A response to the ‘All children are gifted’ comment

1A response to ‘All children are gifted’ By Michael C. Thompson, a speech delivered at the Indiana Association for the Gifted 1998 Annual Conference In a 1994 issue of the Roeper Review, Dierdre Lovecky described an interchange between a gifted second grader and his mother: Mom: We have to eat and run. Son: Like carnivorous pantyhose? These are the times that try gifted educators’ souls. These are the times when gifted education is under attack as never before. It is not unusual for gifted education to come under attack. Gifted education has frequently been the target of opposition and misunderstanding, such as the confounded idea that equity is threatened by the excellence of gifted education, when everyone knows that historically, excellent minds have always been in the vanguard of the demand for equity. It is not unusual for gifted education to the target of charges of elitism, by those who themselves glorified elite talents and accomplishments in every other form of human endeavor. come under attack. Gifted education has had to struggle with serious problems of identification and process that have been criticized by well-intentioned and acute minds. What is unusual, what tries our souls at this moment in the history of gifted education, is that gifted education is under intellectual attack, an intellectual attack aimed at its veryfoundation. ...