Is Every Child Gifted?

Dr. Russell T. Warne

Jun 19, 2025

Every child is gifted and talented. Each is unique. Every child needs, wants, and deserves opportunities for continuing learning, healthy development, and success in school. (Lawson, 2002, p. ix)

All children are gifted ... I think it not at all implausible that a broadened view of giftedness would reveal that every child is gifted in some socially valued way. (D. Feldman, 1979, pp. 662, 663)

One common misconception about individual differences in the educational realm is the belief that every child is gifted. This belief can take a variety of forms, as shown in the quotes above. Lawson’s (2002) perspective was that the uniqueness of each child and their need for a nurturing education is the root of their giftedness. David Feldman’s (1979) viewpoint was that if “giftedness” were just defined broadly enough, then it would be apparent that every child is gifted.

A common modern sentiment is the statement that “Every child is gifted. They just unwrap their packages at different times.” This treacly claim is on T-shirts, wall decorations, hats, tote bags, and other merchandise. Taken literally, this viewpoint means that if a child seems behind their peers, then they are just a late bloomer who will “unwrap their gifts” and catch up with their classmates at a later time. While later bursts of intellectual development do happen, it becomes increasingly rare as children age. By approximately age 10, a child who – in a favorable environment – does not display high intelligence is very unlikely to do so in the future (see Chapter 12).

What’s puzzling about the belief that every child is gifted is that no one would ever say this about adults. No one would claim that every adult is gifted or brilliant and has areas in which they exceed other people’s performance. Nobody believes that if people just look hard enough, they will find an area of exceptional ability in every adult. For some reason, total mediocrity is only permitted in adults – never children. I wonder where the non-gifted adults come from.

What is Giftedness?

Just as there is no definition of intelligence that has 100% agreement, a definition of giftedness that appeals to all scholars (or even a majority) is elusive. In the early part of the twentieth century, many scholars defined “gifted” as being synonymous with having a high IQ score. That changed in the 1970s when the US government issued a report on gifted education in the United States. In this report (Marland, 1971), there were six possible areas where students could be gifted:

1. General intellectual aptitude

2. Specific academic aptitude

3. Creative or productive thinking

4. Leadership

5. Visual and performing arts

6. Psychomotor ability (i.e., athletic or physical skill)

Of these six areas of giftedness, an intelligence test would be most useful for identifying gifted students in the general intellectual aptitude group. Therefore, this report expanded the definition of giftedness to include a much larger group of abilities and developed skills than merely high general intelligence. Later definitions of giftedness have included some of these abilities, though legal definitions vary from state to state and from country to country. Among scholars in gifted education, there is even more diversity in definitions, with some people seeing giftedness as advanced development compared to one’s age peers (e.g., Morelock, 1992) or including motivation and other non-cognitive traits (e.g., Renzulli, 1978).

Yes, Virginia, There are Gifted Children

Without doubt, a broader definition of giftedness will mean that more people are defined as “gifted,” especially if a person only needs to excel on one trait, ability, or talent in order to be gifted (Lakin, 2018; McBee, Peters, & Waterman, 2014). But this does not mean that every child is gifted. Regardless of one’s preferred definition, the term “gifted” implies an exceptionality and a difference in ability compared to the regular population. Stretching the term “gifted” until it encompasses everyone makes the term lose any meaning. If everyone is gifted, then nobody really is. The claim that every child is gifted is really a denial of giftedness and/or individual differences – and it is a preposterous claim. People do vary from one another in their intelligence, specific aptitudes, leadership ability, skill in visual or performing arts, psychomotor ability, or any other ability or skill that one prefers to include in their definition of giftedness. Anyone who has attended a high school football game or a school choir concert can attest to that.

More commonly, the claim that every child is gifted is a denial that some people are smarter than others. I believe that people usually have good motivations for denying individual differences in intelligence. They may not want to discourage a child, or they may believe in the power of interventions to improve or equalize intellectual differences. But individual differences in intelligence do exist, even if some people wish they did not. Every person has different genetic and environmental influences that have resulted in their intelligence level, with some people getting dealt a lucky hand from nature and nurture to make them smarter, and others not being so fortunate.

