GATE
GATE, The nefarious Gifted and Talented
The internet seem to be remembering
Don’t think this has been mentioned on this sub before. I recently came across some people on the internet, especially on reddit and TikTok, claiming to have elementary school memories of these “GATE” gifted and talented programmes that involved several exercises, the most mentioned being wearing clanky 90s headphones and listening to audio clips supposedly brainwashing them to be susceptible to out of body experiences/ lucid dreaming.
Different people are claiming to remember similar things, such as an exercise matching shapes together, or reading a book upside down. One thing they all have in common is their tendency to forget most of or all of what happened in the programme until later in their adult lives. Certain accounts even recall them consuming some kind of pink drink which was said to be a drug for the memory loss.
Most people mainly just remember resenting going to the programme or begging their parents to let them pull out of it. Proponents of this strange story are convinced it was some kind of CIA experiment ran from the late 80s to early 00s. Has anyone else here shared similar experiences or encountered similar stories?
I went to gate and did have an odd experience. All the kids were in the same class no matter the age, so we had 4 – 12-year-olds all in the same classroom, I’m pretty sure there were three classrooms in total, but I only remember two. I also can barely remember anything from the program, but you could also chalk this up to me being 7 and in year two.
Late 80s
One of the things we had to do was make a triangular based pyramid with paddle pop sticks. we didn’t get glue, blue tack or anything we just had to make a pyramid with loose paddle pop sticks. The lunch area was also weird, and I think my program was built into another school just I never saw any kids there
. We just went to another room while the rest of the class did stuff that was way behind our level. Sometimes it was games or fun projects with problem solving. We made little wind-up cars and tested out and improved paper airplane designs. I wish I’d just been allowed to skip ahead. I think I would have handled being a bit younger than my classmates well enough and I could have taken better advantage of the amazingly cheap community college before that went away.
I was a gifted and talented kid. Nothing weird happened. I do remember being taken out of class a couple of times and brought to a small room where there were puzzles and stuff, looking back im guessing there was probably some sort of evaluation process? I only remember sitting at a table in that room and playing with tangrams, which I loved.
No weird testing or suspicious drinks or headphones. I didn’t block this out, I’ve always remembered and it’s never been a secret or anything unpleasant. I’d have to ask my parents for more details.
I got to spend some time in a grade above me every day for like an hour or two while kids in my current grade did reading or something like that. I remember my teachers sending me to a grade higher. I also did stuff like memory recall on calculators. Have never used it in my life apart from the 3rd grade.
Brainwashing
It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the paraeducators pushed their personal philosophies on students. When my grades dropped, my parents removed me from the program. I remember that the paraeducator encouraged me to blame my parents and feel misused by them, then let me sneak back into the centre occasionally.
the audio is the gateway program. actually developed by a super sweet man who was confused why he was having sleep paralysis in the ~50-60’s. he researched it and learned he could do more in this state than he realized and the tapes are actually helpful in several ways (not brainwashing at all) however what you say is correct – the tapes ultimately teach you how to safely experience OBEs and access additional insight from your subconscious or “higher self”.
All that said, learning that these were administered to kids in a program unknown to the kids, parents, and even regular teachers is fucking disgusting. because it’s not the kind of thing you dip into without properly understanding what you’re doing first and second what did they do with the kids who tested highly? idk kidnapping kids as psychic child soldiers is no longer out of the question in my book.
The shapes were a part of standard children’s IQ tests still in the mid-90s. They may even continue to be to this day; pattern recognition is part of the testing at the end of the day.
Likely one of the many reasons these programs had so many autistic kids. Pattern recognition tests are often used and can be an identifying feature of some autistic people. I was also mildly aware of the questionnaires my mother was given, and she was also asked about things like abnormal eye contact and social ostracism by peers while getting along better than usual with adults.
Finish Off
I’m hadn’t thought about this stuff ever… maybe just talked about some speed reading or backwards reading exercises. To say I’ve had some strange experiences in this life would be an understatement and right now I’m a little scared and questioning my life and if my family was really my family.
Perhaps due to a experience I had at a grocery store not so long ago where I met a family and they all seemed extremely familiar and the youngest girl about 8-10 years old asked I if I was her older brother out of the blue. When I left the store, the mother left the girls behind and called out my freaking name which is uncommon and somewhat unique.
