The Giftedness Hype Reveals How Little We Understand
These children are not the problem — our blindness is
Opinion: Giftedness Is Not the Problem — The System That Rejects These Children Is
Let’s be honest.
There is nothing wrong with these children.
There is something wrong with our idea of normal.
While schools, experts, and policymakers keep talking about problematic giftedness, something far more fundamental is happening — something few are willing to name:
The system can no longer tolerate these children, so it pushes them out.
Not because they are too much.
But because the system has become too small.
This piece is born out of my growing frustration with the endless stream of analyses, models, and explanations surrounding giftedness. What once aimed at recognition has turned into a hype: a lot of language, very little insight. Symptom management disguised as care.
Almost everything starts from the same foundational error: giftedness framed as a problem category.
Something to be regulated…
Guided…
Contained…
As if these children are lacking —when in reality, they are exposing something.
The system abandons these children — and calls it “not fitting”
More and more children are leaving the education system. The official explanation is that they don’t fit.
That is not the truth.
They leave because they are no longer wanted within the system.
That is the actual reality.
Their originality collides with structures that only function through predictability, measurability, and compliance. The moment a child can no longer be reduced to behavior charts, test scores, or protocols, the system moves them to the margins.
Not because of who the child is —but because of what the system cannot tolerate.
What we refuse to see
After years of research — and a lifetime of perceiving from a different state of consciousness — I do not see a new generation, nor an explosion in IQ.
I see children who still operate from their original state:
unadjusted,
unflattened,
uncompromised.
They are often called forerunners. That is incorrect.
The forerunners were those with an original consciousness who had to survive in a world not built for it — a heavy, often lonely task.
The children of today no longer carry that burden.
They simply refuse to abandon themselves.
And that is where the friction begins.
The uncomfortable possibility
Has anyone seriously considered that these children are not different, but are functioning from a reality we have largely lost?
A few parents may have.
Structurally, we have not.
We keep looking through the lens of our conditioning:
This is how it’s done…
This is how the world works…
This is what I was taught…
From that same conditioning, we attempt to understand giftedness — and then act surprised when these children do not fit the framework we ourselves constructed.
But creation does not require adaptation.
It requires alignment.
Attunement.
Not control.
A system unable to let go of itself
This is the part rarely spoken aloud:
the system is trying to preserve itself long after its relevance has expired.
Old foundations…
Old interests…
Old logic…
All oriented toward survival, not truth.
I am not speaking from theory. I am an indigo.
My generation — people with an original consciousness forced to live in an adjusted reality — tried to change the system from within. We adapted, negotiated, compromised, often at great personal cost.
The resistance was structural.
The system was never designed to truly transform.
And that is precisely why this new generation of children is not here to continue our task. They are not here to repair what cannot be repaired. Not to improve the old world.
They are the new world.
Not a future projection — but a present reality.
One that transcends the existing system.
The system senses this instinctively — and rejects it.
Not because these children are dangerous, but because they embody an alternative the system cannot integrate.
No guidance — only space
These children do not need programs.
They do not need models.
They do not need labels.
What they need is space.
And trust.
When that space is denied, they will take it themselves.
Not as rebellion — but as self-preservation.
And then the risk is not that they derail, but that we lose them internally.
The statement that changes everything
In my work — including What No One Told the Gifted / The Price of Clarity and my article in the February issue of Hoogbegaafd & Zo! — I do not approach giftedness as a deviation, but as a fundamentally different relationship to perception, meaning, and reality.
Not to amplify the debate.
But to return one statement to where it belongs:
These children are not the problem.
They are the signal — and the solution.
They will not adapt.
The world will have to adapt to them.
That will be uncomfortable.
It will disrupt.
It will be inconvenient.
Get used to it.
This is not about softness or consensus.
It is about one choice only:
space and trust —
or continued loss.
Nothing more!
Exactly! Well said Ron!
Yes I feel it that way! You turn it back, the children are not the problem but the system is. In my day's, educated the old way, they don't give so much labels but 25 years later they did. You had to fit or you get medication or another school. The good and critical teachers are gone. Children are tested and it started very young. It's not about the individual, it became a manipulation system. Everybody must be educated the same way so they fit in the system.
The indigo children had to live in the world with their different mindset and learned to come closer in their soul journey. It was the difficult path they went.
But the ("gifted")children who are born after 2012 don't try to adapt. They know what to do and only when you respect them you can be their guide.
I saw it in their eyes.