The Dilemma of the Instant Expert
Or, how a childless writer with no experience as an educator nevertheless decides to tell parents of gifted children where they've gone wrong
A CRITIQUE OF ALISSA QUART'S HOTHOUSE KIDS: THE DILEMMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD
A book review by Sarah Garrison
Pushy parents – we all know them. We see them scheduling their pre-schoolers for five “extracurriculars” per week, berating and insulting their children at sports events for not trying hard enough to crush the competition, and engineering every event in their child’s life in order to produce that youngest law school graduate in history. In an era when the nation’s vast middle class faces ever-increasing pressure and threats to its stability and future comfort, parents worry about giving their children the competitive advantage they feel their offspring will need to succeed in an uncertain future. And, as documented in books such as The Mommy Myth, and Alexandra Robbins’ The Overachievers, there is no dearth of industries that have sprung up to feed and cater to our parental fears and to fan the flames of this competitive frenzy. From “baby genius” products to college counselors, who for thousands of dollars will advise and package a student for college admissions success, there are countless opportunities for parents to invest enormous sums of money for the sake of guaranteeing their child’s future.
This is all well and good, if one is affluent and can afford to invest thousands of dollars above and beyond college savings funds in tutors, private coaches, test prep classes, summer camps and college counselors. But what will become of those children from lower-income families, whose parents cannot afford such an enormous investment?
Conventional wisdom maintains that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is gutting our nation’s educational system, to the detriment of all children, but especially to the detriment of lower-income gifted children – those who stand to benefit the most from public-school gifted programs that are under constant threat of budget cuts and elimination. Socio-economically disadvantaged children are less likely to be identified as gifted – parents often must pay out of their own pockets for a private assessment, which can cost anywhere from several hundred to more than two thousand dollars. Meanwhile, schools are focused on teaching to the test – raising scores on basic reading and math assessments to satisfy the requirements of NCLB. Often, there is little time left for other subjects or for students other than those in dire need of help in order to pass the state tests.
The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the sorry state of public education, are huge topics meriting careful examination and exploration. While such an exploration could have been the focus of Alissa Quart’s new book, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, the author chooses instead to attack modern parents – especially white, upper-middle-class parents – for what she seems to view as their responsibility for the children who are being left behind as well as those who are being pushed to get ahead. I would argue that vilifying the segment of society that is most able to mobilize and advocate for the benefit of all children serves no purpose and is of no benefit. As the author is well-aware, gifted children are seen as undeserving of assistance, and her castigation of the more well-off families merely perpetrates that myth, despite her intentions to raise up the under-privileged. Ms. Quart’s own apparent background and worldview suggest an insincere aspect of this attitude that ought to cause her audience to question her true intent.
In the first chapter of her book, Alissa Quart profiles several former child prodigies. One of the individuals to whom Ms. Quart devotes the most space is – Alissa Quart. Ms. Quart describes her many precocious achievements – an oddly self-conscious decision, given her stated commitment to letting kids be kids. She lets herself and several other former prodigies serve as cautionary tales against pushy parents.
Ms. Quart does acknowledge that “Of course, some gifted kids don’t wind up resentful or lost.” This is true. The challenge as a parent is to determine which decisions are likely to result in a positive outcome – i.e., a happy adult, and which are not. The author’s challenge is to use the gift of hindsight to ferret out the crucial decisions which tipped the balance and set the positive or negative outcome on its apparently irrevocable course. Unfortunately, humans are messy and unpredictable creatures when taken as individuals, and any attempt to find or distill the formula for happiness from such a small, unusual group of individuals seems to be an exercise in futility.
In chapters two and three, Ms. Quart endeavors to describe the “baby genius” industry and the burgeoning array of “extracurriculars” aimed at the toddler and pre-school set. Ms. Quart accurately describes the flawed logic used to market these products to (largely upper-middle-class) parents. In my opinion, however, she misses the possible influence of parental guilt, a factor one should never underestimate in a society where two-income families are the norm, and where many children send more time with nannies and caregivers than with their parents from early infancy.
