Educating Gifted Students for the Future

By James H. Borland, Ph.D.(注1)

ABSTRACT
In this presentation, I will focus on problems, issues, and practices related to differentiating curriculum for gifted students with the goal of helping these students develop their potential and achieve success in college and professional life. I will start with a brief discussion of the various ways in which giftedness is conceived and operationalized and the implications of these conceptions for curriculum development and differentiation. I will then discuss crucial issues in curriculum differentiation for gifted students and the practical implications of each of these choices. I will also make recommendations for future practice.

The Problem of Giftedness

It may strike one as odd to see a paper by a professor of education whose area of study is the education of gifted students begin with the heading, "The Problem of Giftedness." After all, giftedness is usually considered to be a strength, a blessing, a resource-anything but a problem. However, for people who study such things, giftedness is, conceptually and with respect to educational practice, a problem. Perhaps that is a good working definition of a scholar: someone who can turn a giftsintosa problem. Nonetheless, like many things, the more one subjects the concept of giftedness, especially as it manifests itself in the idea of gifted students in elementary and secondary schools, to disciplined study, the more problematic it becomes. This is not merely a concern for academics. Problems and issues related to the concept of gifted students, in the United States at least, have serious practical implications that are of major concern for children, parents, teachers, and school officials.

Central to the problem of giftedness is its relative, contingent nature. As I and many others have argued, giftedness is a social construction, not a fact of nature. It is something that was created, not a pre-existing thing that was discovered. Its meaning derives from the discourse of educators, policy makers, and scholars, not from the steady accretion of empirical data generated through disciplined inquiry. In the United States, gifted children were more or less invented in the second decade of the twentieth century in response to observed individual differences among school children in academic achievement and especially in scores on IQ tests, whose widespread and enthusiastic adoption by educators was seen as reflecting a new era of progressive, effective, scientific schooling.

That children differ along a number of dimensions is undeniable, and that many of these have implications for the education is also true. However, the particular way in which educators responded to the fact of individual differences, which established the norm for special education and gifted education in the U.S. that prevails even today, was not an inevitable response, at least from a scientific point of view. Educators could have seen diversity and variability among school children as a normal, natural, even desirable fact of life and organized schools and developed curriculum in a way that reflected this belief. Instead, they resorted to a series of rather crude classifications based on the normal distribution of IQs that divided childrensintosdistinct groups-using first the terms "subnormal," "normal," and "supernormal"; later "retarded," "normal," and "gifted."

To repeat what I think is an important point, the creation of the category of gifted children (and the corresponding category of retarded children with seemingly scientific fine distinctions made between "imbeciles," "morons," and "idiots," again based on IQ) was not empirically or logically necessary. It is much better understood in light of social, political, and educational policy forces and the historical fact that the schools were seen as a tool for assimilating massive numbers of immigrant childrensintosa society dominated by white Protestant values and as a tool for providing a workforce for an industrial nation just beginning to dominate the world's economy.

For whatever reasons, early in the twentieth century, gifted children started appearing in U.S. schools, and the field of gifted education emerged as a branch of educational research, theory, and practice. But the fact that giftedness among children was a social construction, something derived from social and historical rather than scientific forces, made educational practice difficult. Chief among the difficulties was the fact that as time wore on, giftedness began to mean different things to different people and, as a consequence of the radically decentralized structure of American education, was defined differently from state to state, school to school.

At first, educators thought of giftedness solely in terms of IQ test scores, since, when the tests were first introduced, most educators seemed to accept uncritically the idea that intelligence was a unitary quantity that varied from individual to individual, a quantity that could be measured accurately and scientifically. Even then, however, the proper IQ cut-off for identifying giftedness was a matter of dispute. Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University, often called the "father of gifted education in the United States," used a cut-off of 140 on his test, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, to define giftedness in the work he began in the 1920s. Terman's contemporary, Leta Hollingworth, of Teachers College, Columbia University, used a Stanford-Binet cut-off of 180, a score theoretically attained by only one person in one million, in her studies of giftedness. Schools often used much lower cut-offs, with 120 being a common score used to distinguish between gifted students and the rest.

