Speaking as someone who went through a gifted program, this is a good thing to recognize, but not enough. I never remember having anything challenging enough to fail at in my gifted courses (and I'm not that "gifted"). Even into college, I never failed (although I scraped by many a course because I could pass with no effort), but when I was challenged, I enjoyed it. It wasn't until the working world that I experienced failure.

Then there are things like "rejection therapy" which to me sounds like something that shouldn't be necessary, ie, you learned to deal with rejection and failure through living.

Another thing to consider: I found Salman Khan's TED talk very interesting when he talked about looking at different "snapshots" of students' progress, and some would look like they were way behind ("remedial"), while others were way ahead, but in the end, they all reached the same level of progress by the end of the course. Picking a point in time and then binning students via that one data point is, quite frankly, retarded.

This can actually get worse for people who are really good at something. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756