I was (maybe still am ) a "gifted" kid. Unlike a lot of the people here- I think that he could be happier/better off in the gifted program. Why? Well, it boils down to the social aspects of school- if you're smart, and it shows, "normal" kids pick on you. So, what do you do? You try to act more "normal" by pretending you aren't smart. If you pretend long enough, you start to believe it.

For me, by 4th grade, I had convinced myself that I couldn't do math. They didn't know whether to keep me in the schools gifted program or to put me in the program for kids with learning disabilities! I eventually overcame my difficulties, but the mindset of keeping myself on the same level of "smarts" as everyone else followed me through high school.

I'm convinced that if I had been encouraged and motivated by peers that were happy to be "smart," then I would have been much more confident in my own brainpower in later years rather than convincing myself that I should hate school, homework, and studying just so I could be more like all the other kids that would pick on me if I acted otherwise.