Equality of Economic Opportunity and the Gifted Student: a Basic Conflict in the American Tradition

Abstract

A CADEMICIANS seem to agree that students with extraordinary capacities to learn should be afforded every opportunity to do so. Expressions of concern over the fate of the gifted student appear regularly in articles in a broad range of professional academic journals. Generally, the writers agree that the superior student should be identified early and that special provision should be made for his education. In this writer's view, the special plans being made for the superior student run counter to the longstanding American cultural tradition of equality. Provisions for gifted students must, at the very least, involve a large investment of instructional time, library facilities, and physical resources. In a period of limited enrollments in public education, such concerns would be matters of simple planning; but in a time of public pressure to admit all qualified students, particularly in public higher education, any special provisions for superior students will force specific choices between using instructional resources for the gifted and for the average student. If the demand for the expansion of public education continues, it is not difficult to foresee a time when many academicians will be faced with a sharp conflict. An examination of the cultural theme of equality and its corollaries as they affect public education provides an understanding of this conflict. A modern Tocqueville visiting the United States would be struck by the apparent lack of a formal nation-wide system of public education with a central authority to enforce standardized curriculums, teaching methods, and activities. He would note the numerous types of public schools: one-room rural, large urban vocational, urban academic, county consolidated, and so on. He would also observe the plethora of public organizations which control and direct these schools. A systematic examination of this diversity would reveal, however, that the apparent autonomy of American public schools is in fact superficial, and that there is actually a unified system in operation as centralized and rigidly structured as those in other areas of the world. This system is determined by the general cultural theme of equality and its several corollaries, which define for most Americans what the standards of public education should be and, more importantly, what they should not be.