Chapter four discusses the early professionalization of child’s play, citing as examples a four-year-old artist and an eight-year-old skateboarder with corporate sponsorships. Ms. Quart references the “pro-recess movement,” and calls for the return of unstructured play time. As a parent, I certainly agree with this line of thinking. Where the author misses the mark is with her statement, “Indeed, I think part of the drive among parents to encourage giftedness is the legacy of children as workers and our current confusion about children’s social roles.”
In my experience, most parents lack the time and energy to engage in such contemplative thought. I suspect the real reason our children are engaged in more and more structured activities is peer pressure. The parents I know – of gifted and non-gifted children, homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers – send their children to organized activities because that is what everyone else is doing. Socializing at school, especially with the loss of recess, has become increasingly difficult. Outside of school, if your child is the only one on the block who is not signed up for Little League, he will be spending his free time sitting by himself on the swing set in the back yard. I do not know any parent who professes to enjoy shuttling children to endless activities or rising at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday to attend a swim meet or cheerleading tournament. One also cannot ignore the role of economics. With more and more two-income families and single-parent families in our society, after-school activities fill the gap between the end of the school day and the end of the work day.
Ms. Quart ends this chapter with a profile of a six-year-old cartoonist. She describes the parents’ struggle with whether or not they should publicize and market the girl’s work. The parents are torn. What if the child’s play becomes the child’s work? What does a good parent do? The author describes these challenges as commonplace, but she proposes no solutions.
As the author turns her attention to the notion of academically or intellectually gifted children, her message begins to lose its focus. Ms. Quart begins the chapter with a discussion of the loss of gifted programs in public schools, the demise of state funding for gifted programs, and the impact of the vagaries of NCLB. She presents herself as a proponent of expanded, enriched educational options and of increased access to such programs, especially for the socio-economically disadvantaged.
After a brief discussion of the negative connotations surrounding the word “gifted” – a word most members of the gifted community dislike but continue to use for lack of a better phrase – Ms. Quart turns her attention to gifted children and their parents, writing “I have my own misgivings…for those children whose giftedness is trained and refined incessantly at home or in costly extracurricular programs.” She does not attempt to distinguish between an overzealous parent and an involved parent, who, presumably, would make an effort to provide stimulating and interesting activities for his or her child. Where, indeed, should we draw that line? Can we even make such a distinction? I would argue that the line between facilitating and pushing is different for each family.
Ms. Quart’s comment also blurs the distinction between ability and achievement. The idea that children are born with certain innate abilities, with their own unique combination of strengths and weaknesses, is lost here. Ms. Quart focuses on a parental drive to create genius, but giftedness, and the high IQ scores that often typify giftedness, represent a potential for achievement, not achievement in and of itself. Some individuals are born with a greater potential to understand quantum mechanics than others, regardless of whether or not they ever fulfill that potential. Later, in the conclusion to her book, Ms. Quart refers to “strong learners” rather than “gifted” children. This further muddies the waters, in that it encourages equating strong test performance directly with intelligence, reinforces the myth that children with learning disabilities cannot be gifted, and suggests a return to Terman-esque ideals of giftedness. In short, this would a step backwards, not a step forward, away from elitism.
Ms. Quart criticizes the “profoundly gifted” community’s zeal for acceleration, noting with some derision an article by Carolyn K. (owner of the Hoagies' Gifted Education Page) and other “parent-crafted essays” on acceleration. Again, the author’s snide tone belies her own lack of experience and detracts from any message she is attempting to convey. At no point does Ms. Quart explain how or why she, as a “former gifted child,” is more qualified to comment on issues of gifted education than the parents she meets at conferences or on the Internet. Perhaps she believes the pushy parents are too busy lying awake at night, imagining the vast conspiracies wrought by the agents of the government and public education against their children, to read the same books and articles she includes in her bibliography.