Apart from denial, some people seem to believe that every child is gifted based on an emotional response:

if we were willing to invest more of our national income in education, we could pay teachers better, educate them better, and provide them with the results of better educational research and with much better teaching aids. We could reduce class size ... We would discover what in our hearts we already know – every child is gifted. (Gruber, 1963, p. 166)

Though over 50 years old, Gruber’s quote is typical of a belief that is guided by emotion and not by rational evidence. It’s a comforting thought, but it is fiction. Many people (with the best of intentions) allow what they wish were true to stand in for reality. And although it may feel good to believe that every child has the potential to be an Einstein or a Picasso if only they had just the right environmental conditions, it is not true. Any educational policy – such as the one Gruber (1963) proposed – based on an incorrect understanding of human psychology is unlikely to achieve its creators’ goals, despite what the creators believe in their hearts.

The Rise and Fall of the Pygmalion in the Classroom. To be fair, sometimes the belief that every child is gifted is based on more than wishful thinking. One famous study that bolsters this belief is called the Pygmalion in the Classroom, which was originally reported in a brief journal article (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966) and later a book (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). In this study, all the children in Grades 1 to 6 in a California elementary school took a group-administered intelligence test. The researchers selected a random 20% of the children (65 across Grades 1–6) and told the teachers that these children were expected to experience unusually strong academic growth in the coming year. But there were no real differences between these children and the other 80% of the children in the school, who totaled 255 children in Grades 1–6. (The teachers did not know that their students had taken an intelligence test.) At the end of the school year, the children were retested, and those that were labeled as due for strong academic growth had IQ scores that increased by an average of 12.2 points. Because of these strong IQ gains, some people have argued that the label of “gifted” is a self-fulfilling prophecy and that if teachers merely believed that all their students were gifted, then all children would perform at a high level (e.g., Weiler, 1978).

The original Pygmalion in the Classroom study has been highly contentious, and people have interpreted it many ways. However, it is incorrect to argue that the study means that (1) all children are gifted, (2) the “gifted” label is meaningless, or (3) gifted programs create self-fulfilling prophecies for children. Several aspects of the Pygmalion in the Classroom study are questionable and prevent any straightforward, simple interpretation (Jussim & Harber, 2005). One curious characteristic was that all the IQ gains were concentrated in first- and second-grade students; no other grades showed any difference in end-of-year IQ between groups of children (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966). Therefore, if teacher expectations have any impact on IQ, it is only for young children. Moreover, IQ scores for the “regular” children also increased – by 8.4 points (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966, p. 116). This means that any effects of labeling were not damaging for children in either group (Jussim & Harber, 2005). Regardless of this increase in the control group, the IQ scores for the group of children that the teachers were told would have academic growth still increased by 3.8 IQ points more, on average, than the control groups’ IQs.

One prominent critic (Snow, 1995) also noted that the entire difference between the two groups of students was driven by five children who had IQ gains of 69 points or more. These gains are so unrealistic that it seems more likely that there was a problem with the intelligence test than that teacher expectations raised intelligence so much. Two of these children had IQs below 20 (so low that a child would have difficulty speaking or feeding themselves) and were above average by the end of the school year. The other three were above average at the first testing and scored above 200 at the end of the year! Another problem with the data that Snow (1995) identified was that the test was only designed to produce meaningful IQ scores between 60 and 160, yet 35% of children scored below 60. Not only were these scores not useful, but it would indicate that over one-third of children in this school had mild to severe intellectual disabilities and would have great difficulty learning in a typical classroom. Unless the school caters to children with disabilities, this percentage is unrealistically high.

The Pygmalion in the Classroom study has problems that extend beyond questionable test scores. The following year, Rosenthal and Jacobson administered the intelligence test to the children again, and any differences between the two groups had disappeared (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Spitz, 1999). Later studies trying to replicate the original work have been disappointing, with most failing to find any relationship between teacher expectations and children’s IQ scores (Jensen, 1980b; Jussim & Harber, 2005; Raudenbush, 1984; Spitz, 1999). Even Rosenthal’s own attempts to replicate his results failed to show any difference in IQ for children that teachers were told should experience sudden cognitive growth and children that teachers were told were developing normally (e.g., Conn, Edwards, Rosenthal, & Crowne, 1968; J. T. Evans & Rosenthal, 1969).

