It is a fallacy that the government does not value bright children because it wants to reduce every child to the lowest common denominator. Nothing could be further from the truth (Asmal, 2003: 4).
The omission of gifted learners as a special education needs category from policy documents such as White Paper 6 (Department of Education, 2001) In South Africa is cause for concern. Although the White Paper acknowledges that certain learners may require intensive support to develop to their full potential and that learner differences should be respected, “whether due to age, gender, ethnicity, language, class, disability, HIV or other infectious diseases” (Department of Education, 2001: 16, 6) it makes no specific mention of gifted learners. Asmal (2003:4) stated that the success of the South African (SA) school system is dependent on providing for the “blossoming of the potential of all our children”, but not by isolating gifted learners, since they could “add great value to the potential of other children through collaboration”. Naledi Pandor, South Africa's minister of education recently explained: “We must promote the broadest possible view of inclusion, in the sense of social inclusion, which poses challenges for every school that has one or more children who are ‘different’ in some way. We must embrace and celebrate that difference” (2005:5).
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