Gifted and Talented Education (GATE): If You're Smart Enough, You Don't Have to Play by the Same Rules
When I was in elementary school and junior high school—at Orchard Elementary School and Willis Jepson Middle School in Vacaville, California, respectively,—I was enrolled in an ongoing education program called “Gifted and Talented Education” (GATE). I and my fellow GATE students would have time outside of our regular classes to pursue activities that were deemed more appropriate for those of us who were designated as “gifted,” with capabilities or performance beyond those of typical students at our grade levels.
GATE activities were quite progressive in many ways—focusing on practical problem-solving and constructivist activities. In one activity that I remember vividly, we were assigned to teams and asked to design and build a device that would prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from the top of a tall ladder. Other activities included things like building rockets, designing and building bridges out of toothpicks, and so on.
These group problem-solving activities were valuable for a number of reasons. GATE activities taught us practical problem-solving, backwards design thinking, and, perhaps most importantly, to function together as a team to accomplish an assigned task—skills which would serve us GATE students well throughout our future lives and careers.
There was, however, a dark side to Gifted and Talented Education (GATE). Insofar as we were removed from our regular classes and from the company of our not-quite-GATE-worthy fellow students, for the sake of gifted educational experiences, we came to view ourselves as deserving of special treatment. In addition to the positive lessons of problem-solving and teamwork, we also learned another lesson, that if we were smart enough, we didn’t have to play by the same rules as everybody else. We learned we were special—too special to have the same low-brow expectations placed on us that are placed on those lesser-quality students that we didn’t have to be burdened with being around for the entirety of our school days.
This is a bit of an overstatement for dramatic purposes, of course, seeing as how my cohort of students were especially close regardless of cliques, social standings, or academic performance—unusually so, perhaps. And yet, I do think that some of us GATE students took to heart that we were not merely students but that we had special abilities and talents that entitled us to a certain type of standing and treatment, a self-image that we carried with us right into adulthood and into our future careers.
There is, of course, a healthy sense in which you can view yourself as not having to play by the rules. Thinking outside the box in what life can and should be allows you to invent your life artistically in true Nietzschean fashion—refusing to settle for the average life that so many of our fellow humans seem to settle for. It can allow you to set a high bar for yourself in terms of what you can reasonably hope to accomplish in our relatively short human lifespans.
On the other hand, however, viewing yourself as extra-talented or extra-gifted can have a negative impact on your ability to fit in with the herd when necessary (as is all-too-necessary in the business and corporate world) and on your ability to work with the group. In GATE, despite the best of intentions to instill us with teamwork skills, each of us came to view ourselves not merely as members of a team but as leaders of of a team. While clearly teams do need leaders, it can be problematic when every member of a team views him- or herself as leader of the team instead of as a cog in a well-oiled machine.
While my GATE experience allowed me to have a strong self-image and confidence in my own abilities, academic or professional or otherwise, I have periodically encountered situations in which I was forced to confront the way in which my GATE experiences were a hinderance to my ability to function instead of an asset—things like corporate layoffs, learning to play by somebody else’s rules (say, in a new job or as a member of a team led by somebody else), academic or professional environments with challenges that I was not immediately able to raise and meet (which does a discredit to my own abilities, as I tend to hunker down and learn whatever int takes to rise to the occasion very quickly. (I can see my GATE-inspired self-image coming though here once again; mostly it’s a benefit.)
So what’s the lesson here? Arguably all students need exposure to the things GATE was trying to offer to us supposedly gifted students: problem-solving skills, teamwork, leadership skills, design challenges, and even fun in education. These are, after all, the skills that allow students to become successful professionals in almost any future career paths they may choose. So GATE education should probably not have been restricted to a handful of students arbitrarily deemed worthy of special treatment. But, insofar as I and my fellow GATE students were given special treatment in elementary and junior high school, a better job should have been done of instilling in us GATE students that we still had to play by the same rules in life as anyone else—that we would still have to work hard, that we would sometimes have to be subordinate to someone else’s authoring, and that we couldn’t always be leaders and masters of every domain in which we would find ourselves in life.
Still, despite its unintended drawbacks, I can point to my GATE experiences as formative and influential in the strong self-image that has enabled me to thrive in nearly every academic or professional environment in which I have found myself, from high school and college and on to graduate school, from low-level service jobs (themselves valuable experiences for a great many reasons) to higher-level professional jobs, and on both sides of the teacher’s desk as both a student and an instructor.
I have, however, occasionally had to remind myself that I am still a human being like everybody else, with the same limitations and life lessons still to be learned—that I don’t already have all the answers even given all my past experiences and successes. If there’s one trait that we GATE students never fully learned to cultivate, perhaps to this day, it’s the recognition that we sometimes need to be brought down a peg or two to function with everybody else, that we’re not as special as we think we are, or as our GATE teachers used to give us credit for.