THE NECESSITY OF GIFTED EDUCATION IN GREEK SCHOOLS

Questions about gifted and talented students have from time to time concerned the scientific community, teachers and parents. It is widely accepted that additionally to high intelligence, characteristics such as creativity, but also social and emotional characteristics had to be taken into account in order to identify gifted students. Today the wide group of disabled people includes also gifted children or “high ability children”. In Greece the legal framework for gifted children is incomplete. It was not until 2003 and then 2008 that a low was passed, which states that people with special skills and talents could be given special educational treatment. However, this reference has never been applied. The role of a teacher in observing, recognizing and developing the giftedness and the talent of the students is particularly important. The aim of this article is to define the gifted, talented or “high abilities” students, to describe their positive and negative characteristics, as they emerge from the recent literature and finally to report the situation that has been formed in Greece as well as the steps that need to be taken. Article visualizations: