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John Gardner (not the author of Grendel nor the author of later James Bond books, but the former head of the Carnegie Foundation) wrote an extended essay entitled Excellence and Equality (a part of The Nation's Children (1960) - report from the Golden Anniversary Conference on Children and Youth, from which the quote below was taken. Beyond the quote, itself, it is one of the best examination of the issues with which, 50 years later, we still struggle.Gardner supported the resistance to labels, but he sought to understand it, because he saw it as getting in the way of meeting children's and society's needs, even as he appreciated the cultural differences that led to it.
"One way of looking at this national reluctance to label individual differences is that it is nonsensical and that we have developed a ridiculous squeamishness about such matters. Critics trace it to our desire to make young people "happy," to our concern for psychological adjustment. But such critics are barking up the wrong tree. The reason we are reluctant to label individual differences in native capacity is that native capacity holds a uniquely important place in our scheme of things. It must never be forgotten that ours is one of the relatively few societies in the history of the world in which performance is a primary determinant of status. More than in any other society, in the United States the individual's standing is determined by his capacity to perform. ... for complex reasons, Americans see appraisals of "intelligence," however defined, as total judgments on the individual and as central to his self-esteem."
I don't know that it was either as unique then as he thought, nor actually true *even then* to say that "the individual's standing is determined by his capacity to perform," but it was certainly more true than in most other places and times. Regardless of its truth, now, the principle behind it is certainly well established and deeply embedded in our national psyche - far beyond just the label of giftedness.
"One way of looking at this national reluctance to label individual differences is that it is nonsensical and that we have developed a ridiculous squeamishness about such matters. Critics trace it to our desire to make young people "happy," to our concern for psychological adjustment. But such critics are barking up the wrong tree. The reason we are reluctant to label individual differences in native capacity is that native capacity holds a uniquely important place in our scheme of things. It must never be forgotten that ours is one of the relatively few societies in the history of the world in which performance is a primary determinant of status. More than in any other society, in the United States the individual's standing is determined by his capacity to perform. ... for complex reasons, Americans see appraisals of "intelligence," however defined, as total judgments on the individual and as central to his self-esteem."
I don't know that it was either as unique then as he thought, nor actually true *even then* to say that "the individual's standing is determined by his capacity to perform," but it was certainly more true than in most other places and times. Regardless of its truth, now, the principle behind it is certainly well established and deeply embedded in our national psyche - far beyond just the label of giftedness.