A likely reason why the Pygmalion in the Classroom study usually fails to replicate is that the manipulation to change teachers’ beliefs about their students’ abilities was – in the words of one prominent psychologist – “unbelievably casual” (Cronbach, 1975, p. 7). The researchers (one of whom was the principal at the school) gave the teachers a list of the students who were supposedly due for an increase in academic performance. There is no indication that the teachers actually treated the children on this list differently in their classrooms than the other children that were not expected to have strong academic growth. Indeed, Rosenthal and his co-authors reported that teachers usually did not remember which students were expected to have a sudden increase in academic performance (J. T. Evans & Rosenthal, 1969; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

This illustrates what I call Warne’s First Law of Behavioral Interventions: “Brief, subtle, or weak interventions will produce brief, subtle, or weak changes in human behavior.” Earlier chapters of this book show that long-term IQ increases require massive, prolonged interventions, such as reducing lead exposure (no easy task in an industrialized society), long-term schooling, and adoption. Less drastic interventions, like Head Start, listening to Mozart’s music, or “brain-training” games, produce small or negligible impacts on IQ that fade out after the intervention stops (see Chapters 12, 14–17). Given this pattern of attempts to raise intelligence, it is difficult to believe that merely giving a teacher a list of names is enough to make those people smarter. Taking the same viewpoint, Jensen (1980a, p. 608) wrote:

It should not seem surprising that the teacher expectancy effect has failed to materialize with respect to [increasing] IQ. After all, even much more direct instruction on the test, tutoring, and compensatory education programs have failed to yield appreciable gains in IQ. Why should as subtle a condition as the teacher’s expectation about the child’s intelligence have a greater effect? Teacher expectations may in fact be quite realistic.

Jussim and Harber (2005) agreed on this point and reported research showing that teacher impressions of children’s abilities are generally reflecting – not causing – a child’s academic performance. Even a supporter of the Pygmalion in the Classroom’s work found that the effect was smaller than in the original study and only had an impact in the first two weeks of the school year (Raudenbush, 1984). This is when teachers generally do not know their students well, and so any new information may influence the teacher’s opinions and behavior towards a child. Giving false information about a child to a teacher does not impact that child’s academic performance if the teacher already knows how the child performs scholastically (Jussim & Harber, 2005).

While the Pygmalion in the Classroom has not been shown to be a consistent phenomenon, it is possible that teacher beliefs about what their students can – and can’t – do could have an impact on classroom learning (Jussim & Harber, 2005; Snow, 1995; Spitz, 1999). A teacher who sets high academic goals for their students and pushes them to work hard to achieve those goals may genuinely cause their students to learn more. Additionally, teacher expectations may be more important for the academic performance of some groups of students – such as low-income students, children from minority backgrounds, and younger children – than others (Jussim & Harber, 2005). What is highly implausible is that teacher beliefs impact intelligence. And because children’s intelligence levels are resistant to their teachers’ beliefs, the Pygmalion in the Classroom does not prove that all children are gifted – or that all would be if adults just treated them like they were.

Are Gifted Classes Appropriate?

The belief that all children are gifted (or a total denial of academic giftedness) leads some people to propose that special classes for “gifted” children should be available to most or all children. While this idea sounds good, there are unintended consequences to opening gifted classes to all children. As these classes become less academically selective, one of two scenarios inevitably arises: either (a) academically unprepared students in these courses experience high rates of failure, or (b) the classes must become watered down to accommodate the new students. Both of these consequences occur because typical children have difficulty handling advanced coursework that their academically gifted peers find manageable.

