As Special as Everyone Else

(A prologue to a series of posts about Giftedness and Talent)

Are you gifted? Are you highly gifted in some domain? Perhaps exceptionally gifted? Are you talented? What do those words mean anyway?

If you have had anything to do with gifted education, you probably know that the mere definitions of giftedness and talent are a potentially endless source of exercises in thinking and debate. I do not want to spend here too much time on academic wordplay, but for the sake of clarity of the upcoming posts, I cannot completely evade definitions either.

In practical projects for gifted children, we have mostly been treating the two magic terms as synonyms. I have nothing against such casual usage. To be honest, I even think that an educator can afford not to distinguish between them, because it mostly does not matter. You just do your best to help the kids or adults who are right in front of you and you do not need to ponder whether a particular teenager is gifted or rather talented of neither or both as defined by the European Union or by somebody else. Such concept defining questions only matter when we are taking decisions on strategic level. For instance, when we are determining who can participate in a talent development programme.

This being said, you may have noticed that you are reading "a blog about the alchemy of turning our gifts into talents". For this blog, I have deliberately chosen to go by the model of Françoys Gagné. With some degree of simplification, we can say that Professor Gagné's approach uses the word giftedness for our innate qualities, while talent denotes something already developed. The distinction makes sense to me, because I want to underline the hard work factor, that complex process of unfolding our potential which we know can be both fascinating and difficult to facilitate.

Vladimir Dockal, a Czech giftedness expert, called his book "Everybody is Gifted". (A more literal translation of the title would be "Everybody has giftedness.") I would like to support such point of view. The line we draw between "(exceptionally) gifted children" and the rest will always be only arbitrary, never natural, whether it is based on classically perceived intelligence or on something else. Moreover, looking for a line to draw may be a completely unfortunate attitude. We are looking at how gifted somebody is in comparison with other people. As far as I can see, comparing oneself to some other self usually triggers envy or pride, not happiness. What seems much more valuable is to look at our gifts just as they are. From this simple perspective, we would have to be blind not to see that everybody around us has "been given" a potential to think, learn, change and grow. They just may not have discovered their gifts yet or maybe they need to learn to appreciate them enough. Unless you are a zombie or some non-human reading my post, you are certainly a very gifted learner of the art of breathing. You probably understand what's written in this paragraph or you wouldn't be reading it and I bet you can do some basic additions or read a graph in the newspaper. Those are all very useful capabilities and we could continue this way naming a plethora of other simple but beautiful gifts many of us have at our service. And yet we so often take them for granted and want to see something special, be it in our pupils or in our own children or even in ourselves. I do not want to preach. What I do want to do is to help inspire the world of gifted education to make the leap from the paradigm of "being special" into the paradigm of being "just as special as everyone else".

You may be wondering now whether we need something like "gifted education" at all. Do we need a special branch of education dealing with "gifted children"? Is gifted education justified? Those are big questions indeed and we are going to explore them in the next post of this series: "Why Gifted Education Is Both a Beast and a Beauty". Stay tuned.