<<What sort of community do people think gifted kids should have when they're growing up so they don't wind up socially mangled, insecure, or (fill in problem someone had when growing up gifted)?>>

As Daniel pointed out, much of the answer depends on what you want your kids' future to look like. If you can create a situation where your kids will be guaranteed to be interacting primarily with other kids of their intellectual level for the rest of their lives, they will probably be much happier for being tracked (but see the caveat about late bloomers). If, on the other hand, you want to give your children the opportunity to develop normal relationships with normal people, you do need to allow them the opportunity to interact with them early on. This does not mean that they need to do it all the time.

I am frankly ambivalent about the value of identifying and culling out gifted students early on. I managed to be a reasonably normal if fairly introverted kid up until the JHU Talent Search hit. I had friends, some of whom were gifted and some of whom were not, and I got along just fine with them. It didn't occur to me to index my friendships based on IQ, or that I might relate better to people who were more intelligent, or even that intelligence had much of anything to do with anything, except that I got better grades and I always did better on those stupid standardized tests. Then comes the JHU Talent Search.

I took the SAT when I was 12, as part of the Hopkins Talent Search. As far as I was concerned, it was another of those tests adults hassled kids with. But when my scores came back, my verbal score (660V) placed me 13th in a Search of 15,000 gifted children. I got invited to an awards ceremony, met a U.S. Senator, received several scholarships, and went through a battery of psychological and aptitude tests. Suddenly, intelligence was something that was both measurable and important. I still didn't really understand why, but I did understand that I'd done something impressive.

That summer I went to CTY, Johns Hopkins' summer program for gifted youth. The first day, everyone was trading SAT scores. It rapidly became clear that there was a hierarchy, and the higher your scores, the better. Not that people would automatically like you for having better ones, but people were aware of it: the smarter people were respected, even if they weren't liked. At the same time, I noticed that the people who were most interesting to me also tended to have the highest scores, and started measuring people's worth (to me anyway) in part based on their scores. This got me into incredible amounts of trouble later in life.

Now, you can argue that this sort of thing doesn't happen at CTY generally, and that I was an exception, but I think you'd have a hard time defending that. There is a definite rank system among the gifted which is associated with intelligence/scores--otherwise people wouldn't have reacted as violently to the idea of a "super-CTY" that not all CTYers would qualify for, and wouldn't have the condescending attitude towards "normals" that often appears in CTYers. I think this perspective is fundamentally unhealthy, and very difficult to avoid if you explicitly section out gifted kids.

At the same time, there are real benefits to providing an intellectual peer group. For me, it was a real revelation to find other people who thought as quickly, liked reading as much, and enjoyed analyzing things as much as I did--the friends I met at CTY are still some of my closest friends, almost two decades later. I also find that intelligence is highly context-dependent--the brighter my surrounding social group, the better and more clearly I think. Having others to communicate with, and be challenged by, encourages me to try harder.

So my feeling is that, if I were creating the perfect world (and practicality were not an issue), that I would want to keep my kids in an ordinary school but allow them to socialize with other highly talented children, without realizing they were being tracked. How you would do this without giving the game away, I have no idea--but I do think there are real problems with tracking.

I'm frankly not convinced that there is any real solution for some of the problems facing gifted children, particularly the severely gifted. There is a limited pool of highly gifted children in the country, and short of sending them to boarding school, it's impossible to match them up with a pool of peers. Summer programs such as CTY and TIP fill in some gaps, but for the severely gifted, there may be no answer. (Even at CTY, I was usually one of the brightest in my class, and often felt isolated.) On the other hand, as long as nobody made a big deal out of it, it didn't mess me up too badly--it created problems when I started internalizing it, thinking I had to do something in real life to "live up to it", and that giftedness was/should be an important component of personal worth. (This got worse later, as I got into mathematics and realized I was one of the top U.S. women. I stayed in math much longer than I should have, out of a sense of obligation.)

Like I said, I'm ambivalent--I got a great deal out of CTY, but the system also screwed me up by emphasizing things that (in retrospect) really shouldn't have been that important. It gave me a social group at roughly the same intellectual and maturity level; but it also singled me out, which has haunted me ever since. So, I don't really have an answer.

It's worth noting, btw, that while I went to Caltech in search of people like me, my best friend went to Princeton because he felt it was important to integrate with the real world, i.e. not isolate yourself with a group of geeks. I think Caltech was the right decision for me--but he was right, in that it took me four or five years to learn how to re-integrate with the real world afterwards. I still prefer my choice--but he fits in better with society, and missed out on a great deal of angst. I guess it all depends what you're looking for.