Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child

> Even Einstein was unexceptional in his youth.

Citation needed.

This has to be paid placement for the book, shame on you Guardian.

Also it's laughable. Intelligence is basically something you're born with. Around half is inherited, the rest is, IMO, luck, but still determined very young or in the womb.

Giftedness is measurable young, possibly at the beginning of speech (gifted children almost always talk earlier than average). This raises doubt that it's something developed by training.

Some studies also, controversially, show that final IQ can't be easily manipulated by learning. That IQ is fixed at a young age and remains static through a wide variety of future up brining.

Hello slackingoff2017! I agree, and I disagree: I have seen exceptionally gifted children being told they were so, and enter a failing mode of trying less hard and relying on wits to stay afloat in school. This eventually fails. So the luck element is true, but pointing this out is not helpful, because a lot more than luck is required.

The article uses three terms: "gifted", "intelligence", and "high performance", but it seem to be as doing a rather poor job at distinguishing them in the beginning. The article seems to acknowledge that intelligence is a spectrum where people are born with everything from intellectual disability to intellectual giftedness, but then focus primarily on performance. A gifted child, as define by the article, is a high performing child.

Seems similar to people who would look at a tall child and proclaim that they will be high performing baseball player, and then get disappointed when they don't end up in major league. I find it rather obvious that most of the tallest children in the world won't end up as professional baseball players, similar to how most of the highest intellectual gifted children won't end up with a Nobel prize. Instead I predict that children on any extreme end of a spectrum will face a long list of unique challenges in a society which is designed for the median, resulting in a wide range of performance results.

IQ is 50-80% heritable.

There is such a thing as a gifted child.