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A global village is a small world.

Article Excerpt
It was a most diverting sight--12 mature Australian teenagers happily riding round in the teacups in the "Small World" area of Disneyland in Los Angeles, California. The holiday break was a treat during our return trip to Australia from the annual Future Problem Solving International (FPSPI) Conference at the University of Georgia, and these hard-working students were thoroughly enjoying their "time out." When the carousel music died away and, with some reluctance, they climbed over the teacup rims, Simon came over to where I stood, smiling a bit indulgently as I watched their return to childhood. We surveyed the next riders companionably until he turned to me. "You know," he said with some surprise, "it really is! Small, I mean. That's one thing I've learned through doing FPSP--that we're all part of one world. And it's not so big, either."

That remark has come back to me many times during my years of working with the Future Problem Solving Program (FPSP). The words are a testament that the program is one important way of encouraging students of all ages to think about the world they inhabit not just from a local or national perspective, but a global perspective, and helping them see themselves as part of a much larger context.

GIFTED STUDENTS NEED TO DEVELOP A GLOBAL OUTLOOK

For gifted students in particular, this is a critical part of their development as potential future leaders and contributors to world progress and harmony. It matches not only the needs of society but also their own personal needs and capacities.

In Clark's (1983) overview of the characteristics of gifted students, she noted the following attributes: (a) strongly motivated by self-actualization needs, (b) advanced cognitive and affective capacity for conceptualizing and solving social problems, (c) leadership, (d) solutions to social and environmental problems, and (e) involvement with the metaneeds of society (e.g., justice, beauty, truth).

WORRYING ABOUT WORLD PROBLEMS AND FEELING HELPLESS TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT THEM

Other scholars have commented on the gifted student's interest in world issues and concern for social problems and moral and ethical matters. On the basis of action research questionnaires, Schmitz and Galbraith (1985) recorded the eight great gripes of gifted students, one of which is significant in this discussion: "We worry about world problems and feel helpless to do anything about them" (p. 97). This has been endorsed by scholars such as Silverman (1993, 1994), who emphasized the heightened sensitivity of gifted students to global affairs and their deep concern for moral and social problems. She stressed the importance of understanding and nurturing the inner world of the gifted, especially the "inherent relationship between abstract reasoning, complexity, moral values, and the evolution of society" (Silverman, 1994, p.115).

Both Silverman (1994) and Pohl (1995) advocated programs to develop these interests of the gifted and to allay their anxieties. The sense of helplessness they identified was echoed by Cohen and Friedenberg (1993), who remarked on the burdens that gifted students often impose on themselves by their own unrealistic expectations--the feeling that they are somehow personally responsible for finding solutions to the world's problems.

More recently, Silverman (2007), as director of the Gifted Development Center (Denver, CO), listed 23 highlights of what has been learned so far from the Center's assessment of nearly 5,000 children from 1979 to 2007. Three of the findings are particularly relevant to the consideration of the exceptional sensitivity of gifted children as "burden or blessing." The first (#15) was the higher percentage (over 60%) of gifted children who are introverted compared with the general population (30%). The second (#9) was their asynchronous developmental pattern, and the third (#14) was their perfectionism, which allied with highly developed sensitivity and intensity. All three attributes make gifted children particularly vulnerable to awareness of the perils of the world, without necessarily having the emotional resources to deal with the problems they perceive or the moral issues that their cognitive awareness has heightened.

These observations are not new. Roeper (1988) quoted the findings of Clark and Hankins' (1985) comparative study that showed the greater concern of gifted students for world news items, and particularly war, compared to their nongifted peers. Their acute sense of justice, she noted, leads them to:

[F]eel helpless and powerless to make an impact, and they suffer deeply from this. They worry about the injustices of the world. They worry about peace, about the bomb, about their futures, about the environment,...

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