IN FOCUS: What the 'gifted' label means to children, and the adults they become

SINGAPORE: When Ayden Ang was nine, he turned down an offer to join the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) in favour of staying at his primary school.

The maths and science lover went through with the GEP screening and selection because he was doing well in his studies and wanted to test himself. He didn’t expect to get in.

“But the reason why I ended up not going for it is because it just felt like a very sudden change,” the now 18-year-old told me in his home in early October.

The thought of changing schools – the GEP is not available in every school – and leaving his friends was scary.

“It’s quite an intimidating change, and frankly, one that I was not prepared for,” he said.

Quiet by nature, Ayden struggled to make friends in his first two years in primary school, his father Kelvin Ang explained. In Primary 3, he had just started to settle in.

So when he gained entry to the programme meant for the top 1 per cent of students in Singapore, his parents were happy but mostly fearful about whether their son could cope in a new school.

Their approach was to give Ayden as much information as possible and let him decide. They took him to an open house and laid out the pros and cons – the rest was up to him.

Ayden’s decision is an example of how emotional and social intelligence shape the futures of high-ability children, not just their academic performance and intellectual precocity. This has become more noticeable in recent discussions about giftedness.

Education Minister Chan Chun Sing made this observation after noting the GEP’s good outcomes and the significant contributions its alumni have made to society over 40 years.

"However, there are also some students who felt weighed down by the expectations to excel, or could not cope with the rigour of the programme and lost interest in learning," he said.

"There were also students who were selected for the programme but decided not to join."

In the revamped GEP that will apply from this year’s Primary 1 cohort, selection will involve holistic assessments of students’ academic abilities and “socio-emotional readiness” – which Ayden was already attuned to at his young age.

I wanted to look more closely at the emotional and social implications of being identified as gifted or having high ability at a young age.

What does that label mean for these children as they go through school and grow up?

I went through the GEP, and even now, far into adulthood, I’ve been trying to make sense of the impact the "gifted" identifier has had on me.

WHAT IS GIFTEDNESS?

Started in 1984, the GEP provides an enriched curriculum for intellectually gifted students at nine primary schools. At the age of nine, students in Singapore who pass tests over two stages are invited to join the programme.

The GEP used to continue into secondary school, but this stopped in 2008. Select secondary schools still run school-based gifted programmes that GEP students and students who do well in their Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) can join.

What is giftedness? Beyond intellect, are there emotional and social traits that are associated with it?

When I asked Dr Sum Chee Wah this, the former divisional director who oversaw gifted education at the Ministry of Education (MOE) from 2004 to 2011 responded with American psychologist Dr Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.

Singapore’s GEP focuses on linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities. Dr Sum stressed that these exist as potential skills that can be developed. 

“What we are born with is not fixed. The potential depends on the environment for it to be realised and for it to be stretched,” she told me.

Dr Sum, now an associate professor at the Singapore University of Social Sciences’ (SUSS) S R Nathan School of Human Development, also laid out the traits of high-ability students.

These include the ability to learn new things very quickly, a capacious memory, abstract and critical thinking, the ability to reason well, a high degree of curiosity, a vivid imagination, having many academic and intellectual interests, and a tendency to get absorbed in them.

Then she mentioned some qualities that surprised me. 

These seemed unrelated to intellectual giftedness, but were nonetheless observed in students – emotional intensity, a “very unusual ability to empathise with others”, and a heightened sense of fairness and social justice.

This last attribute is why GEP students are given more opportunities for community involvement projects, along with the desire for them to have a more holistic education, she added.

Ms Mariya Angelova, a senior counsellor at Sofia Wellness Clinic who specialises in working with gifted children and adults, told me there is a distinct difference between being gifted and being high-achieving.

High-achievers are usually motivated by outcomes, focused on achievement, and take practical steps to succeed. They balance working hard and playing hard.

But gifted students are “more up and down” in this balance. They may be highly capable in some areas but not in others, and lack consistency in their efforts. They may have hyper-focus for a subject that interests them, but then lose focus when it comes to studying for grades.

Ms Angelova, who spent about eight years as a counsellor in a local school, also said that gifted students tend to experience more self-doubt and find interpersonal relationships more difficult.

What is the common thread that runs through all these challenges?

“I have a feeling that giftedness has been viewed as a ticket to success for life. And so once a person is identified as gifted, the adults around them, and including the person themselves, feel like in every area of life, they should be already capable,” she said.

This means that gifted children, who tend to come across as highly intelligent, mature and “smart enough” to figure things out on their own, can also be perceived as not needing support in their emotional and social development.

DISMISSED, SCARED AND ANGRY

My time in the gifted programme followed the script at the start. Lower primary was easy and when the GEP offer came, there was no question I would transfer schools to take it up.

I enjoyed the expansive curriculum, the literature we read, and the trust our teachers put in us to handle more complex ideas. 

In secondary school, I felt our quirks, interests and points of view were respected and given space. And I made dear, lifelong friends.

But I knew this wasn’t true for every “GEPer” (as we called ourselves). 

The programme was difficult for Reuben Yee, now 32. He was in the GEP around the same period as me.

As a kid, Mr Yee was a voracious reader who would use up his and his mother’s library loan quotas. He was often late to class as he preferred playing football.

School didn’t interest him as he felt it relied on rote learning. He got full marks without studying and came to expect that he could just breeze through exams.

He accepted his GEP offer without hesitation. In 2002, he transferred to a boys’ school that his family would not otherwise have been able to afford to send him to.

The programme was an “equalising measure” in that sense. 

“It was one of the reasons why we were happy initially when I got in,” Mr Yee said, although he still felt the gap with his richer classmates.

Once in the GEP, he expected it to fill his “thirst for knowledge”. 

But he felt there was little change from rote learning. When he asked questions to try and understand more, he felt that his teachers dismissed his queries in order to get through the lesson material.

“Math was the real issue, because at that level, you’re supposed to remember all the formulas, all the theorems. And then for me, (I) was always trying to understand what these symbols, what these numbers represent,” he said.

Disenchantment set in, and he scaled his efforts at school down to a minimum. He also had the mentality that “because I am capable or brilliant enough, I will just wait until (the) last minute to catch up”. 

His grades started to fall.

“When I saw my grades dropping, I think I was also scared, but I never admitted it,” he told me.

In the past, he was showered with praise for showing natural abilities in his studies and sports. Now, he started to brush the bad grades off by telling himself he hadn’t tried.

“You don’t want to try, because you’re like, what if I try and I’m not as brilliant as people think I am, or I think I am?”

Things came to a head in secondary school. He started skipping class, his attendance falling below 50 per cent at one point.

He spent his time hanging out with friends outside, reading books in the library and most of all, playing video games.

“It wasn’t so much that I was addicted to the game itself. It was more that it was an escape for me because I didn’t have to deal with any of the things in real life.”

To escape parental detection, he blocked calls that his teachers made to his father’s mobile phone.

He also paid strangers and friends with deeper voices to answer and pose as his father.

His parents eventually found out and were called into regular meetings with his teachers. They tried everything, Mr Yee said, but nothing worked.

“At that point, I was just a very angry kid,” he said. “Angry about life, because I felt like nobody really understood.”

While he shared an intellectual wavelength with his classmates, he could not connect with them socially. With his parents or other friends, he felt he could not talk about how he felt.

His truancy, coupled with the bad grades, eventually caught up with him. At the end of Secondary 2, he was asked to leave the GEP.

FINDING RESILIENCE AND A COMMUNITY

Mr Nicholas Gabriel Lim, who heads the graduate diplomas in youth work and professional life-coaching programmes at SUSS, said that youths go through a quest for identity, autonomy and belonging, while navigating intense social and emotional changes.

However, as the rational and emotional parts of the brain develop at different rates, they can be impulsive, emotionally sensitive and prone to risk-taking behaviour, especially when it comes to decision-making, self-regulation and long-term planning.

