Harry Giles

Nurturing Giftedness to Genius Harry Giles

This work is a combination of research, applied research, and ultimate success. When I got into it, I was a university lecturer in three different areas. I knew nothing about preschool, primary school, or secondary school except that I had passed through them. I had wanted my psychologist wife to run the first bilingual school in Canada, but there were so many legal problems imposed by an uninformed ministry that I had to become headmaster as well as to continue to practice law to earn my livelihood and to subsidize the school in its dramatic growth.

Since I knew how to research, I found out the best schools in the world, visited them, and adopted their procedures. I visited fourteen countries, studied the approaches of perhaps forty schools, was helped by the government of France, and ended up with one school that was probably the most successful academic school in the world. It dominated the Putnam University Level Mathematics Competition; beat every country in the world in the Chemistry and Physics Olympiads except Russia; and beat most of the European countries regularly, some every year. When the university professors chose the Canadian Olympiad teams, they almost always chose the students from the Toronto French School because they had covered 2-3 1/2 years of the program at the University of Toronto because I knew how to hire gifted teachers and because our programs were enriched beyond any that I knew of in the world.

Because of my complex approaches and early academic intervention, all of the children had a boost in measured IQ. Unhappily, they dropped my ideas of teachers, dropped my psychological approaches, my learning methodologies, and neither of the two schools now even reach the Putnam or the Olympiad teams for any of their students and do not win regular national science fair gold medals or national mathematics competitions.