You know those stories about revelations: threshold concepts that change the way you see the world, like the day you were on your way to work and you realised that it’s not about what you teach, it’s about what the students learn? I had one of those powerful shifts in perception and belief some 10 years ago when I went on a training course run by Unlocking the World on Gifted Education. The course was a one week, 40 hour deep dive into gifted education theory and practice and it basically changed the way I looked at students from then on.

As I’m licensed to train teachers in gifted education, I took a whole school’s staff through the exact same course some years later, because I wanted them to see things the way I had been brought to see them, to unlock the world in each learner. It remains a passion today and I invite all educators to consider this mind-shifting approach to human intelligence, and therefore, to teaching.

The revelation

I used to think that the whole world of gifted education was a somewhat exaggerated and potentially damaging elitist exercise in labelling. To me, everyone was gifted in some way and it seemed crude to decide that some were and others not, not to mention all sorts of problems around criteria, cut off points and separate programmes running alongside mainstream programmes. However, I was misguided and ill-informed as the course taught me. Not everybody is gifted but more are than we might initially think, often gifted people are not recognised, and you can use the principles of gifted education to enhance all learning. Here are four powerful concepts embedded in gifted education that are worth careful consideration:

1. There are different types of giftedness: you can be moderately or profoundly gifted and gifted in at least six domains (see the 2015 research of Betts & Neihart). Gifted people are not necessarily high achievers academically, that is just one type of giftedness. In fact, many go under the radar because educators have not been trained in identifying them. Bad schools ignore gifted students to the point that they become dropouts or even delinquents, since the enormous creative energy they have has simply been neglected. 
2. Often gifted people are twice exceptional. This means that their gifts are accompanied by some form of neurodiversity. When you are gifted, you see things differently and that is not always understood and recognised by standard types of intelligence screening. In fact, and most unfortunately, often learning needs mask gifts. This can mean that untrained educators will treat a gifted student through a deficit approach, via the learning need and without compensating for the gifts. For example, a student might be dyslexic but highly creative, or might become restless when not challenged. The dyslexia and the attention deficit that should be looked at in isolation, they should be understood in the context of the gifts: they go together.
3. Gifted people often experience asynchronous development (Silverman, 1997). The hyper development of their cognitive or intrapersonal abilities means that they are not necessarily in tune with the social behaviours of their age peers. The factory line admissions approach (stamped by date of production) we have socialised over the last century and a half assumes that children of the same age grow up better together. This might be true for a majority of students, but gifted students often prefer the company of older peers and struggle to assimilate the codes of the group given the asynchrony between those codes and the gifted person’s sense of humour, conversation preference, interest and passions.
4. Gifted students are often neglected. Schools often spend a lot of energy on helping the students struggling to integrate the curriculum. However, the students who are performing well – so those who are academically gifted (which, again, is only one type of giftedness) – are seen as not needing help when, in fact, if they were helped, they would go even further.

  What to do?

Here are three steps I would encourage schools to consider in order to accommodate gifted students and create conditions for them to flourish.

1. Ensure that you have the right checklist to identify gifts. Kanevsky’s brilliant behaviours are based on behaviours that can be observed and interpreted. Gifted students often have beyond age-peer sensitivities, an original sense of humour, quicker processing speed and higher spontaneous information recall capacity. Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a single quantitative assessment, even a well-established psychometric test, will identify giftedness, it simply loses too many gifts and is a very narrow yet blunt instrument to assume any pertinent diagnosis. Careful attention to behaviour while knowing what you are looking for will tell a more truthful story. The observation of peers and parents can be useful to build up an accurate picture too.
2. Recognise, don’t label. When you see a gifted student in action, it’s a powerful, mind-opening moment, and it gives educators a renewed responsibility to differentiate carefully, to allow for enrichment and extension options on assignments, to consider acceleration and to engage the learner in a scaffolded manner. However, openly labelling students as gifted or running gifted programmes for some students and not others is a mistake because it leads to stigmatising, pressured expectations and, invariably, artificial cut-off criteria. Only when students are exceptionally and profoundly gifted should measures beyond differentiation be considered, the first being acceleration.
3. Don’t punish students for being gifted. An unimaginative educator will simply give fast finishers extra work, or ask students who understand concepts quickly to teach the other students. Worse, they will become defensive when students are easily bored and challenge parents who might believe their children have gifts by looking to test scores, as if the only way to be gifted is through academics. An open-minded educator will see the restlessness, the etiolated behaviours and the unusually high processing speed of a learner as a challenge to ensure that in all curriculum planning, enrichment and extension work, qualitatively differentiated items, choice of assignment and other varied techniques (essentially, inverting Bloom’s Taxonomy so as to allow some students opportunities to deepen higher order thinking skills at entry point) are used.

