"Enrichment" Is Palliative Care for the Gifted

Gifted & Talented Failure Mode #2

“Enrichment” has a strongly positive connotation. Think: soil “enriched” with fertilizer, grains “enriched” with vitamins, your dog “enriching” his day with a trip to doggy daycare.

But, in the context of gifted and high-capability learners, any focus on “enrichment” actually serves as a huge red flag because it frequently signals that the school won’t do the one thing gifted kids consistently need: harder, faster core academics.

The most appropriate, evidence-based intervention for giftedness is academic acceleration, not enrichment. “Acceleration” means providing the generally agreed-upon curriculum faster, which promotes short-term time efficiency and emotional health (as well as long-term success).

What Even Is “Enrichment?”

On the other hand… “enrichment” means providing… something? Anything?

Consider these sample gifted “enrichment” activities I found people discussing on Twitter:

• Shooting pool

• Creating posters about the Byzantine empire

• Playing sudoku or Oregon Trail

• Making soda

• Dissecting sharks

These activities potentially contain an academic component - if aspirationally, or for plausible deniability. But most enrichment activities don’t stand up to scrutiny, especially if the standard is “best possible use of student and teacher time and school resources.”

Enrichment Offers Quick Wins, Not Compounding Benefits

If a student is bored out of her mind with too-easy reading or math, how does building a structure from toothpicks and marshmallows or hot glued spaghetti address that? (Especially if she still has to go home that night and complete the too-easy worksheets that she missed in the process!)

Overall, the function of an “enrichment”-type program is to throw gifted learners (and their parents) a bone within whatever boundaries happen to be comfortable for the school and for whatever teacher has been honored (or annoyed) by the duty to teach it.

In a sense, offering “enrichment” actually constitutes a quiet admission that the baseline educational environment is not appropriate for gifted learners.

But, instead of fixing that mismatch wholesale, educational “enrichment” becomes more akin to symptom management and an acceptance of constraint - a kind of palliative care for the gifted.

Enrichment as Palliative Care for the Gifted

Even where “enrichment” succeeds, it succeeds at a fundamentally different goal than acceleration.

The people I saw on Twitter who reported dissecting sharks and playing sudoku found those activities pleasant for the most part, especially compared to regular class. They maybe even learned a thing or two. But their condition of giftedness was not directly addressed or supported. Most likely, no one even tried.

Notice one major difference between medical palliative care and the educational equivalent, though: in medicine, patients are not supposed to be coerced into taking a palliative approach! Instead, medical patients choose palliative care in addition to, or instead of, more curative options when palliative care aligns with their specific values and goals.

Gifted children and their parents aren’t always choosing the palliative approach of scattershot “enrichment.”

Instead, this defeatist and scattershot “enrichment” approach has mostly been chosen for them, regardless of their specific values and goals, by a system that reveals itself as unwilling and/or unable to offer anything else.