Living With Live Wires

If you use the term “gifted” in reference to your children, or yourself, chances are you may get a negative reaction or a non-responsive reaction from others.  Why is this term so loaded with negative connotations?  

Let’s take a look at where the term originated.

It wasn’t until the early 1900s tht the general public be came interested in adapting education to those with more or less than average ability.  At that time, the French government commissioned psychologist Alfred Binet, who had developed a test to measure people’s “judgment” or “mental age,” to screen out those children who weren’t likely to benefit from a general education…Binet believed that intelligence is educable – that it can be learned, expanded, and improved.

In 1916, American psychologist Lewis Terman took Binet’s test to Stanford University in California and standardized it.  Ironically, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale assumes that intelligence is fixed – that it can’t be learned, expanded, or improved…Terman was the first to use the term “gifted,” and his study was the most comprehensive long-term study of the gifted ever conducted.  Sally Walker, The Survival guide for Parents of Gifted Kids, (1991) .

Since that time, there have been a preponderance of myths related to people considered to be more intelligent, creative or ambitious.

Many people think that using the term “gifted” conveys elitism.  They think that if you consider one group of people to be “smarter” than others, that you are claiming superiority and special treatment.  This could NOT be further from the truth.  Giftedness is a real phenomenon of people who fall outside (above)  the normal development curve in one or more areas.   And thus, many have special emotional, psychological and social challenges.  And, most gifted individuals deal with intensities, sensitivities and overexcitabilities.  Many people who fall into the gifted category are not aware of the far-reaching impact of their uniquenesses.  Instead, they have been given messages by others that they are just, “too sensitive,”  ”too intense,”  ”to dramatic,” “too weird,” in other words, just not normal.

In the lanuage we use on this website and in the podcast, we will use the term “gifted” as a shorthand way of referring to the wildly diverse and amazingly unique people who fall outside the norm for potential in areas of intelligence, creativity, and talent.  Hopefully in the future we can all come up with a term that is not so emotionally-charged.  But for now, “gifted” is the most widely recognized term used in education and legislation and is the umbrella term that most people use to identify resources.  We will also use other terms, such as, “bright,” “creative, ” “high potential,” “accelerated learner,” or “talented.”  There doesn’t seem to be the ideal way of describing gifted children and adults, so we will just do the best we can with the most accepted terminology.