EXTREMELY GIFTED STUDENTS AND TEACHING PHILOSOPHY IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

Within the Gaussian curve, there are also extreme fluctuations in talent within the population. If the extreme is upwards, these are students with a high personality potential. Such students are potentially beneficial in their lessons if they are interested in the lessons. This is also the case when teaching philosophy. First and foremost, gifted students ask interesting and challenging questions. Their comments and correlations are a great benefit to philosophy teaching. They often go into a broad multidisciplinary context. It is necessary to use an individual approach. Leading a gifted student in philosophy can direct their attention to contexts, texts, and issues that a standard peer is usually unable to understand, due to certain age limitation and lack of pre-understanding. Such students often manage a really difficult task, and understand difficult issues. If they have a real interest in philosophy, an extraordinarily gifted student can already achieve remarkable results in secondary school and be on the best path to becoming a professional in the field. In this paper we will try to define the difference between average and extraordinarily gifted students in philosophy. We will try to present the individual approach to gifted students in this area. On the one hand, our method is based on observations from practice and many years of experience in high school teaching. On the other hand, the method directly applies the didactic division of the power of abstraction into an isolated model and a universal model according to prof. Milan Hejny. The model was taken from the didactics of mathematics (schema oriented education). The result is the discovery that gifted students can exceed the given curriculum several times from philosophy. Another result is to conclude on the need to devote an individual approach and an increased amount of time to work with gifted students in the field of philosophy, as it is potentially a valuable intellectual expert.