My family has always seemed distant and unaffected and unsupportive like I’m just tolerated but I can’t think of anything I’ve done to deserve such treatment through my so-called life. Anyone else feel me? I haven’t read any responses yet, but I be m gong to learn some things. Thanks for this post all I want is to know why this happened to me
The Famous Pink Drink
Occasionally, they would pull me out to do the hearing tests. I remember the pink drink as well. Tests involved sentence structure and puzzles. I don’t remember much else. But this took place in an auditorium, not in a regular classroom. Iirc it wasn’t more than 20 or so kids in my group.
I switched schools in 3rd grade, and I remember doing this even at my new school up until middle school. Nothing else came of it then.
Did well in high school and college. Have a decent life now. I can’t for the life of me remember any of the kids in that program with me. I’m very curious to hear everybody else’s stories. Would love to meet kids I went to school with especially.
Yeah, there wasn’t any indoctrination in GATE. I didn’t even have to take a test – a counsellor just looked at my standardized test results and said that I’d been eligible all along. Would have been nice if they’d just told me when they got the test results, rather than waiting years to be asked about it.
After that, all I remember is a list of guest speakers and enrichment events. No weird drinks, no headphones. And that was about the time I got shuffled off to the independent study program anyway and wasn’t at the regular school.
Really the #1 thing I got out of it was the satisfaction of knowing how mad it made my asshole frenemy that they let me in without the IQ test, while he missed the cutoff by one point and they wouldn’t let him in even when his parents appealed.
The only ‘pink drink’ I remember anywhere was my polio vaccine in the Air Force
I was in GATE at Walt Whitman Elementary in Littleton Colorado in the early 80s. But now that I think of it, I think that program was called LEAP (can’t recall what LEAP stood for) and GATE (Gifted And Talented Education) was a later one.
Pretty Hippy
It was a pretty basic Gifted and Talented program. We did independent study exercises. I did one on Japanese art styles compared to Western. I was a pretty bad student though I was a smart kid. I half assed my entire art project the afternoon before it was due. I got commended for my project and some of the others (Patrick Brueckhart) were chastised for not being dedicated and committed. I never said a thing. Matt S carved a polar bear figure out of wood with a Dremel tool.
I got threatened with being dropped from the program because I was struggling to keep my grades up. Another kid who was probably smarter than me did get dropped, but I won’t name him because he’s a cool guy and didn’t deserve it.
The GT teacher (can’t remember her name) was super nice and tried to give me a lot of suggestions that at the time I was too dumb to take.
At least one of our groups became world famous and wealthy so maybe the class was valuable?
I was in a gifted and talented program called MGM–Mentally Gifted Minors, in California in the 1970’s. I do remember the reading upside-down exercise. My school was pretty hippy dippy, so I mostly skipped classes to read comic books and listened to records in the Learning Centre, and snacks were available only for the kids in the program.
The Learning Centre was a central space with the regular classrooms around the perimeter. It had several different spaces set up like living rooms. Each space was supposed to be for a specific subject, and dead centre was a larger area for assemblies. There was also a small library. The Learning Centre had a paraeducator who was supposed to supervise, but I remember not being supervised at all.
Wanted
Both things that higher achieving autistic people also tend to be more likely to experience than the average child. A lot of what I can remember of the more psychiatric side of things (it was not just academic or qi testing in my case, but I can’t tell you whether it was a widespread program or just my school district because, well, I was a small child and did not care or ask, and by the time I thought to ask elementary schools about my records they had destroyed them all because it had been over a decade) is very similar to autism testing today.
I’m not sure any children were being diagnosed in my area that were viewed as intelligent, I don’t think the criteria had caught up with yet with reality, so I think they just kind of tried to put us in a room together every once in a while and see if that helped enough that they didn’t have to bother with anything else to help us stop being so consistently victimized. It didn’t, obviously.
Especially since the teachers were so fond of telling us that the other kids were only mean because of how “jealous” they were about how “smart” we were. As if elementary children in the 90s WANTED to be smart and as if intelligence wasn’t the typical indicator in all media at the time that someone would be victimized by school bullies.
I don’t remember anything explicitly nefarious. Just retrospectively useless or outdated or mildly emotionally harmful (obviously there’s a big issue with teaching a bunch of kids you expect to gain future power that they are inherently better than all the other children, but it wasn’t enough to counteract the social conditioning from peers at every life stage in most cases. Parents agreeing with the outlook likely had more to do with those who ended up believing it properly)
Holy shit I have goose bumps all over my body… These claims you listed are real and true! I lived in a small town outside of Houston in the 80’s and early 90.s where we listened to tones matching our frequencies to them, read books by line or just a few at great speed, listened to subliminal tapes by the load…
I even took them home, practiced astral projection, and other sense games with objects and between each other. I remember going to “lab” and the pink drink
