Advice on gifted education

If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm. (Bruce Barton)

Education is a complex, multifaceted, and painstaking process, and being gifted does not make this less so. I would caution against any single “silver bullet” to educating a gifted child, whether it be a special school, private tutoring, home schooling, grade acceleration, or anything else; these are all options with advantages and disadvantages, and need to be weighed against the various requirements and preferences (both academic and non-academic) of the child, the parents, and the school. Since this varies so much from child to child, I cannot give any specific advice on a given child’s situation. [In particular, due to many existing time commitments and high volume of requests, I am unable to personally respond to any queries regarding gifted education.]

I can give a few general pieces of advice, though. Firstly, one should not focus overly much on a specific artificial benchmark, such as obtaining degree X from prestigious institution Y in only Z years, or on scoring A on test B at age C. In the long term, these feats will not be the most important or decisive moments in the child’s career; also, any short-term advantage one might gain in working excessively towards such benchmarks may be outweighed by the time and energy that such a goal takes away from other aspects of a child’s social, emotional, academic, physical, or intellectual development. Of course, one should still work hard, and participate in competitions if one wishes; but competitions and academic achievements should not be viewed as ends in themselves, but rather a way to develop one’s talents, experience, knowledge, and enjoyment of the subject.

Secondly, I feel that it is important to enjoy one’s work; this is what sustains and drives a person throughout the duration of his or her career, and holds burnout at bay. It would be a tragedy if a well-meaning parent, by pushing too hard (or too little) for the development of their child’s gifts in a subject, ended up accidentally extinguishing the child’s love for that subject. The pace of the child’s education should be driven more by the eagerness of the child than the eagerness of the parent.

Thirdly, one should praise one’s children for their efforts and achievements (which they can control), and not for their innate talents (which they cannot). This article by Po Bronson describes this point excellently. See also the Scientific American article “ The secret to raising smart kids ” for a similar viewpoint.

Finally, one should be flexible in one’s goals. A child may be initially gifted in field X, but decides that field Y is more enjoyable or is a better fit. This may be a better choice, even if Y is “ less prestigious ” than X; sometimes it is better to work in a less well known field that one feels competent and comfortable in, than in a “hot” but competitive field that one feels unsuitable for. (See also Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage.)

My own education is discussed in the following articles. While I am very happy with the way things turned out for me, I would again caution that each child’s situation, strengths, and weaknesses are different, and that my experience might not necessarily be the ideal template to follow for others.

• “ Terence Tao ”, Ken Clements, Educational Studies in Mathematics, August 1984, Vol. 15, No. 3, 213-238
• “ Parental involvement in Gifted Education ”, Billy Tao, Educational Studies in Mathematics, August 1986, Vol. 17, No. 3, 313-321
• “ Radical Acceleration in Australia: Terence Tao”, Miraca Gross, G/C/T, July/August 1986
• “ Insights from SMPY’s greatest former child prodigies: Drs. Terence (“Terry”) Tao and Lenhard (“Lenny”) Ng reflect on their talent development ”, Michelle Muratori, Julian Stanley, Lenhard Ng, Jack Ng, Miraca Gross, Terence Tao, Billy Tao, Gifted Child Quarterly, Fall 2006, Vol. 50, No. 4, 307-324

For professional advice on gifted education, I can recommend the Center for Talented Youth. See also my page on career advice.

Addendum on IQ

There are various internet sources attributing a large numerical Intelligence Quotient (IQ) to myself. Despite the popular fascination with this statistic, it plays no actual role in academia (outside of specialist fields such as psychometrics); for instance it has no official or unofficial role in determining college admissions (in contrast to standardized tests such as the SAT or GRE), or on job applications. Nevertheless, I am asked from time to time as to the source of this number.

When I was six years old, I was given the Stanford Binet test and obtained a score that was equivalent to that attained by a typical 14-year old. Based on this, an IQ of just over 220 could be inferred by simple division, but the test is extremely noisy at these scales, and with realistic error bars a more accurate estimate would be “greater than 175”. This was documented in the book “ Exceptionally gifted children ” by Miraca Gross, where I was given the pseudonym “Adrian Seng”; a relevant excerpt can be found here.

But there is no reason to expect that this ratio would continue in my later years; I did take some other cognitive tests at age eight (see the article of Clements linked to above), but have not taken such tests since.