Our role as educators is to see the gifts in learners and to make those gifts grow into socially recognised talents. 

Next time you are challenged by a student who is underperforming, is restless, does not get on well with their peers, seems to be looking for something else, consider that they might be gifted and look at them not through a deficit model created by a rigid assessment model, but through a world of possibilities.

Moving house

When I was about 17, in my final years of schooling in Eswatini, during the summer holidays, given that we were moving house from one part of Johannesburg to the other, and I had to throw piles of school documentation that I had been hoarding out of my bedroom, I found myself rummaging through artefacts from my earlier years of schooling in South Africa. 

Among the childish art projects and textbooks I came across was my history notebook from my Primary School. On the first page my own clumsily formatted 8 year old handwriting spoke to the maturing young person I had become. The trembling, awkward letters carried much of the sadness and solitude I had experienced as a child: looking at my own handwriting almost created a sense of pity in me for my earlier self.

But it was less the form and more the content of what I read that struck a strange, dissonant chord within:

“South African history started in 1488 when Bartholomew Diaz planted a stone cross at Kwaaihoek”.

This was when South African history was to begin. The next sentence jumped forward over 100 years:

“On the 6th of April, 1652, Jan Van Riebeeck landed at the Cape of Good Hope”.

The next pages of my notebook, the contents of which had been copied off the blackboard word for word, spoke of how the Cape was empty and how Dutch settlers simply moved in and took over. My notes also mentioned how the climate in the Cape was “Mediterranean”.

Early Days

The notebook took me back to the classroom of my former all boys, almost exclusively white school. This was a place where you would get the cane if you stepped out of line. The history lessons were highly formatted pieces of propaganda, singing the praises of Afrikaaner nationalism, the heroes of the Boer War, with caricatural representations of Zulu chiefs such as Chaka and Dingaan.

My teacher, who taught us Afrikaans as well as humanities, was a terrifying little man with piercing blue eyes, a thick moustache, burly tanned, hairy forearms and a sickeningly sweet smell of musk perfume mixed with cigarette smoke that would trail behind him. He was well known for his use of the cane, in fact he called it “bliksem”, which means lightning in Afrikaans. Beating us was clearly a pleasure for him, as was teaching us how white settlers roamed into a garden of paradise where, conveniently, there was no one to stop them before they were attacked unfairly by aggressive Zulu warriors.

Waterford

My life changed when I relocated to Eswatini (then Swaziland) to attend a United World College, Waterford Kamhlaba, which was also an established anti-Apartheid school. Here I learned shoulder to shoulder with the children and grandchildren of Nelson Mandela, Albert Sisulu, Mosiuoa Lekota and Desmond Tutu.

My history teacher here was completely different: he was passionate about South African history and we learnt about it. However, the core of our learning was about Apartheid, from the 1930s all the way through to the 1990s. We learnt every Apartheid law, massacre and injustice. As my learning of my own history deepened, so did the unlearning of what I was told before. In my old school, the so-called “great trek” (white settlers exodusing the Cape to travel to Johannesburg) was presented as a Moses-out-of-Israel type fleeing from British persecution; at Waterford our teacher explained that it was because the settlers refused to abolish slavery, which had become illegal; in my old school, the earliest Cape Settlers had to defend their property from marauding thieves, at Waterford we learnt how they would shoot down locals who dared to walk across their land.

Understanding the past to understand the present

And the history lessons were not just about the past, they were about the present too. Each holiday, when I would travel back to South Africa, I would be confronted with my friends and even family who were still wallowing in the lie of Apartheid education, not knowing their own history, not even being able to name some of the most foundational Apartheid laws, facts and figures.

It was at Waterford that for the very first time I saw a picture of Nelson Mandela. He was a banned person in South Africa and it was impossible to see any images of him. The picture is a famous one of him in London, young, bearded, looking wisely but somehow mournfully into the middle distance. At Waterford, because of my history classes, the invisible was made visible.

None of this was easy to learn. I would find myself sitting in classes with friends from different African countries feeling deeply ashamed to be a white South African, having to endure in front of everybody what people like me were doing. When we put on a school play about South Africa, there was a riot scene and students were needed to play the soldiers who would open fire on the crowd. Everybody turned to look at me. I volunteered reluctantly.

We also studied the holocaust at Waterford. I remember having nightmares for several nights consecutively after seeing the black and white footage of bodies being discovered in the camps. Knowing that the early architects of Apartheid were Nazis connected the two quite seamlessly: it was part of the same vicious cruelty.

David Olusoga and Shashi Tharoor

A few years ago, as part of the extraordinary Guest Speakers Series that we run at the International School of Geneva, I was lucky enough to meet with the softly spoken, dashing and consistently poignant British historian David Olusoga. He addressed our students on British history with a focus on the experience from the point of view of Black people. I was familiar with his work on German concentration camps in Namibia ( The Kaiser’s Holocaust) and his television documentary Black and British: A Forgotten History.

