Gifted Children: Intellectual and Creative Potential of the Society

The article is on the process of work with gifted children in the context of the overall task of increasing the nation’s potential. In order to explain the dramatic discrepancies in the science concerning the problems of gifted children and prospects for their decent self-actualization the author proposes the idea of two samples of gifted children. On the one hand there are highly gifted children who also have a great amount of different problems as well as difficulties with self-actualization. And on the other hand there are gifted children that belong to so-called “high norm” and their level of adaptation is much higher as well as their level of achievement compared with other children. The author believes that in order to address the problems of highly gifted children, a special psychological and pedagogical method is required. As such the “need- instrumental approach” is proposed which is based on the principal developmental motivation of a gifted person – the need for self-actualization. According to the author, in order to become a real driving force, this need has to become a dominant. On this basis a special “dominant life project” should be created, a kind of image of a required future. In this approach, the adaptation skills are considered as instruments subject to the dominant project and ensuring achivement of its goals and tasks.

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