Ms. Quart sneers at an early 20th-century concept of “a gifted child who can be culled from the assembly line of mass education and educated in a special but still reproducible fashion.” Later in the chapter, however, she touts the importance of public-school gifted programs, noting their profound impact on intellectually gifted members of our society’s lower classes. Yet Ms. Quart seems to harbor her own class resentments – is this self-loathing? Parents of lower-income or minority families are “foot soldiers” in the war to save gifted education, while upper-middle-class parents fighting the same battles are paranoid, elitist and delusional about their children’s abilities. This sort of reverse-snobbery is unfair, unnecessary and, given what we can glean about the author’s own background, disingenuous. Charges of elitism ring hollow when they are leveled by a graduate of not one but two Ivy League schools.
The focus on the gifted community continues with a chapter on intelligence testing and what the author calls “the highly idiosyncratic gifted subculture.” Apparently, hallmarks of this subculture include “a penchant for conferences,” a peculiar jargon and eccentric behavior. Perhaps Ms. Quart is unaware of the many conferences available world-wide for members of professions and organizations of every kind under the rainbow. If she were to attend a conference of, say, massage therapists or orthopedic surgeons, surely she would hear jargon peculiar to those occupations rather than endless gossip about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Throughout “Hothouse Kids,” Ms. Quart paints in broad brushstrokes, lumping “Indigo Child” theories together with the ins and outs of intelligence testing, portraying middle-class parents of gifted children as striving, paranoid, eccentric, misled, and elitist. These parents, according to Ms. Quart, are shirking their responsibilities to society by focusing on the well-being of their children rather than attending to the task of repairing our public schools. Moreover, these parents are consumed by a mania to obtain higher and higher IQ scores for their children, to prove by whatever means necessary that their children are “different” and “special.”
Ms. Quart devotes considerable space in her book to Linda Silverman, “Indigo Child” theories, and two rather well-known tragic stories involving gifted children. The author notes with apparent surprise that “the tragic fates of two children she had championed” have not deterred Linda Silverman from her path or changed her message. Regardless of what anyone might think of Dr. Silverman or Indigo Children, one cannot hold her solely responsible for what happened to those two children. One was a victim of his mother’s manipulations; as for the other young man, we can never really know what caused him to take his own life.
The author criticizes the “star system” of giftedness, that is, the commonly-used distinctions between “gifted,” “highly gifted,” and “profoundly gifted.” There are plenty of stories of parents who shop around to get the best scores for their children; the person you knew in high school who just had to know and share everyone’s SAT scores might well be running about today, trying to compare her children’s IQ scores to everyone else’s. This does not and cannot imply that every parent seeking private testing for his or her child is obsessed with proving that child’s superiority. If Ms. Quart had taken the time to ask some of these parents what motivated them, she might have heard many different answers, including concerns about learning disabilities and fears for their child’s mental and emotional well-being, not just “my child must attend Mirman or else!”
While we can argue endlessly about just how important it is to distinguish between, as Ms. Quart writes, IQs of 170 and 200, Ms. Quart misses an important reason why parents pursue intelligence testing. For parents seeking information about learning disabilities and neurological disorders, the subtest scores contain much more information than that lone three-digit IQ score. Two children might both receive overall scores of 132, yet their subtest profiles could be very different, indicating different strengths, weaknesses, and possible learning disabilities.
I was surprised to see a profile of Nadia Webb describing her as offering private intelligence assessments. I must disclose that I have taken one of my children to Dr. Webb for a neuropsychological evaluation. Neither I nor any parent I asked in my brief, unscientific survey has made the trip to Dr. Webb’s office to get an IQ score. We went to Harrisonburg to get answers about our child’s neurological issues. I would add that we did indeed like Dr. Webb, and we gained much from our visit, but it was not because, as Ms. Quart suggests, she is a snappy dresser with “Gen X mannerisms.” We liked Dr. Webb because she was able to see the child as a whole person, with strengths and weaknesses, and because she explicitly said that, unlike so many doctors we have seen, she did not think we were imagining problems.
Ms. Quart attacks the proliferation of intelligence tests, and gives special attention to the SB-LM, an old and controversial version of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The available tests can be confusing and frustrating; there is no perfect method for assessing intelligence, nor is there consensus on how intelligence should be defined. (Ms. Quart shares two of the more well-known and notorious examples of this debate, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve.)
On the other hand, after discussing affluent parents’ mania for private testing, for its comprehensive nature and its advantages over testing offered to public school children, Ms. Quart states that the IQ tests most likely to be used in public schools are the WISC-III and the Stanford-Binet 5. Ms. Quart does not cite a source for this statement, and I would be very interested to know if it is indeed true. According to my sources, if and when public schools administer individual tests, any of a variety of instruments, including but not limited to the WISC-IV, the Stanford-Binet 5, the Slosson and the K-BIT, may be used. There is no uniform policy for administering intelligence tests in public schools. The author might be interested to learn that the tests generally administered during private assessments are the WISC-IV and the Stanford-Binet 5. When the SB-LM is used – and it rarely is – it is administered only as a supplement after current test versions have been given.
In a chapter titled “Extreme Parenting: Mothers and Fathers as the Ultimate Instructors,” Ms. Quart examines the growing trend of families who homeschool their gifted children. She profiles a family where the children are being raised to be, in their mother’s words, “supreme humans.” The children are indeed very independent, articulate, accomplished young people. While the author describes extreme parents as micromanaging their overscheduled children, and she has clear misgivings about the lifestyle that in her opinion smack of elitism and a loss of childhood, she does acknowledge that parents who claim to homeschool their gifted children because the schools cannot do an adequate job of educating them might actually be right. Ms. Quart seems to agree that much of what passes for gifted programming in our schools is fluff.
The author’s emotions with regard to her own childhood come through clearly in this chapter. She acknowledges that “there’s a continuum of involved parents, ranging from committed, to extreme committed, to too-extreme.” She notes that some families choose homeschooling to give their children the freedom to follow their own interests and passions.
Unfortunately, Ms. Quart devotes the overwhelming majority of space in this chapter to what she seems to perceive as the too-extreme parent. She presents these parents as living through their children, over-investing themselves in everything their child does. If Ms. Quart had chosen to include examples of homeschooling families she felt try to maintain a good balance, this could have been a very interesting and much more balanced chapter. If we are to believe that the author is interested in the well-being of today’s gifted children, it would be enlightening for many of the book’s readers to learn about: parents who removed their children from abusive or unhealthy school situations; parents whose children were denied the special services to which they are legally entitled; and parents who somehow manage to balance homeschooling and their own careers. Why is there no mention of unschoolers or community activists? People who are not close to the homeschooling community often assume that homeschooling is a monolithic, homogeneous movement, when in fact homeschoolers are of all faiths and political persuasions and of all ethnicities, and they homeschool for many different reasons and according to a variety of teaching philosophies.
And, yes, the Internet has been a tremendously valuable tool for homeschoolers. Listservs allow homeschoolers to network with other families from all over the world, just as listservs for scrapbookers allow fans of cutting and pasting from many different countries to exchange ideas and themes. To my knowledge, classes on how to make one’s child gifted are not especially trendy among this group of parents.
Six pages of Hothouse Kids are devoted to the sad story of a young man who took his own life in 2005. Ms. Quart had the opportunity to interview this young man in 2004, and his suicide seems to have made a large impression on her. She wonders if homeschooling was a contributing factor in his death, although the young man apparently had not been homeschooled for several years. Ms. Quart cites statistics from NIMH on suicide among young people, and tries to find a correlation between these statistics, what she perceives as the isolation of homeschooling, and depression among the gifted. But she notes that there are no statistics for rates of depression and suicide among the gifted.