Some months later a colleague lent me a book by Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness, about the British colonial empire in India, the resources that were exploited and the financial reparations that amending this might imply.

I had learnt about British colonialism at school, Cecil John Rhodes’ dream of a train line from the Cape to Cairo, the “jewel in the crown” that was India for the British Empire, the Opium Wars and so on. However, these anecdotes were not particularly well developed and there seemed to be more emphasis on abolitionism, the suffragettes, Common Law, the Bill of Rights, extraordinary inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday and so on. In other words, British history was presented more as a series of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution positive contributions to humanity and science than the slave trade and colonisation. It was only after coming into contact with these pointed, detailed and harrowing accounts by Olusoga and Tharoor that some of the more shocking facts became fully available to me. Notably:

• The 1837 slave compensation act in which 20 million pounds were paid to slave owners and their families up until 2015
• That the slave trade was financed directly by British monarchy 
• Over a period of 200 years, the British East India Company and the British Raj syphoned out at least $44.6 trillion worth of resources from India, which is more than 17 years gross domestic product of modern day Britain 
• Over a span of 40 years, leading up to 1920, between 50 and 100 million Indians were killed because of policies under the British Empire in India, more than all the “famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined”

The list goes on.

How much of this is widely accepted and taught in schools? In the late 1930s, the Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams’ thesis Capitalism and Slavery substantiated the huge benefits slavery had brought to industrialisation in Britain, something that has since been reiterated by economists such as Thomas Picketty. However, he would have to wait more than 20 years before finding a publisher. This was because he was accused of understating the role Britain had played in abolitionism. It was only last year that the book was published by a mainstream group (Penguin) to become a best-seller.

Even today, according to the British academic Kehinde Andrews:

“The orthodoxy of the history of the Industrial Revolution is that slavery wasn’t important. If you go to most universities, most academics will say that and they’ll dismiss the book – because they just cannot accept that the Industrial Revolution could not have happened without slavery” (Feguson, 2022).

In  2022 article, Sean Matiluko says that British Schools have “whitewashed history”, leaving out important annals describing the contributions of Black people to British history and the extent of racial exploitation that built up Britain’s economy.

Since teaching Britain’s role in colonisation, or the transatlantic slave trade was not compulsory, a 2021  petition was signed in parliament with over 260 000 signatures requesting this. The response was mitigated: a School minister rejected the outcome, claiming that such a programme would “lower standards”.  

So the question is, when will the teaching of British history face the past squarely with all the facts? The same questions can be asked for a number of national history narratives: there are too many to mention, Britain is merely an example.

It takes courage to look much more critically at the histories of global powers whose legacies are taught partially, emphasising the positive and leaving out the painful stories of colonialism and slavery. There have been several genocides, and they must be known.

There is a diversion tactic which consists in the discourse of saying that things have changed and such historical facts are water under the bridge now. But are they? How can such important chapters of history not be taught and then treated as already forgotten when evoked? It is by bringing them into public discourse and problematising them that society will become more sensitive and aware. If the historical inequities behind the current dispensation are taught clearly and formally in school, it also allows younger generations to embrace questions of inclusion and social justice more openly. If not, any discussion on equity becomes a quarrel, a painful and humiliating one at that for those who have lost out historically because of systemic racism and exploitation. It should not be for these groups to have to fight their way into a space of representation, that work should be done by schools.

The histories that we learn must be true, and it becomes increasingly difficult to hide skeletons in the cupboard when the world wide web makes research readily available to the public. Those writing history textbooks need to understand that if we do not relate the whole story, no matter how shameful and painful it is, no matter how much it becomes a thorn in the side of nationalist, imperialistic and romanticised discourse about nation state history, the more dangerous it is, for those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

My textbook 

I toss the textbook into the rubbish bin. I’m not looking for things to hang on to as we move house, since we are down-sizing, and I can’t see the purpose of hanging onto a historically incorrect, propaganda-glazed set of notes from my pre-adolescence.

As I throw the book away though, in particular because I know the history of my country and feel part of it, I am reminded where I come from and, perhaps more importantly, the responsibility I have as an educator to tell it.

The histories that we learn should not be ideological narratives or partial stories, they should not be a crafted story to influence minds and shape opinions, they should aim to do one thing and one thing only: tell the whole story.

