How to tell the gifted 'You suck!'

Rod Dreher has a fascinating post over at Crunchy Cons surveying a series of OpinionJournal.com columns by Charles Murray on education and intelligence. I won't blather on about it here, for Rod does a more-than-reasonable job of blathering over on his blog.

HOWEVER . . . there's one point I'd like to make about Murray's last column, about the importance of properly educating America's gifted-and-talented students. Murray's right -- this is an incredibly important endeavor, and hardly a popular one.

It all goes back to populism. Populism has many positive attributes, and I'd have to (mostly) self-identify as a populist. It is, however, populism's pronounced Green Monster of envy that endangers any effort to allow the brilliant and the motivated to achieve their full potential as humans . . . or as future drivers of our economy, our sciences and our body politic.

That Green Monster, of course, produces the "Crab Bucket Syndrome."

The gifted are the crabs trying to climb out of the bucket and make it back to the water. The rest of our American society, by and large, is the majority of metaphorical crabs who find the bucket, all-in-all, mighty fine.

And here lies the rub. The "Bucket Is Fine" crabs resent the hell out of the "Must . . . Reach . . . Water" crabs, and they'll be damned if they're going to help the "Water" crabs reach their full potential of wetness.

As a matter of fact, they'll try their damnedest to pull the "smarty-pants" crabs back into the bucket.

I know this. To grow up academically gifted in Louisiana "back in the day" was to be well acquainted with the Crab Bucket Syndrome.

We who yearned for, and made it into, Baton Rouge Magnet High School universally were known to our "regular-school" confreres as "Maggots" and derided as freaks. Uppity.

We went to "The Maggot School."

I wonder how much of that kind of sentiment is at play nationwide. Says Murray in Thursday's column:

How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.

(snip)

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

I also wonder how much some version of the Green Monster, the "Crab Bucket Syndrome" -- whatever you want to call it -- might be at play in the long physical deterioration of my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High, into Third World . . . shall we say dishabille? And, brother, talk about speaking euphemistically . . . .

Let's just say it's the ghost of Huey Long giving The Man (to be) the ol' middle-finger salute. Just a decaying community's way of telling The Elite "You suck!"

Let's just say that's an outlandishly counterproductive thing to do in a state that, according to all the pertinent statistics, is on the bottom and still sinking. Today's scorned and neglected "student elites" are the people Beavis and Butthead will be counting on to pull their chestnuts out of the fire tomorrow.

But the "maggots" either will be long gone (to places where things generally work and people generally care) or giving some "Fickle Finger of Fate" salutes of their own.