“Hence, you can imagine gifted or (high-ability) youth may sometimes feel unappreciated or misunderstood.

“And when that happens, the likelihood of feeling frustrated, worried, scared, alone … is quite high and at a faster rate as well,” he said.

But Mr Yee’s experience of being removed from the GEP is still exceptional. Most students complete the programme and, hopefully, emerge with the intellectual depth, creativity, social conscience and other qualities that it aims to foster.

Ms Magdalene Chew was in the second batch of GEP students. She entered the programme in secondary school in 1985, and she remembers it fondly.

After coasting through primary school, she relished the intellectual challenge posed by her new curriculum and her peers, yet never found it too stressful.

“I think it was good because it made me realise that there will always be people better at certain things than you,” said the lawyer, 52, who runs her own practice at AsiaLegal.

“I think people should be challenged, not just so that they can be pushed to do their best, but also so that they can understand sometimes you can’t achieve what you want to achieve … and be able to accept it. 

“It’s humility and resilience.”

Ms Chew’s classmates were a supportive bunch and would help those who were weaker in certain subjects. Mingling in a small cohort, the GEPers in her school got to know each other well and remain close-knit to this day. 

As an adult, she again found community in another group of high-ability individuals – Mensa Singapore, whose members’ IQs are within the top 2 per cent of the population. 

She passed the admissions test in 2004 and now serves on its management committee.

Ms Chew joined Mensa out of curiosity, as a different way to meet new people. Mensa members’ interests are varied, she told me, and they explore them together at local and international gatherings.

The search for community also extends to the parents of children with high IQs, who network and find each other through Mensa. There seems to be a particular draw for youths, whose membership has risen steadily in the past three years.

Mensa conducts the admissions test for those aged 14 and above, while children under 14 must find their own qualified psychologist for an intelligence test and submit their score. Despite this, close to 300 of Mensa Singapore’s 1,618 members are under nine.

I asked Ms Chew if people were also interested because a Mensa membership makes a resume stand out. 

“I’m sure some were motivated by that,” she said, although she pointed out that some who pass the admissions test still decide not to join.

TIMELINES AND EXPECTATIONS

The decision not to join the club is all the more notable when it comes to the GEP, given the fact that some parents hothouse their children just for this purpose.

This made the laissez-faire attitude of Ayden’s parents more unusual. I asked them about their willingness to let their nine-year-old son decide what to do with the GEP invitation.

Mr Ang said that Ayden’s mental well-being and happiness took precedence over the intellectual development he could get in the programme.

“It’s more of realising (there’s) not just one way to realise a kid’s potential, and it’s not just that point in time.”

The Angs’ approach mirrors what the education minister has said about providing “porous” pathways across Singapore’s education system, for children to develop at their own pace.

With the changes to the GEP, students will be able to join it at multiple junctures between Primary 4 and 6, and not just the standardised test in Primary 3. Schools can identify suitable students based on day-to-day observations, teachers’ recommendations and their work.

Dr Sum, the former MOE divisional director, noted that parents may still compare their child to others and question why one child is admitted to the GEP, but not the other.

“My plea to the parents is – the children have a lifetime to develop their potential. It’s not as though, once they’ve missed out on something at this stage, they’re going to be disadvantaged for life,” she said.

Ayden was content to “take it easy” in primary school. “I knew that there was going to be a long, long path ahead where there could be potentially more stuff that pops up down the line,” he told me.

And there really was “more stuff”. After primary school, he got into the NUS High School of Math and Science through Direct School Admission. 

He immediately felt the weight of expectation from the school’s advanced curriculum and alumni’s achievements. “I do feel like they have that kind of messaging where … you are one of the country’s best, and you should go on to (do) big things.”

He met brilliant peers and started to compare himself to them. “I’m meant to be their equal, I’m meant to be their classmate, so why are so many of them so much better than me?”

But over six years in NUS High, he came to realise that what matters is to “run your own race”. 

“All of those times I’ve been sad, upset, frustrated at the fact that my friends were doing better than me didn’t really matter, because I looked at my transcript and it’s fine,” he said.

