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Developing Higher Education Systems that Discover and Enhance Latent 'Gifted" Talent

We are in a new era that has long left behind the chalk boards and pull down maps we so fondly remember learning from in classrooms without air conditioning (Go back further and people sat under trees.🌲🌳🌴). We are now in a time when virtual education has rises and will someday likely be parallel to traditional schools (at least for some degrees. STEM education will likely still need campus for the "hard" sciences. That also doesn't discount some of the benefits of being on ground and socialized into the educational system. Proximity and face-to-face is a rich environmental and channel expansion great for learning. What we can say is that education/communication is not limited to physicality but can be expanded beyond that.) What the era of big data allows is for the discovery and fostering of those with latent gifted potentials to better ensure they move to actualized performance for the benefit of themselves and their nation (i.e. an alternative form of service). 

This isn't about elitism as there is a certain percentage of the population that will have these traits and they don't get to select them or opt out of them making them both an enhancement and at times a disability due novelty and lack of mentors (Sometimes minorities of minorities with limited self-awareness.). There are young college students with unexplored latent multiple intelligences that could be enhance not only for their personal development, community development but even national development. (or perhaps a rare rare few with multiple Gardner's Intelligences and who have mastered their environments to reach the Debrodski's 5th Development Level through their Overexcitabilities. This is all pretty hypothetical when you reach this level because of a lack of examples and being in an era where people didn't understand the concepts nor did the unpublished geniuses leave marks of their behaviors.  From a controversial product of his time perspective Galton in 'Hereditary Genius' 1869 or came up with the idea of how genetics can play a part. He unfortunately didn't understand perfectly the nature of biology and how similar strains run through every race and thus there is no such thing as an "inferior race". I think in the future further DNA testing will defunct those outdate notions among the "learned" in society. Galton was right on family hereditary issues but failed to understand environmental factors and why certain eras and societies "documented" more genius. Pushing our best and brightest into unchallenged lives of mediocracy is a wasted national resource and unfair to them. As a nation we haven't focused on developing our "out of the bell curve" minorities (of any background) and instead leave gifted programs for the well-to-do school districts for students that get high grades on standardized tests but aren't necessarily gifted with latent underdeveloped potentials. No matter the race, religion, gender when we find high potential gifted students we should consider opening the doors to personal and national development through better online/ground discovery. "Giftedness" moves beyond IQ into the other intelligences but you can get a glimpse of how environment can impact development in exploratory learning.). 

(Heyden) Problem Solving

One of the biggest differences is the ability to take in more information through sensory processing that allows for increasingly complex thinking (Less black/white dualistic heuristics.). Additional information creates precocious development that isn't always easy for people to see or understand leading to all types of judgements and confusions. Because of heightened sensory information they are able to take in additional information that others usually filter out and/or don't process leading to the development of internal cognitive models of their world through what is termed the "Eagle Eye" (We all do this naturally but some build their own models versus primarily borrowing models/explanations making them a wellspring of new ideas that can lead to successful businesses and/or new discoveries; maybe both.)

The Director Francis Heylighen of ECCO - Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group from Vrije Universiteit Brussel states, "Giftedness, the potential for exceptional achievement, is characterized by high intelligence and creativity. Gifted people exhibit a complex of cognitive, perceptual, emotional, motivational and social traits......" (Heylighen, 2006 para 1).

"Flow" of Performance (Heyden)

Online education offers new opportunities to understand, select and enhance abilities through the development of learning environments that allows students to self explore and in turn develop fields of interest through their natural interests and overcoming staged challenges. That will require the ability to uncover the uniqueness of problem solving, more variability in the line of development, and opportunities to explore particular topics that may have merit thereby giving some sense of direction when they leave. That can come about through the connecting of industry needed skills/competencies to every increasing difficulties through catered educational development and greater awareness through self assessments (All of course possible in the online and offline world.)

Galton stated, "In conclusion I wish again to emphasis the fact that the improvement of the natural gifts of future generations of the human race is largely, though indirectly, under our control. We may not be able to originate, but we can guide."

Heylighen, F. (2006). Characteristics and Problems of the Gifted: neural propagation depth and flow motivation as a model of intelligence and creativity. (1 ed.) Brussels: ECCO Working Papers. Brussel. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/GiftednessModel.pdf


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