A FABLE?
One time the animals had a school. The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, flying and swimming, and all the animals took all the
subjects.
The duck was good in swimming, better than his instructor, and he made passing grades in flying, but was practically hopeless in running. He
was made to stay after school and drop his swimming class in order to practice running. He kept this up until he was only average in swimming. But, average is acceptable, so nobody worried about that but the
duck.
The eagle was considered a problem pupil and was disciplined severely. He beat all the others to the top of the tree in the climbing class,
but he had used his own way of getting there.
The rabbit started out at the top of his class in running, but had a nervous breakdown and had to drop out of school on account of so much
makeup work in swimming.
The squirrel led the climbing class, but his flying teacher made him start his flying lessons from the ground instead of the top of the tree,
and he developed charley horses from overexertion at the take-off and began getting C's in climbing and D's in running.
The practical prairie dogs apprenticed their offspring to a badger when the school authorities refused to add digging to the curriculum.
At the end of the year, an eel that could swim well, run, climb, and fly a little was made
valedictorian.
--printed in The Instructor, April, 1968
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"To understand highly gifted children it is essential to realize that, although they are children with the same basic needs as other
children, they are very different. Adults cannot ignore or gloss over their differences without doing serious damage to these children, for the differences will not go away or be outgrown. They affect almost every
aspect of these children's intellectual and emotional lives.
A microscope analogy is one useful way of understanding extreme intelligence. If we say that all people look at the world through a lens, with
some lenses cloudy or distorted, some clear, and some magnified, we might say that gifted individuals view the world through a microscope lens and the highly gifted view it through an electron microscope. They see
things in very different ways and often see what others simply cannot see. Although there are advantages to this heightened perception, there are disadvantages as well."
Stephanie S. Tolan, Helping Your Highly Gifted Child, 1989
(http://ericec.org/digests/e477.html)
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"Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly most
fundamental.... The freedom to learn...has been bought by bitter sacrifice.
“And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the
right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have
said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what
the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be." -- W.E.B. DuBois
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