He takes a wider view of himself than his grades, like his love for photography. He doesn’t feel “particularly special”, and that doesn’t bother him. 

“I just feel like a normal kid that just happens to be good at math and science,” he said.

Ms Angelova, the counsellor, told me that the messages a gifted student receives about their talents have an important influence on them, and this is true of any academically inclined child.

“It’s even worse when their achievements in academics, their performance, are so highly praised that the child just feels like my self-esteem and my identity are linked with my achievements, and it becomes very external.

“So I am loved as a child, I have attention and people like me, want to be with me, only if I demonstrate something or only if I can show my abilities,” she said.

“They don’t get a picture that they’re being liked and loved as a person.”

This inculcates a fear of disappointing teachers and parents, leaving less space for experimentation and failure.

Ms Angelova said that the language people use when talking about “gifted” or “difficult” children matters for this reason. What needs to come through is that “you actually have a complete person behind” the label.

This means talking not about “high-ability students” but “students with high abilities”, and not a “difficult child” but “a child that is experiencing difficult emotions”.

“I think that kind of a reframe will be very helpful in the long run,” she said.

SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF

What I heard in my interviews made me reflect on what I experienced after I was told I was gifted.

After Primary 6, I got into my first choice of secondary school and sat on the through train to junior college. There, I got into another selective academic programme. That was when things started to go off script, after I left the official bounds of the GEP.

The lead-up to the A-Levels was when I realised how difficult consistent effort had become for me. 

I recognised Mr Yee’s fear of trying and the ensuing avoidance, for when I was in junior college, I spent my time doing anything but preparing for the exams.

I still made it to university, at which point I realised I had been relying on membership in exclusive programmes to prop up my self-esteem for years.

It took me even longer to strip this down and see that I based too much of my identity on how intelligent I seemed to others.

There were many factors that contributed to this. But as a young person, I think I would have benefited from hearing that I was a “complete person” with more than academic talents, and getting support with difficult emotions.

I was not alone in gaining more clarity years after my time in school.

After Mr Yee was asked to leave the GEP, he sometimes thought about ending his life. Lacking people to confide in, he credits screamo music with helping him cope with pent-up emotions.

He was allowed to stay on at his secondary school in a non-GEP class. However, as his parents could not afford the fees, he had to transfer to another school.

At this new school, not much changed for him academically. But emotionally, he experienced “a very drastic change” as he finally found people he could connect with. His teachers were encouraging and receptive to his questions.

“Every time I wanted to have certain debates with them, they would engage me, which was nice.” 

Although he was a transfer student, his classmates made efforts to include him, and he made good friends.

He graduated from junior college with grades fit for a private university. After national service, he started working instead, as he still disliked school and had financial responsibilities. Without a degree, he worked 18-hour days in his first job to prove himself.

I asked Mr Yee whether being a gifted or intelligent individual was important to him now.

“I would rather be proud of something that I achieve through my own work,” he said. “How intelligent you are is just how you were born, basically the lottery of life.”

Instead, he was proud of how he had worked his way up in his career without a degree. Now a vice president at a real estate technology company, he is studying for a bachelor’s degree and has plans for a master’s so he can move further up the executive ladder.

I asked what he would do if he had a child in the future and they were offered a place in the GEP. 

Expecting him to have reservations about this, I was surprised at his response.

“Having gone through that emotional turmoil in the growing years, I know exactly what I need to do to make sure that they grow up healthily and have that right attitude to succeed.

“The most important point is, I will attribute all their successes to hard work, not because they’re smart or because they’re talented. So I will inculcate that value that they need to try for everything that they want to achieve.

“No matter if it’s easy for them, or it’s hard for them, I will never attribute it to their natural inclinations.”

He also felt that children will quickly stop approaching the people around them with their questions if they have been disappointed with what they perceive as a lack of interest.

“I think that was a bit of what I also went through,” he said.

“I will make sure that no matter how busy or how caught up I am with life, I will always make it a point to engage them whenever they express some kind of curiosity.”