Even more disruptive to consensus regarding the meaning of giftedness was a series of challenges to the idea that intelligence was unitary, quantitative, and fixed and that IQ tests were valid measures of intelligence. Alternative conceptions of human abilities proliferated in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and this caused a corresponding proliferation of alternative definitions of giftedness. The widespread use of the phrase "gifted and talented" reflects the fact that, early on, educators were thinking of giftedness as encompassing more than intellectual ability. In the 1950s, Paul Witty proposed that "any child whose performance, in a potentially valuable line of human activity, is consistently remarkable" is a gifted child. In 1972, the U.S. Office of Education published a highly influential definition of giftedness that, in addition to high general intellectual ability and high academic aptitude, listed leadership ability, creative and productive thinking ability, ability in the visual and performing arts, and psychomotor ability as co-equal forms of giftedness. And in the late 1970s, Joseph Renzulli of the University of Connecticut proposed a widely adopted definition of giftedness that contained three components: creativity, task commitment, and above-average ability, the last term meant quite literally as merely above-average ability, not Terman's 140 IQ, let alone Hollingworth's 180.

The practical consequence was, and is, that giftedness has many definitions and that different school systems across the U.S. define giftedness in different, sometimes radically different, ways. This means that a child can be "gifted" in one school district and, upon moving to another community, find that he or she is "not gifted" in the school district in which he or she is now enrolled. Giftedness, in educational practice in the United States, is therefore multiple, shifting, locally determined, and highly relative.

When one thinks about giftedness internationally and cross-culturally, the conceptual difficulties are compounded. If, as I believe, giftedness is relative, contingent on historical and cultural factors, and more a matter of values and beliefs than scientific fact, giftedness will vary considerably in its meaning and in its educational application from country to country. And, in fact, the notion of gifted children may not make sense at all in some countries and cultures.

The danger of treating American thinking about giftedness as universal, a specific manifestation of a more general national failing, is evident when one looks at two features of definitions of giftedness that seem to be common to most of the varied definitions in use today in the U.S. One of these is the idea that, in the words of James J. Gallagher, "the ability to manipulate symbol systems is the sine qua non of giftedness." It is true that in highly industrialized countriesswheresliteracy is widespread, the ability to understand and express oneself in symbolic media such as words, numbers, musical notation, visual representation, and so forth is essential to success and to being recognized as excellent in academic and other pursuits. However, there are cultures on this Earth in which symbolic representation of knowledge has little importance compared to the ability to orient oneself in space, to find sustenance, to negotiate social hierarchies, and other abilities. In such cultures, something other than the ability to manipulate symbol systems would necessarily be the sine qua non of giftedness.

A second feature seemingly common to American conceptions of giftedness is the belief that giftedness is the result of a high level of ability within the individual-a "gift"-and that one either has it or one does not, whether at birth or as a result of environmental influences or a combination of the two. There is reason to believe that this notion about giftedness may not be universal. Research among Asian-American children and their families suggests that for them giftedness is more likely to be seen as the result of hard work, that one can be a gifted student if he or she values education sufficiently and works hard enough.

It is simplistic and dangerous to treat all Asian-Americans with their varied national and cultural backgrounds as a monolithic group, and it is similarly dangerous to generalize from, say, Chinese-American students and families to Chinese students and families, but there may be something to the idea that, with a number of exceptions, there is a difference between Western and Eastern conceptions of human ability. One of the wonderful things about teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, is the fact that we have so many international students, including many from Asian countries. I have asked a number of my students from China, Japan, Korea, and other countries, as well as a number of Asian-American students, what their parents taught them about what people in my field call "giftedness," and, on the basis of my far-from-scientific survey, there does seem to be a greater tendency among Asian and Asian-American families to stress to their children that academic excellence is more a matter of hard work and dedication than of an immutable ability that has been given to one as a gift.

The point that I am making, perhaps belaboring, is that giftedness is not a fixed thing; that it is inevitably going to reflect the values and beliefs of a community, a culture, a country; and that the practice of what we call "gifted education" will, as a result, vary considerably from place to place. This is what I mean by the "problem" of giftedness, a problem that can only be solved in a culturally or nationally specific manner that reflects the values and beliefs that inform the schools in a particular location.

