In October 1940, Kappan published an issue on the “Education of exceptional children.” At the time, school attendance was growing quickly, and schools were having to figure out how to educate children with an ever-widening range of abilities. Most articles in the issue focused on students with disabilities, but Ernest Newland noted in his Editorial Comment introducing the issue that “only about one-third of our mentally superior children are able to push themselves through the educational undergrowth of mass instruction to any point near the achievement of which they are capable” (p. 33).
Whether they are called mentally superior, highly intelligent, gifted, talented, or advanced, the most capable students in schools have presented a dual conundrum for educators. How do we identify them, and how can we develop their abilities? The question William Connor asks in the October 1940 Kappan has remained relevant across the decades, right up to today:
Children are being born and growing up with the same individual differences they have always shown. There is no going backward in the schools which serve a dynamic society such as ours. What, then, is the best possible approach to the identification and education of gifted and talented children here and now? (“The education of gifted and talented children,” pp. 72-73)
A multifaceted purpose
According to Connor, programs for these children were not just intended to help them develop their superior abilities further, but also to help them surmount problems perceived as common among gifted and talented children, such as boredom, social isolation, a sense of inferiority, a tendency to correct others, worry over the state of the world and their place in it, and “bafflement” in social situations.
Likewise, in December 1956, Herbert Klausmeier noted in “The gifted: What will they become?” that programs for the most capable children should be about more than intellectual development:
The most important question to be answered by the schools, by parents interested in education of gifted children, and by those organized groups who wish the public schools to get more gifted students ready to meet certain college or career requirements is: “What kinds of individuals would we like gifted and talented children to be as a result of our educational efforts?” This broad question needs further defining in the areas of intellectual achievements, social competence, and moral values. (p. 112)
By developing the talents of future citizens and workers, gifted education could also serve a societal purpose, yet, as Allen Bernstein explained in “Whither the gifted child?” (November 1958), different stakeholders had different ideas regarding what fields are most in need of the greatest talents. Would the most gifted be the greatest assets to the country by entering the sciences, academia, world affairs . . .? For Bernstein, the most capable students should be urged to enter the seats of the greatest power, and for better or worse, the scientific and scholarly worlds are not where the power is. Rather, the power is in the fields of economics and politics, he argued, and society will derive the greatest benefit from putting the best students on the path to these fields:
What a dilemma! Highly talented youth come to us for vocational advice and encouragement. Their own security and society’s professional shortages encourage entry into the scientific professions and teaching. Society’s greatest need pleads that we channel some of the ablest into the more crowded fields of law, business, and politics, noted for insecurity, vilification, and a host of other ills. The twentieth century is the paradox of history. Mankind has in its grasp the choice of great progress or great destruction. How education manages the paradox of the gifted child may well have a major bearing on the ultimate outcome. (p. 101)
A sense of ambivalence
For Bernstein, educating the most gifted was a matter of social urgency. If we don’t do a better job with these kids, he wrote, “America’s traditional distrust of the egghead will have us hoist by our own petard” (p. 101). But despite this plea, gifted education largely fell out of the conversation in the pages of Kappan and the larger education space in the 1960s.
In June 1973, Robert Tresize (“Are the gifted coming back?”) contemplated how interest in providing special opportunities for the most advanced students had waxed and waned over the years, often alongside concerns about IQ testing, questions about whether nature or nurture were paramount in child development, and the eugenics movement (which he termed a “curious sociocultural phenomenon,” p. 687). However, Tresize explained, America’s mixed feelings about the most gifted also arose from our founding principles:
The widespread ambivalence about gifted children in this country has its roots in our two conceptions of democracy. On the one hand, our political ideas are rooted in the concept of Jeffersonian democracy. [Thomas] Jefferson’s idea was that an intellectual elite should be encouraged. His philosophy suggested that we should continually survey the country in order to identify those who seem to be talented, and then pains should be taken to nurture that talent. The country will prosper and attain its ideals only if led by a group of enlightened leaders drawn from the various segments of society.