The best evidence regarding the drawbacks of admitting many non-gifted students into academically intensive classes comes from Advanced Placement (AP) tests. AP is a program owned by the College Board that allows high school teachers to teach an introductory college-level course. At the end of the school year, students take a standardized test created by the College Board, and students who earn a high enough score (usually a 3, on a scale of 1 to 5) receive college credit from the university that they later attend. The AP program is very popular; a majority of American high schools offer at least one AP course (Warne, Sonnert, & Sadler, 2019), and between 2006 and 2018, the number of students who took at least one AP test grew from 1.3 million to 2.8 million.

However, as more students have participated in AP, the average test score in the most popular classes has dropped. For example, the average score for the AP English Literature & Composition test was 3.05 in 1998 when there were 163,520 examinees. Twenty years later, in 2018, the average score was 2.56 for 396,350 examinees. For the AP US History exam, the average score was 3.02 in 1998 when there were 160,674 examinees. In 2018, the average score was 2.66 for 497,290 examinees. Additionally, the correlation between the number of examinees and the average test score was r = -.51 across all 38 AP exams in 2018. This indicates that the most popular tests tend to have the lowest AP scores, which is consistent with my claim that letting less academically gifted students participate in AP has lowered scores and increased the failure rate on AP exams.

The effects are even more drastic when school personnel implement a policy to eliminate non-AP courses in certain subjects so that all students enroll in AP. When this occurred in Philadelphia, only 4 of the 41 high schools in the city had passing rates of 50% or higher, and these were schools that had selective admissions and test scores at or above the national average. Among the other 37 schools, none of them had passing rates above 33%, and 30 of them had passing rates less than 10%. A few high schools did not have a single student pass any AP exams (Lichten, 2010). Similar results have happened elsewhere when schools have opened AP classes to less prepared students (e.g., Blagaich, 1999; Bowie, 2013). In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio started an initiative in 2017 called “AP for All” that is designed to implement AP in more New York City schools (Finn & Scanlan, 2019). While there has been an increase in the number of students taking AP exams and earning passing scores, the passing rate has dropped. In 2018 (the most recent year with available data), only 51.9% of AP examinees citywide passed at least one AP exam – the lowest percentage on record. The same year, in “AP for All” schools, the percentage was the lowest since 2007: only 21.8% (New York City Department of Education, 2019). Pushing all students into AP courses does not result in large-scale academic success; instead, it results in an increase in failing grades on AP exams. Increased failure is apparent in AP because the College Board sets their standard for passing scores and local schools have no control over this measure of academic success.

A more common outcome in opening up advanced classes to the general student population is that the rigor and curriculum get relaxed to accommodate less gifted students. Firm evidence of this consequence is harder to find because most gifted programs do not have objective measures of advanced student learning (like an AP test) that can be used to evaluate them. However, the characteristics of high-IQ learners make it inevitable that a class that includes a significant portion of average students will serve bright children more poorly. One succinct comparison is that:

low-g learners require highly structured, detailed, concrete, and "contextualized" instruction that omits no intermediate steps, but that such “complete” instruction is actually dysfunctional for high-g individuals. The latter easily fill gaps in instruction on their own and benefit most from abstract, self-directed, incomplete instruction that allows them to assemble new knowledge and reassemble old knowledge in idiosyncratic ways. (Gottfredson, 1997b, p. 124)

Therefore, lessons tailored for students with high intelligence will be effective by starting from general, abstract principles and then using specific examples to illustrate. These lessons will be loosely structured and include connections to different topics and school subjects. If a substantial proportion of average students are in the class, then an effective lesson will inevitably need to be less abstract, more concrete, and more carefully structured.

High-IQ individuals also generally learn faster and need less repetition and practice than average and low-IQ people to master a new concept (N. M. Robinson, Ziegler, & Gallagher, 2000). Many gifted children can master the K-12 curriculum in less than 13 years and are excellent candidates for grade skipping, especially if the curriculum prepares them to advance through grades more rapidly than one per year (Assouline, Colangelo, VanTassel-Baska, & Lupkoswki-Shoplik, 2015; Assouline, Colangelo, VanTassel-Baska, & Sharp, 2015). Courses set at their pace will inevitably be a place where average students struggle to keep up. If there are enough students who are only modestly above average in intelligence, then the teacher must steer the class towards their needs by slowing down and reducing the complexity of the lessons.

