From the editorial staff
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 9, 2024, p. 17
Andrew Almazán, director of Research and Psychology at the Talent Care Center (Cedat), warned that Mexico is losing more than 50 percent of its intellectually gifted youth (higher intelligence), in addition to the fact that the brightest minds
are not detected and treated; to date, seven out of 10 go unnoticed, he lamented.
He pointed out that of the estimated one million gifted children and adolescents in the country, only 14,000 have been identified, less than 2 percent.
A survey conducted by that center, he said, revealed that the majority of young people in high school with brilliant minds, He plans to go to another country to continue his studies.
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The specialist, who has studied at Oxford, Yale and Harvard universities, highlighted: “At Cedat we have detected that there is an accelerated brain drain; today more young people and talented children are leaving the country.
According to the U.S. State Department, for every intelligent young person who leaves the country at age 18, on average, $70,000 is lost, because that is approximately what is invested in educating and raising a child, from birth to age 18.”
Mexico, which is the country that loses them, is hurt more, because when a nation like the United States receives this young man, There is no longer any need to invest in kindergarten, primary, secondary and high school, but only in the last part and here, where all that has already been done, our country does not benefit from that talent.
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He explained that Of every 10 children with superior intelligence that we receive at Cedat, 90 percent are misdiagnosed, with hyperactivity disorders, attention deficit, autism, dysgenesis, that is, they are poorly detected and poorly cared for. A child with problems, instead of being cared for correctly, is treated as if he were a sick child. When all this is put together, we are talking about the fact that of the million children with superior intelligence that should exist, they are lost due to the lack of detection and by putting labels on them as if they were sick. That is why we say, 95 percent of them are lost.
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Unfortunately, the specialist stressed, the loss of brains has accelerated, one of the causes being pessimism. “There are young people who are physically here, but their minds are already in another country, they are 15-year-old teenagers. When a 15-year-old student says: ‘I studied at university or for a master’s degree, I’m going to go to another country’, they are still physically here, but their minds are already somewhere else and they begin to prepare to leave.”
We have, he added, a brain drain of at least 150,000 a year. There are several reasons why young people decide to leave: “They say that there is nothing left to do here, that they have to go to another country to develop themselves, they have not finished their studies yet.” prep And they are already thinking that they are not going to look for a job because I am not going to find one, they are not even trying. That is something that also greatly motivates the brain drain, which has increased since the pandemic, because there is pessimism about the country.”
Dafné Almazán, also a member of Cedat, reported that a gender campaign has been launched in the country to detect more gifted minds, because in a study carried out several years ago, it was said that only 20 percent of women with this condition have been detected. That was alarming for us, that’s why we started this campaign to find out why we can’t find those girls, because they exist, but we haven’t detected them.
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