There is no natural, dehumanised law of success.Gifted and talented children need to be part of a school culture that understands the importance of growing up in a happy, fun-loving, positive, tolerant community. Great teachers mentor and encourage their pupils, convincing the child that he or she can get there if they commit themselves strongly enough. There's a nice contemporary description of Matisse's first encouraging teacher - the one sacked by the Ofsted of its day for nonconformity: "He was attentive and clear-sighted, impatient of slickness, ruthless with sloppiness, but endlessly encouraging individuality."Teachers are crucial. We all need feedback, support and knowledge: both of what we need to know and how we can best assimilate it into our own way of thinking and practising. It is no exaggeration to say that the pupil learns the teacher's mind.This calls for teachers who have been on the kinds of journeys that the child will need to travel; the child may go further than the teacher, but the teacher needs a sense of anticipation, understanding the implications and empathising with the experience of what it means to enter new and highly challenging territory.At the heart of all human development lies the phenomenon of conversation.

Giftedness seems to me to be partly about high levels of skills and competences, partly about the ability to pursue these skills in divergent and inventive ways, and partly about the quality of reflection, tinkerings and adjustments that the person makes. You set up a conversation with yourself that mirrors the conversations you may have with your teacher or tutor.Giftedness at its most subtle, highest level is not mechanical On the contrary, it is highly humanly aware. And human awareness grows out of the interaction of one person with another. It seems of paramount importance to me that all children should experience the type of learning environments which will encourage flexibility of thinking, innate curiosity and tough granular thinking - in other words, minds in action.Conversation should be employed to build up the child's thinking processes slowly - and the language world should be used to underpin giftedness, talent, or simply learning for all, wherever it may emerge.. Eat your heart out, Francis Fukuyama: history may not be quite as dead as it once looked Politics may even be interesting after all For something significant happened here this week. It had nothing to do with backstabbing ministers, the nocturnal lapse of the first son, or the supposedly malign effects of the Blair regime on British culture.

As a result of it, moreover, it is already possible to see that the next election will be a good more interesting than the last. For the choice before the electorate will actually be a much clearer one. Eat your heart out, Francis Fukuyama: history may not be quite as dead as it once looked Politics may even be interesting after all For something significant happened here this week. It had nothing to do with backstabbing ministers, the nocturnal lapse of the first son, or the supposedly malign effects of the Blair regime on British culture. As a result of it, moreover, it is already possible to see that the next election will be a good more interesting than the last. For the choice before the electorate will actually be a much clearer one. Partly, of course, that choice has been clarified by the Tories. When William Hague and Michael Portillo - at the latter's instigation - performed their handbrake turn on their unsustainable guarantee to reduce taxes over a parliament whatever the economic circumstances, they were doing no less than was necessary.