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Young and gifted, but are they hungry?

Young and gifted, but are they hungry?

Daily Telegraph - 12/08/2003 - original

Summer school experience suggests that it is the most curious youngsters who want to learn, not the most talented, says Lincoln Allison

I have "taught" people all my adult life, but in the amateur tradition of the English university: more a question of discussing things that interest me than teaching in the formal sense. So, finding myself in front of a class of schoolchildren for the first time at the age of 56 was a weird experience.

These children were well-behaved and had plenty to say. Nevertheless, collectively, they carried with them an atmosphere of incarceration. Like prisoners – and unlike undergraduates – they were marched into my presence and fought little battles with each other through glances, contemptuous sighs and the possession of particular chairs.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the school day, which was from 9am to 4.30pm in this case, was too long by a matter of hours. If undergraduates have three hours' contact with their lecturers in the course of a day, they consider themselves exhausted, yet children at school are expected to study all day.

The context of my experience was the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (Nagty), a Government-sponsored initiative in which leading universities offer summer-school teaching to able pupils from the state sector and ordinary backgrounds. The result, in my case at least, was a certain amount of incomprehension, but also a fair amount of stimulation.

I was teaching a course on the interpretation of sport. There were a number of good discussions, especially when I showed the film Chariots of Fire and we talked about whether the qualities required to be a "winner" were admirable or not. I also got myself into trouble over a discussion on drugs in sport, saying things that I (and others) have said in many contexts but which were considered too morally ambiguous for children's ears.

The question I wanted an answer to, and which everybody else asked me, is whether the children were really "gifted and talented".

The simple answer is no, but the explanations and qualifications of that answer are far more important than the bald negative itself. The most obvious of these is that the kind of capacities that mark people out as prodigies in music or mathematics are barely relevant in the humanities. Instead, there are a great range of factors, including wide reading and urgent curiosity as well as the capacities to accumulate information and sympathise with people very different from yourself.

Having said that, to someone of my generation the young seem to lack both a broad reading background (do they have too many alternative entertainments?) and a real intellectual hunger for ideas. At Wimbledon this year, nine Russian girls made it to the third round of the tennis tournament, whereas not a single British girl got beyond the first round. The obvious explanation was "hunger", at least in its metaphorical sense: in Russia, people have ambition desperate enough to devote themselves entirely to their chance of excellence.

The same is true of intellectual life: a couple of years ago my department gave its prize for the best degree of the year to a woman from Bosnia operating in her fourth language. I asked her whether she thought she worked harder than her English contemporaries. She gave me what can only be described as an old-fashioned look and said: "Very, very much harder."

Perhaps it doesn't help either that the young are constantly presented with celebrity rather than excellence as their role model, with people who are rich and famous because they are cool, sexy or charming and who are not particularly gifted or talented, certainly not intellectually.

One of the most gifted and talented students I have ever taught reacted with hostility to the Nagty idea when I mentioned it to him. He would have been a prime candidate when he was younger, but his view was that no teenager in his right mind would have wanted to go back to school for three weeks as soon as the summer term ended, let alone have to explain to his mates in September that that is what he had been doing.

I could see his point, but the idyll of lazy, crazy summer days is surely mainly myth, and my pupils were manifestly quite excited by the situation they found themselves in, on a campus with hundreds of other young people.

The Nagty idea started badly: more than 40 per cent of the 900 places offered this year were not taken up. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but it needs to develop. Certainly, there should be less of a spread of age and ability in a class. I taught an age range from 12 to 16 and what seemed to me to be a wide range of abilities. And they should cut the nonsense about "gifted and talented"; those who need to be succoured are the seriously intellectually curious.

When considering the idea of the intellectually "gifted and talented", it is impossible for me to put out of my mind the image of my friend and contemporary, Gareth Evans. He was a genuinely brilliant man, offered an Oxford fellowship at 19. His legacy – he died of cancer at 33 – is admired work on the philosophy of mind, put together posthumously from his notes by friends and colleagues.

He was not an easy character, being arrogantly logical and aggressively well read. At our very first seminar (on welfare economics), he arrived late, carrying the entire body of set reading and announced that his week's reading had demonstrated to his satisfaction that the academic discipline of economics was "based on a mistake".

Gareth was genuinely gifted and talented. His company was exciting, dangerous and more than slightly disturbing. I get the impression that nobody in the younger generation would want to be like him.

The author is reader in politics at Warwick University