The smart man's burden

Abstract

We have heard much talk lately about America's newest oppressed minority-the gifted and talented. Dealing with this recently discovered pocket of privilege has become the hottest field in education today. Colleges are gearing up to train teachers to work with the gifted, programs are being started in almost all schools, consultants have been hired to minister to their needs, and the usual screening tests and educational materials are flooding the market place. Now let us talk common sense about the gifted and talented. These kids we all remember from school were brilliant in class-seemingly without the effort that most of us needed to devote to studies. In our view, school was easy for them. Often such precocious children spoke three languages, played several musical instruments, starred in the school play, edited the student newspaper, won the state science fair, led the student council, and were featured on 122 pages of the high school yearbook. It would have been hard to see that they needed special attention. Later, these same kids had Harvard calling their counselors on the phone, found themselves declared National Merit Scholars, and went off to become lawyers, doctors, and executives of Fortune 500 companies. In our eternal ignorance, we thought that such people had it made. The rest of us went off to work or to state colleges and vocational schools, sometimes even wishing we had been born gifted and/or talented. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we would value our own accomplishments more because we had to work harder than did the whiz kids. Little did we know that we had it made, not the gifted and talented. Only now do we get the opportunity to make it up to them by providing special educational programs to compensate for their blighted status. How can we account for the recent upsurge of attention the problem of being gifted? We know from history that Americans have always lived uncomfortably with the concept of elites, be they based on Divine Right, wealth, or even brains. We have believed in the American Dream, which means that an individual can go as far as talent and ambition permit. We also have believed that nobody ought to receive special treatment unless that treatment aims at making the competition for success more fair. This commitment to fairness and equality of opportunity always has acted as a restraint on the urge to treat the gifted as an elite. It explains, too, our willingness to poke fun at eggheads and to portray geniuses as bumbling fools dressed in white socks and Einstein sweatshirts. More recently, however, some elements of the public and the educational community have grown critical of rapidly increasing expenditures of funds used to assist the economically disadvantaged and the handicapped. Some degree of resentment has appeared concerning the amount of attention paid to improving the quality of educational services for those on the bottom while little or nothing was done for the exceptionally talented and gifted individuals at the top. To add to the confusion, many educators supporting the concept of mainstreaming the handicapped have advocated removing the gifted from regular classrooms so that they might receive special education.