Therefore, educational decisions based on the idea that every child is gifted result in unfavorable consequences: either widespread failure ensues when average children take advanced classes, or the teacher of a “gifted” class is forced to slow down or reduce the complexity of lessons in order to accommodate the typical learner. Exposing average children to lessons they are not ready to master, or setting them up for likely failure in advanced classes is cruel. Watering down the curriculum or slowing down a gifted class to accommodate less academically elite students is failing to deliver on a promise to gifted students that the class would help them learn at their pace and cognitive complexity. Instead, a g-aware policy would recognize the differences in intelligence among students by creating advanced classes and identifying children who can skip grades or experience other forms of academic acceleration (Assouline, Colangelo, VanTassel-Baska, & Lupkoswki-Shoplik, 2015; Assouline, Colangelo, VanTassel-Baska, & Sharp, 2015).

A Rigorous Education For All, Not Gifted Education for All

I hope readers do not misunderstand me. While the evidence indicates that gifted children can benefit from their own classes and from academic acceleration, this does not mean that only gifted children should receive a rigorous education. All children should be challenged by a curriculum and learn something new every day in school. Ideally, all children would also experience the best teaching methods and a rich, engaging curriculum that prepares them for their post-high school life path, whether that is in the workforce, the military, college, or technical training. But giving the same curriculum and educational experience to all children leads to undesirable consequences. Some children will inevitably fall behind, and some will go months or years without learning much because the curriculum is not challenging. Ironically, treating students in the same way in school is profoundly unfair (Benbow & Stanley, 1996).

The reason gifted education programs need to exist is that the curriculum that works for the typical students will not provide high-IQ children with regular opportunities to learn. The further a child’s IQ is from average, the worse the typical curriculum and teaching methods will be for the child (Gottfredson, 2003c). As children’s abilities are further from average, more drastic changes are needed to provide a challenging, appropriate education (Ruf, 2005). This is true for people who are significantly above the average IQ or below the average IQ (N. M. Robinson et al., 2000). While people recognize the importance of adjusting the educational experience for children with abilities that are below average, few recognize that the need can be equally strong for children with above average abilities. For example, only about 0.25% of children per year skip a grade (Warren, Hoffman, & Andrew, 2014, p. 435), and only about 2–3% will do so during the course of their K-12 experience (Warne, 2017). However, by Grade 11, nearly 25% of students are college-ready in every core subject and could attend college immediately (Dannenberg & Hyslop, 2019).

Creating a rigorous education should not be a zero-sum game. In the elementary grades, these programs do not cost any more than the regular education program. And when an experience does not require a high ability to provide a benefit, it should be open to all students. For example, participating in a school play, career day, or field trip is probably beneficial for everyone, so all students should get to participate in these activities. Allowing gifted children to flourish does not mean that other students are neglected; it merely means that their educational needs are met – just as any child deserves. But it does not happen on its own; serving the needs of high-g students requires administrative flexibility and support from school personnel, including the staff and teachers serving the regular student body (Benbow & Stanley, 1996).

Conclusion

In conclusion, some children are gifted, and some are not. Stating this is not elitist. Rather, it is a recognition that individual differences exist and that adapting to these differences will shape the education that children have. Educational programs that reflect this reality will inevitably give different educational experiences to gifted and non-gifted students. Ignoring these differences, though, will produce negative consequences. Gifted children shoulder the brunt of the negative consequences of a curriculum designed for the child with an average or below average IQ. They sit through lessons covering topics that they already know and go weeks or months without learning anything new. They spend longer than they need to in the K-12 education system and miss out on an early start in their postsecondary education or careers, which can have negative economic consequences for them (Warne, 2017; Warne & Liu, 2017). The negative consequences of ignoring individual differences in intelligence extend beyond gifted children, though. The next three chapters will show that denying differences in IQ can have negative effects for all children.

From Chapter 18 of "In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence" by Dr. Russell Warne (2020)

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