wrote these quotes in my journal while preparing for NAGC.
Readers of this post outside of gifted education may not be aware of this fact, but there has been some controversy around overexcitability and Dąbrowski’s theory in the field. As I first studied the theory seriously in 2016, papers that questioned the relevance of overexcitability in the gifted were coming out. At the same time I was dedicating myself to studying the theory, there was a serious push in the field to dismiss it as pseudoscience.
Remember that I came to the theory thanks to my exploration of being gifted and disabled. What were my disabilities? That’s what I was trying to figure out. I had already considered myself mentally ill for more than twenty years. Discovering answers for myself in the gifted literature and realizing that I wasn’t doomed to be a lifelong mental patient has obviously changed my life. That’s why I do the Positive Disintegration podcast with Emma, and it’s why I’m writing this post for you.
At NAGC last fall, it seemed to me that what needed to be made clear about Dąbrowski’s theory is that it gives us a framework for understanding certain outlier experiences in a way that doesn’t exist elsewhere. It’s a theory that emerged from Dąbrowski’s practice, research, and lived experience, and expecting to study and understand it from a strictly quantitative perspective doesn’t make sense.
Why are we still talking about this man and his work? Because his theory remains relevant and vital for so many of us.
Dr. Michael M. Piechowski first introduced overexcitabilities and Dąbrowski’s theory to the gifted field in 1979. During his career, he’s done more than talk only about that one part of the theory. One of the things that Michael has done is provide an understanding and appreciation of the qualitative differences experienced by gifted individuals who are also intense. Not all gifted people are intense, but Michael and Dąbrowski have provided a rare mirror outside of the deficit perspective for those of us who are.
One of the papers that gave me life and energy while preparing for NAGC was “Theories and the Good: Toward Child-Centered Gifted Education” by Barry A. Grant1 and Michael M. Piechowski.
I found this paper to be very inspiring while Nicole and I worked on the Risks of High Achievement session. Here are some of the excerpts I wrote out in my journal:
“By pushing conventional success and achievement (e.g., good grades, high status, high paying jobs, stability), we push children away from who they are. What we need to do is simple: Stop pressuring children to perform and achieve on our terms, stop weighing children’s worth in the currency of accomplishments, stop killing intrinsic motivation, and give up the fear that children will be unsuccessful. Allow children their own route to self-actualization, otherwise no self-actualization is possible.” (p. 4)
This paper speaks to me as a parent and a grown-up gifted child. Even “Give up the fear that children will be unsuccessful” is so powerful. Too many parents (especially of gifted children) worry about their children's future success instead of being present with the children they’re living with today.
“The most important question we can ask is: what is the good for children?”
Yes, that is the most important question. How do parents and educators think we’re doing on this point? Are we designing schools and curricula based on “the good for children”? How about the good for neurodivergent children? Reading this paper from 1999 felt like a breath of fresh air.
“Being child-centered means respecting children’s autonomy, providing experiences that enable children to follow their passions and be self-actualizing, and seeking to understand things from the child’s point of view. The strongest argument for child-centeredness is that it regards children as ends, not means. It provides conditions for children to flourish, become themselves, and it does not impose a way of being on them.” (p. 8)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point readers to our podcast episode with Marni Kammersell on Self-Directed Education. Some of us have opted out of sending our children to school to prioritize their autonomy and provide the best conditions for them to flourish and be themselves.
“The models and theories set to maximize giftedness regard gifted children much as farmers regard cows and pigs, with an eye to getting them to produce more. They do not describe how giftedness works—how the gifted think, feel, and experience.” (p. 8)
Giftedness is more than test scores and what’s produced in the classroom. The inner experience of giftedness matters, which is something we talk about regularly on the podcast. It won’t be long before I work on an Interesting Quotes post tackling this issue and sharing thoughts about the qualitative aspects of giftedness.
“Theories and models that were not designed to address giftedness from within the experience of being gifted simply are not equipped to help us understand it. Our current theories of intelligence do not do this either.” (p. 9)
Even though Dąbrowski’s theory isn’t only for the gifted, there’s no denying that he provided a window into the experience of giftedness that many of us continue to resonate with more than 40 years after his death.
Before I wrap this post up, I want to share something that Dr. Sarabeth Berk created while attending our “Risks” session last year. I’ve never had anyone make something like this during a presentation, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share it here.
Here’s the reference for the excerpts from this post:
Grant, B.A., & Piechowski, M.M. (1999). Theories and the good: Toward child-centered gifted education. Gifted Child Quarterly, 43(1), 4-12.
Dr. Barry A. Grant was Michael’s graduate student at Northwestern University in the 1980s, and they are still close friends. Barry published an excellent response to the papers from 2016 that I mentioned in the post, which you can download here.