Ferguson, D. (2022). Groundbreaking work on slave economy finally back on UK shelves. The Guardian.    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/eighty-years-late-groundbreaking-work-on-slave-economy-is-finally-published-in-uk 

The hype around ChatGPT is palpable: schools are racing to have staff meetings on it, share resources, and react quickly. After decades of being steadily and collectively formatted by a technology-driven economy and the resultant positivist ideology, peppered with our schizoid relationship with artificial intelligence (the pendulum swings from the feeling that we have to get ahead with artificial intelligence at all costs, to the other extreme of fear and reactivity), ChatGPT leaps out at us as from the dystopian sea of Deep Blue the “big data” craze and the robot Sophia. Remember the excitement and panic around Google search engines and Wikipedia and how much it would change everything? Here we go again … One can expect references to ChatGPT in conference keynotes for the next few months, speakers having grown tired of videos of robots or fun statistics about computing processing power.

And with these waves of advances in machine learning come the habitual rather hackneyed warnings of how this will change the face of employment, education and even what it means to be human. Such crystal-ball gazing can be quite serious, but it can also become ridiculous, always couched in norms and generalisations. There is the idea that educators should be doing something about it, changing something, getting ready for the future, or accepting that the future has already happened, and this needs to be done quickly and so on.

I don’t mean to denigrate the serious challenges and opportunities that technology creates (and always has as it has evolved historically), I write about it at length and seriously in Educating for the Twenty-First Century: Seven Global Challenges, but I do think that a pinch of salt here and there is not a bad thing either. 

Here are my four thoughts on ChatGPT at this early stage:

1. Artificial intelligence should be where thinking starts, not where it ends. (that phrase comes from my colleague Yoni Osman). Those who still hang on to the idea of banning technology in schools are fighting a losing battle. I once heard a rather sad story of a child being told off by a teacher for correcting him in class having accessed Google on her phone to verify what was said. Is the goal to access knowledge or to hide it? Curriculum has to be relevant, and the world we are living in is assisted by technology. Sometimes I wonder if cell phones have not replaced parts of our neocortical architecture. It might not be what we want to see happening to us as humans, but trying to create a romantic garden where there is no technology and algorithms such as ChatGPT are closed is absurd. On the contrary, algorithms save time. This does not mean that we should stop reading or doing research, it just means that such arcane intellectual and academic pursuits need to be accompanied with technology in more colourful ways. Students can use ChatGPT for certain in-class supervised tasks, they can ask it to give feedback on the occasional essay, but they need to use their faculties of discernment to discuss what is being created. 
2. The death of the search engine. One can imagine that ChatGPT will replace Google searches. Unfortunately, most users of search engines skim quickly through the first items that appear, so having artificial intelligence spew the answer out to you or create a narrative to your question instead is merely an accentuation of the same linearity. Discerning scholars might sieve through search engine responses, using their background knowledge and critical thinking to select the best sources, and they will have to do the same with ChatGPT, scrutinising it.
3. The sterility of the artificial voice. As powerful as ChatGPT might be, and we should not underestimate its deep learning capacity (in a few months it will be much more powerful), when you read the texts it produces, somewhere, in the distant recesses of the prose, is a slightly flat monotonous machine-like sterility, resonant of the computer Hal’s metallic, depressed voice in Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. ChatGPT might sound human, but in that case, it sounds like a fairly dull human. And there are errors of course because of the automaticity of its understanding of semantics. Ultimately, expression is about style and voice, which is what I encourage in my philosophy students’ writing: give personal anecdotes, let the reader hear your voice. Perhaps it is a good thing that artificial intelligence is competing with us, it pushes us to bring out more vivacity, originality and personality in what we say. 
4. Plagiarism is only as big a threat as we allow it to be. One obvious reaction to this development in technology is to fear that students will no longer bother to write essays at home, or even design projects, since they will simply ask ChatGPT to do it for them. This merely reinforces the problem of extended pieces of homework. As soon as we ask students to do substantive pieces of work at home, there are a host of ways of plagiarising, getting others to do the work, using pre-packaged prompts and so on. I  always have my students write every essay in class. At home they read and revise. Teachers who are fond of giving important and lengthy homework to students might have to rethink that strategy. And let’s not forget the Pandora’s box of assessment reliability problems that homework releases anyway, including issues of unequal work conditions at home: one of the reasons why schools exist in the first place is to create fair and equal learning conditions for all students. For coursework assignments, students might plagiarise and plagiarism-detection software will not pick it up. However, the irony of ironies is that ChatGPT cannot lie, so all we need to do is ask it if it wrote the piece of writing in question, and it will tell us.

All in all, the purpose of education is to live a better life, and this is achieved through the development of  knowledge, aesthetics and virtues. Using artificial intelligence to accelerate processes and find solutions should not be a problem, but it will be our fault if we let artificial intelligence carve out the end of our thinking and not the beginning. All the texts in the world written by ChatGPT will not make us any wiser, and we have to teach our students to integrate words, ideas and values for themselves, for it is with this truly natural, inner language that they will define and understand the world, and the world will be as interesting as the depth of concepts are to describe it, no more, no less. As the great Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. May those limits be the ones we choose, not the ones chosen for us by an algorithm.