Music for Gifted Children: A Bridge to Consciousness

Abstract

The author is Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. cratically oriented society has managed consistently to shortchange. Left to fend for themselves quite as much as slow learners, weighed down by unreasonable assumptions and unrealistic expectations, they customarily tend toward one of two behavior patterns-either becoming cunningly cynical players of the education game or turning their backs on a world that holds out little promise of recognizing the gifts they themselves are often only dimly aware of. For many children, being gifted is hell. The resulting perversion of the normal developmental processes ought to concern us much more than it does. Either these children will at some point in the future settle into a kind of comfortable mediocrity, or they will be obliged to reach back, root out the false values, and modify the distorted images of life that they acquired under circumstances beyond their control or comprehension. Mature adulthood should surely consist of more than picking up the pieces. The waste of human resources is obvious. Yet this view of the problem also has its hazards, for if the wastage is seen in societal terms alone-a matter of manpower potential or of think-tank productivity -the result will be only a new kind of violence done to the gifted individual. In my view, the function of the school in furthering the socialization process has been vastly oversold. Social maturity might reasonably be expected to follow from personal maturity, but the reverse is by no means as likely.