The Education and Guidance of Gifted Children

The purpose of this essay is to explore and emphasize the needs, expectations and problems encountered with the gifted child at home and in school. It represents an attempt to identify, characterize and understand the nature of gifted children. It discusses procedures used by educators for the identification of these children and it presents a plan of action for meeting their particular needs. The plan of action to be discussed consists of a program of acceleration and enrichment geared toward actualizing the individual child\u27s potentials. It will be my objective to show also how an effective guidance program is necessary to implement the proposed program. I will attempt to illustrate the necessity for improving our present-day curriculum to include to a greater extent the needs of the gifted child. Finally, this paper will focus on the roles we as parents, educators and counselors must assume in order to guide these special children to a rich, self-satisfying and worthy life