As it happens, Ms. Quart refers to seven distinct and diverse sources over these three paragraphs on the possibility of a link between gifted homeschooling and suicide. This might be the most heavily-sourced part of the book. Many questions are raised, tenuous connections are suggested, but the end result is inconclusive. Suicide and depression are serious topics, and in my opinion an author broaching the subject must do so with a sober, even-handed approach. If we wish to discuss suicide rates among gifted children, we must do so within the context of rates in other sub-groups. What role does gender play? What about ethnicity, religion, and affluence? In a fundamental sense, any frequency of suicide, no matter how low, is unacceptable. Statistics are meaningless to someone who has lost a child or loved one. But we need not cite statistics out of context in an attempt to fan the flames of hysteria.
Along with the professionalization of play, Ms. Quart examines the proliferation of contests and competitions for children. How do we compare the Intel Science Talent Search, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a Scrabble championship and a youth poetry slam? In the chapter on such competitions, the specter of class division once again rears its head. The author wonders aloud about the potential harm of having one’s Scrabble losses be the focus of public attention. She – rightfully – questions the marketing behind such contests, and voices concern about the potential for “ghoulishness” and Schadenfreude in the audience for such competitions. I personally wonder about the value of spelling bees and Scrabble tournaments. The marketing Ms. Quart observes is not confined to kiddie contests; our local shopping mall and supermarket both have “kids’ clubs” which are thinly disguised marketing tools, and cradle-to-grave marketing is all around us.
However, I take issue with Ms. Quart’s glorification of the youth poetry slams, which she portrays as being more noble competitions, because they tend to attract urban, disadvantaged young people, and monetary prizes apparently are non-existent. We all can appreciate the community involvement Ms. Quart describes as manifesting at these poetry slams, and the young man whose work is quoted in Hothouse Kids seems to be a genuine talent. The question that stayed with me, though, was why aren’t these kids awarded monetary prizes? While we are questioning corporate marketing motives, why not also question the lack of marketing to these presumably less-affluent young people? I believe that the poetry slam participants’ main desire is to have their work and their voices heard by others. On the other hand, if they were to win a $10,000 scholarship in “Publishing Company X Voices of America’s Future Youth Poetry Slam” I doubt they would turn down the money – and why should they?
Ms. Quart’s distaste for her subjects in a chapter in teen preaching tournaments overpowers and distracts from the competitions she describes. While the evangelical Christians are allotted less space than the gifted community in Hothouse Kids, they receive their share of snide observations – about their dress, their conservative attitudes, their insulation and isolation from popular culture, their faith and their proselytizing. Given the polarized nature of American society today, I see no purpose to deliberately catering to the stereotypes and assumptions that have proven to be so divisive. At one point, Ms. Quart writes “One cannot help but wonder what the American Association of Christian Schools (AACS) children might discover, invent, or build if they were encouraged to apply their enthusiasm to something other than memorization of the Bible.” By making such a pronouncement, Ms. Quart exhibits the same narrow-minded self-righteousness she ascribes to her subjects. The statement stands in bold contrast to another pronouncement Ms. Quart makes in her final chapter; wherein she describes a math and science prodigy who rejected the path laid out for him: “While you can see [him] as a squanderer of great talents, he seems to have shrugged off the cloak of precocious failure. Doing so may have enabled him to claim his true gift: the knowledge that he is more than his accomplishments, more even than his failures. When he no longer needed to be gifted, he could simply be.” So, if we attempt to follow this convoluted logic, the author’s message seems to be: focus on just being rather than on accomplishing things; however, if you feel compelled to accomplish something, it must align itself with the author’s values to garner her approval.
