[Ohiogift] The Gifted

[Will Fitzhugh]

The life-adjustment movement would establish once and for all the idea that the slow learner is “in no sense” the inferior of the gifted, and the principle that all curricular subjects, like all children, are equal. “There is no aristocracy of ‘subjects,’ ” said the Educational Policies Commission of the N.E.A. in 1952, describing the ideal rural school. “Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and homemaking are all peers.”
 

In the name of utility, democracy, and science, many educators had come to embrace the supposedly uneducable or less educable child as the center of the secondary-school universe, relegating the talented child to the sidelines. One group of educationists, looking forward to the day when “the aristocratic, cultural tradition of education [will be] completely and finally abandoned,” had this to say of pupils who showed unusual intellectual curiosity: “Any help we can give them should be theirs, but such favored people learn directly from their surroundings. Our efforts to teach them are quite incidental in their development. It is therefore unnecessary and futile for the schools to attempt to gear their programs to the needs of unusual people.” In this atmosphere, as Jerome Bruner puts it, “the top quarter of public school students, from which we must draw intellectual leadership in the next generation, is perhaps the group most neglected by our schools in the recent past.” This group has indeed been neglected by many educators and looked upon by some not as the hope or the challenge or the standard of aspiration for the educational system, but as a deviant, a side issue, a special problem, at times even a kind of pathology. Possibly I exaggerate; but otherwise it is hard to understand how an official of the Office of Education could have written this insensitive passage: 


A considerable number of children, estimated at about four million, deviate sufficiently from mental, physical, and behavioral norms to require special educational provision. Among them are the blind and the partially seeing, the deaf and the hard of hearing, the speech-defective, the crippled, the delicate, the epileptic, the mentally deficient, the socially maladjusted, and the extraordinarily gifted.


Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (pp. 353-354). 
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. {Pulitzer Prize 1964]
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