To start gifted students thinking about the future, an exercise in the benefits of future studies can help prepare their minds.
Future Studies, or Futurology is a study that attempts to hypothesize what will be taking place in the future by studying current and past trends in what has been taking place in the world. Gifted students are particularly good at thinking about the future and are motivated to help things go the right way.
Framing Future Studies for Gifted Students
Begin a classroom literary discussion using any apocalyptic story the students know about and enjoy. There have been any number of movies recently about asteroids blasting into the planet, and books about nasty viruses that enslave humankind. Even if the title is less than scholarly, it helps set the table for the next focusing discussion.
Next, ask the gifted students to think about the long-term consequences of the disaster, even if people were to survive the threat. What would the world’s drinking water supply be like? What would have happened to the animals, and more importantly, what happened to the animals that people eat to survive?
And, what would have happened to the crops?
Real Futurology Comes Alive
Explain to the students that people tend to think about systems as whole entities, so if everyone survives the fictional big tsunami from the underwater volcano, all will be well. In complex, interdependent systems, however, that is not always the case. So, if some disaster came along that threatened humankind, and we all somehow dodge the big bullet, the smallest of details like dead crops could spell disaster down the road.
Would the students agree that somebody should have thought about that ahead of time and done something about it? Fortunately, somebody did. Futurologists in Norway built a frozen vault to safeguard millions of seeds from disasters and wars.
That should kick start a healthy discussion.
