Local Authority Duties, School Duties and the Parent Duties in Relation Provision of an Effective Education for Gifted Children



Local Authority Duties, School Duties and the Parent Duties in Relation Provision of an Effective Education for Gifted Children

Introduction

In one of my courses at Teachers College, I display an overhead transparency on which the following question appears: How long have there been gifted children? Typical answers are “Forever,” “As long as there have been children,” and the like. However, I suggest a more prosaic answer, which, in 2008, is “88 years.”

By claiming there have been gifted children for 88 years, I am being somewhat arbitrary, but also making an important point: The concept of the gifted child is a social construction, not a fact of nature. Gifted children were invented, not discovered. They were invented in the second decade of the 20th century, and the construct received the imprimatur of the educational establishment in 1920 with the publication of Classroom Problems in the Education of Gifted Children , the 19th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE; Henry, 1920). Acknowledgment by the educational establishment that gifted children existed and warranted serious pedagogical consideration marks, for me, the beginning of the field of gifted education and the existence of gifted children themselves.

Discussion

Before this, there had been studies of “men of genius” (always men) starting with Galton's Hereditary Genius in 1869. However, there was little focus on children. The idea that children could be gifted was, I believe, the result of a technological innovation: the advent of mental testing. It is no coincidence that the father of gifted education in the United States was Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University, who conducted the first major study of gifted children starting in the 1920s (Terman, 1926-1959), and that the father of mental testing in the United States was the same Lewis M. Terman who, enamored of the work of Binet in France, developed an American version of Binet's test, the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale.

The fervor with which psychologists and educators embraced Terman's and other psychometric tools, believing that these were true measures of intelligence, led to the wholesale testing of countless Americans, from World War I draftees to school children. Test scores were arrayed according to the normal distribution, and, as Foucault (1975/1995) noted, our tendency toward “normalizing judgment” led inevitably to the conclusion that people within a certain IQ range must be normal and that those outside it must not be. Thus, without having done anything but answer a series questions in the manner that psychologists deemed “intelligent,” certain students became “gifted children.” Soon, gifted programs appeared across the country, and researchers initiated studies to learn what gifted children were like.

Identification Issues and Practices

Following are the identification of the issues and the practices for the effective deliver of education to gifted children

Assessment and Labeling

In this field, nothing is as vexing as identifying students for a gifted program. Identification invariably involves some form of assessment, including testing and teacher judgment, that ...