Fundamentally, there are three basic problems with this book: inconsistent use of genre, inconsistent arguments, and an immature tone. As for inconsistent use of genre: This book does not know what it wants to be. At times it purports to be a scholarly work, at other times it reeks of socio-political commentary. Personal revelations and recollections intrude awkwardly, and in the chapter on teen preachers the author refers to the people profiled as subjects of journalism. Hothouse Kids lacks the thorough research and referencing one would expect from a scholarly work, yet the author presents her writings as fact. The derogatory comments and descriptions of various people are inappropriate outside of a book of political commentary or social satire, or perhaps the author’s personal blog. Memoir-type comments ought to be reserved for a memoir. We all bring our personal experiences to what we read and write. An invasive first-person tone suggests this book is not really about the “hothouse kids” the author met, but rather about her own unresolved childhood issues.
Is Hothouse Kids a piece of journalism? If it is, what is its point? Investigative journalism serves an important function in our society, but I wonder if the subjects of this book really merit such an approach. There are no crimes being committed, no heinous abuses are being perpetrated. What has the author uncovered in the course of her research? I found no great discoveries in this book – there were some musings, some questions, but no real answers. The anecdotes the author shares could be overheard at any Starbucks or playground across the country.
The arguments set forth in Hothouse Kids are difficult to follow, as they are not well-argued and they tend to be inconsistent. Some of the statements set forth include: Stop wanting children to be gifted; stop trying to make them become gifted; do away with the use of the “gifted” label, as very few children are truly gifted; recognize more children as “gifted,” as per Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Recognize that some of these not-gifted children are strong learners; increase access to enriched learning opportunities for these strong learners; give them copious free time, free rein and encouragement to pursue their passions; do not let these strong learners advance beyond age/grade level. Preserve public-school gifted programs, but quit trying to place children in extra-curricular academic programs or elite private schools for the gifted. I fail to comprehend how we are to encourage -- but not push -- children to pursue their passions as far as they can take them, without allowing or encouraging them to advance.
The overall lack of cohesive, consistent arguments in this book gives Hothouse Kids the feel of a student term paper. Facts are cherry-picked -- and often unsubstantiated -- to support whatever point the author is trying to prove; a point argued in one chapter is contradicted in the next. Thus, we get a capsule history of childhood in one chapter, while the book ends with a call for a return to “childhood as it is classically imagined.” Which era are we imagining? Shall we long for a return to the time when children were apprenticed at a very young age, the era of the child factory worker, or the opulent lifestyle of wealthy children in more recent centuries? While in chapter five Ms. Quart describes the historically changing views on gifted education, in chapter six she cites a 1953 – pre-Sputnik – quote from conservative writer Gertrude Himmelfarb about how child prodigies are “an outrage against nature” in an effort to describe her own emotions when confronted by the concept of a child with an IQ of more than 200. Citing an opinion from over half a century ago in the contemporary context of the author’s own emotions serves only to obscure and muddle the issues at hand.
The immature tone of Hothouse Kids permeates nearly every page of the book. Members of the gifted community are freaks, conservative Christians are rubes, and nearly everyone is not stylishly dressed. The book smacks of armchair quarterbacking – Ms. Quart is neither psychologist, nor parent, nor educator, yet she claims to know exactly what parents are doing wrong and what the consequences of those errors will be. A more even-handed tone would have lent the book greater credibility, both in terms of its scope and in terms of the reader’s perception of the author’s maturity and insight. One need not agree with one’s subjects to treat them with respect and dignity.
One of the commonly-cited “rules” of writing is “Write about what you know.” Ultimately, though, I am left wondering if Ms. Quart really is writing about what she knows. She provides detailed descriptions of her own giftedness, and clearly she relates very keenly to the former child prodigies she interviewed for this book. Ms. Quart, who as far as I can tell is childless, places the blame for the problems she sees, and the burden of solving those problems, on today’s parents. I would be most interested to learn, if and when Ms. Quart has children of her own, whether she is able to live up to her own expectations. That might be a book worth reading.
Sarah Garrison lives in New Jersey with her husband and two sons, one of whom is twice-exceptional, the other too stubborn to assess. She has homeschooled her children for the last five years. She can be reached at frenetic@earthlink.net or you can check out her blog at The Best-Laid Plans.
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