Rationales for Gifted Education

Not only is the definition of giftedness likely to differ from country to country, culture to culture, but the reasons for developing programs for gifted students, however they are defined, are likely to vary as well. I have identified two separate rationales for gifted education in the United States, and I think the distinctions between them might have some relevance here. One rationale, which I call the "national resources rationale," is based on the belief that gifted students are a valuable national resource and that it is in the interest of society at large to develop this resource. Giftedness in students thus becomes linked to the potential for productivity and creativity in adulthood; gifted students are defined as potentially gifted adults. The identification of gifted students centers on identifying those students who have the traits that suggest that they will contribute to the common good in the future.

A second rational, which I call the "special educational rationale," focuses not on the needs of the society or country but those of the individual. Gifted students are seen as being exceptional, or different, because of their abilities, so exceptional that they cannot receive the education to which they are entitled unless their curriculum is in some way differentiated. Giftedness is thus defined as significant variation from the norm, and identification focuses on identifying exceptionality and educational need now, not the potential for productivity in the future.

It is not difficult to see the degree to which values entersintosthe discussion of these two bases for gifted education. The second rationale, the special educational rationale, is clearly grounded in notions of individualism that may have little currency in societies in which the common good is valued more than individual needs. In the United States,swherespersonal autonomy is highly valued, some would say over-valued, this rationale for gifted education is likely to be more persuasive than it is in other countries,swheresthe needs of the individual are subordinated to those of the family and the society at large.

Since each of these rationales has its own implications for practice. As I suggested previously, each requires that giftedness be defined and identified differently. Moreover, other rationales for gifted education could exist in other countries and cultures. It is not difficult to see how, say, in a theocratic society a completely different rationale for gifted education could emerge and how differently giftedness would be defined and identified.

Again, the point is that giftedness, and thus educational practice related to gifted children, is profoundly shaped by the society in which it is conceived. Giftedness is local, not universal.

Curriculum Differentiation for Gifted Students

Thisshavingsbeen said, what general comments can one make about the schooling of gifted students? If giftedness is so relative to time and place, are there any generalities that have any validity? I think there are some, but they always need to be considered within a local context.

First, research in the U.S., and to some extent in other countries, strongly suggests that the most capable students do not develop their potential for outstanding accomplishment unless some special provisions are made for them. A common curriculum with the same content, the same forms of instruction, the same expectations for growth for all students-in short a one-size-fits-all curriculum-will not result in the development of the abilities of those students with the greatest capacity for high performance. If curriculum and instruction are not differentiated, if they are not modified to allow for the varying needs and abilities of different students, students at the extremes of the ability distribution not be well served. Students of lower ability will struggle to keep up with students of average ability, and students of high ability will not be challenged, will not learn much they do not already know, and very well might not develop their capacity to think at higher, more productive levels. Ignoring the educational needs of highly able students, assuming that they will develop on their own (which is essentially to assume that schooling does not matter very much), inevitably leads to talent wasted, which is a loss for the individual and the society.

Second, the development of talent and ability must be carried out in a value-consistent context. By this, I mean that there needs to be consistency among the values and goals of students, families, the peer culture, and school authorities. In the U.S., attempts by educators to develop academic talent have sometimes been hampered by a youth peer culture that values things other than scholarship. Students who achieve in school sometimes risk social alienation unless their academic success is "tempered" by such things as athletic prowess or social facility. Some, not all, African-American students have been accused of "acting white" when they have shown success in school. These are characteristically American issues, but I think the underlying issue, that students and their families need to share the goals and values of school officials if talent-development efforts are to be successful, is a universal one. Changing society through educational practice is an attractive idea, but effectively using schools as an agent of societal change requires that students and their families agree with , not merely acquiesce to, the goals and values of school officials.

Third, no society can flourish without the optimal development of its most talented citizens. I strongly believe that each child has an equal right to an appropriate and effective education. But I also believe that it is essential to the health and future of a society that it nourish and encourage the abilities of those individuals, children and adults, who have special talents and abilities.

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