What "gifted" meant in education at that time, and pretty much through the
60s and early 70s, was being developmentally precocious by the timeline
expectations of the day ... too adult, too mature, too interested in
matters beyond your years, too bored with the inanity of your peer group,
reading books too advanced for you, using vocabulary (always the
superficial signs mean most) not in common parlance or considered "written"
or intellectual ... and what education responded with was the very simple
ideas of "double promotion" "skipping grades" "accelerated curricular
progress" and generally rushing you ahead of the normal timetable so fast
that you would never have time to actually think about anything. It was the
same curriculum, just delivered at double-speed ... right on into
undergraduate education. Universities responded with "early entrance" and
other programs to get high school "geniuses" into standard college courses
... but there was never any _qualitatively_ different approach to our
education on a large scale.
It's interesting that the folk-view was that we were some sort of mutants,
and definitely Other, and qualitatively different ... and likely to become
"mad scientists", totally amoral and definitely dangerous. But to
mainstream pscyhology and education deriving from it, we were just
developmental robots whose timers were set a little faster than those of
our peers. The folk-view was much closer to the truth, I think, at least in
the sense that we (I knew a fair cross-section of others like me) really
did think and feel and see the world very differently from our peers, and
we wanted a totally different sort of curriculum and education: more
freedom to pursue special interests, fewer requirements, less conformity
and uniformity enforced on us, and above all the opportunity to pursue
specific issues in real depth and not move on to the next topic in just a
few days. There was a small educational counter-movement to 'acceleration'
known as 'enrichment' but even many of us avoided it because we had no
trust in the educational system at all, and we just wanted to get free of
it as fast as we could. You didn't have to be a "rocket scientist" to
realize that the purpose of schooling is to create as uniform a two-tier
workforce as possible. "Creativity" was definitely NOT encouraged.
There was, by the way, a longitudinal study of a lot of us, by one Morris
B. Parloff ... not likely that the online databases go back that far, but
it should be possible to retrieve some references from the old index
volumes (librarians, please note, don't throw them out quite yet!). I have
no idea what the final conclusion was, though I vaguely remember that we
were socially maladjusted (or at least bi-modal on this) and a lot of us
had a tendency to disappear. We were enough of an oddity, by the culture of
the times, to be considered worth studying as a phenomenon ... and Parloff
was very well funded, indeed he used to send us checks to stay in the study.
Sometime in the 70s, perhaps about the time that elite college admissions
were becoming competitive because there was a rising cohort population (we
were the original baby-boomers) and a less rapidly expanding set of
placements available ... it suddenly became fashionable to be, if not
exceptionally intelligent, then at least academically successful (in middle
class communities) ... it may be hard today to imagine, but in the 1950s
and 1960s parents did NOT want a straight-A son, and god-forbid a
too-smart-for-her-own-good daughter! the gentleman's "C" was fading
already, but the class habitus said that average academic success was
optimal, just enough to leave the working class kids in your dust, but not
enough to be thought "odd" in any way (this attitude still exists in parts
of rural Australia). When the change came, parents lobbied politically to
get their kids into "gifted" classes and programs, and the meaning of
gifted changed to something like "above average", as in the classic
description of Lake Woebegon, USA, where "all the children are above
average" (and followers of the research literature will know that this
anomalous statistical distribution was actually manufactured in many places).
I lost interest around this time ... but my sense is that some of the early
grades programs actually flirted with radical ideas about how to teach the
gifted in qualitatively different ways, but that secondary education always
re-normalized things back towards the accelerated model. Little kids can
play, but then you have to get to work (very literally ...)
A friend of mine in student days was Jack (Jacob) Getzels, who did the most
interesting research on the gifted in those days. His basic finding was
that there were two totally different kinds of people who got included
under this heading: the quick and the weird, the just-highly-intelligent
and the genuinely-creative. Assuming as we now do that hi-IQ meant
exceptionally well adapted to middle-class norms of reasoning, and to the
late capitalist value of SPEED, the first group had the higher IQs and were
otherwise pretty dull. They made great actuaries and run-of-the-mill
engineers or normal-science scientists. The second group actually had lower
IQs (than the first, but still well above average), and were best
characterized by the fact that whatever task you assigned us, we found some
way to appropriate it to something we were already interested in. The first
group solved other people's problems; we solved our own.
Are type-II gifted students inherently culturally or politically
subversive? probably not politically, unless we happen to get interested in
social structural issues (and there were plenty of efforts to steer us away
from that china shop) ... and culturally, perhaps yes, but only if there
was some amplification from our idiosyncratic micro-social activity to
larger macro-social changes, and again there are plenty of social
mechanisms to quarantine and contain such deviations (social stability
would be rather hard to come by if there were not). I am not even sure that
we were temperamentally rebellious; I think we were more often loners and
reclusive, unable to identify with the common cultural symbols and
identities that would bond us to our peers ... at least this was true of
the boys, I early on gave up trying to figure out the girls, except to
realize it was much harder for them than for us, and that they were much
better at hiding their oddness than we were. When we saw something
"stupid", as we did every day, we did not want to change it (unless it was
manifestly unjust as well), we just shook our heads and got as far away
from it as we could. Some escaped to mathematics, many to fields where you
didn't have to deal with people at all (on the theory that most people were
stupid, so avoid them all), some to technical specialties, some to the
ivory tower, a few to the arts ... and most, it seems, just disappeared
(teen suicides were quite common and very hushed up, as they are still; the
profoundest indictment of our social order: Better Dead than "Normal"). By
my university days, there were masses of new escape routes (music
fanaticism, psychedelics, communes, political commitment ...) but they were
becoming jammed with just about everybody in the middle class under 30, so
we and our younger kin tended to avoid these too and create uniquely
idiosyncratic paths for ourselves ... making us hard to track, and harder
to generalize about. Conformity did not disappear at the end of the 60s,
but it certainly diversified, and rebelliousness mutated into pity for our
elders. (After all, we were at this point technically the majority and
certainly the heirs apparent.)
So we vanished from sight, and giftedness changed its meaning. IQ fell into
disrepute (slowly), creativity became a fetish, weird behavior was normal,
and who knows ... maybe society stopped producing our historically specific
sociotype. I would be very skeptical of attempts to identify kids today who
resemble our profile and label them as a "natural kind". There is a new
cultural order today, with new socially meaningful categories and types of
personae being produced. If education wished to cater for these different
styles of human today (it doesn't), by offering different styles of
education, we would have to do a whole new analysis of contemporary
sociotypes among younger children and younger adults. Maybe the marketing
divisions of educational software companies will do this for us ... but
with very different ends in view.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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