But along came [Andrew] Jackson with a conception of democracy derived from the frontier. While Jefferson tended to see American society in a somewhat triangular sense, with the brilliant, enlightened leadership at the top, Jackson’s conception of democracy was more rectangular, with all social levels more or less on a plane. Being a product of the frontier, where all men were equal, Jackson thought that all men regardless of experience or educational background should share equally in the leadership function. In fact, the unlettered man of the frontier — but the man with ordinary common sense — should always be kept around to keep the intellectual and aristocratic elitists well rooted in reality and out of mischief. (pp. 687-688)
Defining the gifted
The idea of gifted education as an elitist endeavor that shut out plenty of worthy learners was no doubt the source of some of the suspicion of these programs. After all, as John Feldhusen explained in “Programs for the gifted few or talent development for the many?” (June 1998):
It is undesirable to identify some students as “gifted” and the rest as “ungifted.” All students at all ages have relative talent strengths, and schools should help students identify and understand their own special abilities. (p. 738)
Indeed, Kappan authors had long sought ways to bring more young people into the gifted umbrella. As early as November 1958, Jacob Getzels and Philip Jackson (“The meaning of ‘giftedness’: An examination of an expanding concept”) considered the merits of including highly creative students among the gifted, tailoring opportunities to build their specific talents. It was possible, the authors acknowledged, that including creativity as a marker of giftedness could set a precedent for further expanding the definition, but, for them: “The not inconsiderable dangers inherent in the possibility of expanding the concept to a point where it becomes meaningless seem to us to be compensated by the possibility of increasing the effectiveness of our education for all children” (p. 77).
In May 1982, Sally Reis and Joseph Renzulli (“A case for a broadened conception of giftedness”) noted the many problems with using IQ tests to determine giftedness and described a more flexible “revolving door” approach, in which students whom the school deemed in need of enrichment would pursue areas of special interest, with the guidance of a resource teacher and following a clear management plan establishing when students would move in and out of the program.
By the late 1990s, educators were thinking about gifted education as a form of talent development, potentially available to a much broader swath of students, as Joyce VanTassel-Baska explained in June 1998:
The case could be made that all of education should be about talent development, a view of schooling that focuses on the optimal, not the minimal, development of each student. Based on such an idea, many educational institutions have reformed their practice using talent development ideas. Whole schools have been founded and many others have been reorganized around the talent development concept as it applies to all learners. (“The development of academic talent: A mandate for educational best practice,” p. 761)
Educating the gifted
The June 1998 issue included articles on the philosophy behind a talent development approach, as well as articles on specific areas of talent, such as personal and social talents and artistic talents. But there was also a great deal of discussion about how to implement an education program focused on developing talent.
Although the term talent development was relatively new when that issue was published, many of the earlier authors cited above discussed how to develop students’ abilities. Common themes included frequent assessment of abilities, careful matching of programs to students, assessment of program benefits, and so on. One of the more in-depth descriptions came from Donald Treffinger, whose June 1998 article (“From gifted education to programming for talent development”) described a Level of Service (LoS) approach similar to Response to Intervention, in which different levels of service are available, with most students receiving instruction at the lowest levels (and note that Dixson et al. make a similar case in the present issue). Students with more specific needs not met at a lower level move up to a level that is more tailored to them:
The goal of LoS is not to find out whether a student is “truly gifted,” but to determine what unique strengths, talents, and sustained interests a student exhibits. Nor does the LoS approach seek to identify an arbitrary number of “gifted” students; the goal is to find an appropriate educational response for any student. . . . Thus the focus is not on eligibility or inclusion versus exclusion but on designing appropriate instructional programming. (p. 753)
Regardless of how authors define giftedness or design specific programs, the goal of “designing appropriate instructional” programming seems to be the theme that echoes through all of their proposals. And it’s something every student, with every level and kind of talent, needs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teresa Preston
Teresa Preston is an editorial consultant and the former editor-in-chief of Phi Delta Kappan and director of publications for PDK International, Arlington, VA.
Visit their website at: https://prestoneditorial.com/
