Meaning of Giftedness is experienced differently by individuals. While people talk about gifted education, the meaning of giftedness may be interpreted differently by different people.

If we see gifted education as elite education which assusumes that academic excellence is everything, we may take it for granted that any special support of the gifted is a luxury as they are 'privileged enough'.

From a humanistic perspective, giftedness is one of the human conditions that affect the development and needs of our lives. Like our health conditions, giftedness is part of our functioning system doing with our brain functions. To lead a successful and fulfilling life, one needs to possess and capitalize good conditions in health, cognitive, affective, social emotional, adaptive aspects and the like. Aside from giftedness or cognitive functioning, regardless of its actual levels, there are many aspects of human functioning affecting life satisfaction of individuals. For example, giftedness experienced by a very healthy girl of a well-off middle class family in the US can be very different from that experienced by a boy from a disadvantageous community in Hong Kong. Even though both children were assessed by psychologists to have an Intelligence Quotients (IQ) as 130 come across different treatment. Very likely, they will be told by their caregivers that they need to do something to stay happy and competitive.

Nowadays, the saying that giftedness is found in specific domain of performance is not sufficient. Scientific evidence of neuroscience shows that intelligence as ability of abstract reasoning is genetically linked and mainly planted in our frontal lobe. Very superior intelligence actually is hardwired in some individuals and that predisposes them with greater capacity to think, associate, connect, memorize, organize, recall, feel and respond. It makes more sense to view giftedness as asynchronous development. Since those gifted individuals have to cope with the greater degree of intrapersonal differences, the hidden difficulties or frustration they are facing may be stronger than what we normally would expect for their age peers. For example, a 4-year-old avid reader enjoying reading an encyclopedia on animals found it frustrating to draw vivid pictures of his favorite animals. The child may even want to write down some important information about the animals but he painfully gives it up because he is not going to make it with his poor and slow handwriting. More sadly, he goes to the school for the whole week talking about a few animals in his class without much chance to go into more intellectual discussion with the teachers or any one else.

Children with significantly advanced cognitive and affective development certainly need appropriate support to fit into the educational settings in the local community. As the readiness, capability and personal interests of individual learners are generally seen as more or less equal in the regular schools in Hong Kong, children with special individual strengths or weaknesses are not treated differently. Since equal treatment of the unequal, the unavoidable results are losses of human resources due to mismatch between individual needs and treatment. Such loss, however, is hard to families, damaging to individuals, and eventually unaffordable to the wider society. All these losses can be avoided if we understand more deeply and take proactive action early.