Gifted and Talented, for What?
by Edwin Dorn
Speech to the Texas Association of Gifted and Talented
Austin, Texas
December 2, 2000
Introduction
I'm delighted to be here. However, I feel a bit out of place. Your program is filled with discussions about testing and curriculum development and a range of other topics about which I know virtually nothing.
Underneath the technical titles of the many of the panels, however, appear to lie two understandable and important questions: how do we identify "smart" kids, and how do we make them even smarter?
Speaking of smart kids, my 13-year-old daughter was surfing the Internet the other day and ran across the answer to a question that kids have been asking for ages: Why did the chicken cross the road? Actually, she found out that the answer depends on whom you ask. So, here are several perspectives on the question, why did chicken cross the road?
- Captain Kirk--"To boldly go where no chicken has gone before."
- Colonel Sanders--"I missed one? Dang!"
- Bill Clinton--"I did not cross the road with that chicken. What do you mean by 'chicken'? Could you define 'chicken', please?"
- Dr. Seuss--"Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed, I've not been told."
- Ernest Hemingway--"To die. In the rain. Alone. Forgotten."
Speaking of being alone and forgotten, don't you wonder how Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan are feeling right now?
Of course, Vice President Gore and Governor Bush won't suffer that fate. No matter which of them eventually is declared the winner, their contest won't be forgotten any time soon.
I bring up the presidential race because it brought to the fore a question about how "smart" a President needs to be. Vice President Gore presented himself as the person whose knowledge and experience made him the better candidate--eight years in the House, eight years in the Senate, eight years as Vice President, familiarity with virtually every federal program.
Governor Bush, a relative newcomer to politics and government, couldn't compete with Gore on those terms. But he had "smarts" of his own from the business world. He'd started an energy company and later owned a sports franchise. He didn't claim to be an expert on either of those things. His approach was to set up the businesses and find good people to run them.
During the race, Governor Bush surrounded himself with people who were widely respected for their expertise and experience: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice. He pushed them forward, as if to say, "These are the kinds of people I'll rely on." By contrast, Vice President Gore's advisors stayed in the background.
Comedians satirized the difference between the two candidates--Bush stumbling over answers, Al Gore hopping up and down like a schoolboy eager to answer the question, even when it wasn't his turn.
In short: Al Gore presented himself as the smartest kid in the class, while George W. Bush presented himself as the guy who would hire a whole class of smart kids.
Gifted and Talented, for What?
The comparison between Bush and Gore exemplifies an important issue in education: what we are educating our students for? Are we trying to produce experts, or are we trying to produce leaders?
Now, some among you will respond to that question by arguing that an expert--someone who rises to the top of his or her field--is by definition a leader. In a sense, you are right. It's a matter of definition.
There are two very different views of leadership. One is positional. When we talk about the best student, the leading university, or the most authoritative book, we are referring to a ranking system. My guess is that every G&T teacher is keenly aware of how each of his or her students is ranked in class. That's the positional definition of leadership--how one person, institution or product stacks up in comparison with another.
Leadership also can be relational: that's the second view. Relational (or dynamic) leadership is about how one person interacts with another, about who can elicit the cooperation, trust and support of others.
The President of the United States represents both kinds of leadership. In positional terms, the President is at the top of the heap: he's the Chief Executive and the Commander-in-Chief. He gets to fly on the fanciest aircraft ever built, and he never has to wait in line.
But the President's success depends on relational leadership--how well he works with members of Congress, for example. Indeed, one of the most famous lines in one of the most famous books on Presidential leadership is, "A President's power is the power to persuade."
Our national experience suggests that a President's success as a leader is not at all related to how smart he is--at least, not the way we generally define "smart." Let's try a little exercise. Make a mental list of the most effective Presidents in the 20th Century. I suspect that your list includes Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.
Now make a list of the Presidents who would have been regarded as the smartest--that is, those who had the most impressive educational backgrounds. You probably will include Princeton Professor Woodrow Wilson, engineer Herbert Hoover, Annapolis graduate Jimmy Carter, and Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton. (By the way, although George W. Bush didn't make a big deal of it during the campaign, he has degrees from both Yale and Harvard.)
But back to my point, which is that in the Presidency, "smarts" don't necessarily translate into leadership success. I could make the same point with lists of Fortune 500 CEOs and with lists of the most successful high-tech entrepreneurs. Here's an exercise for someone: go through the Who's Who and count how many Fortune 500 CEOs possess either a Phi Beta Kappa key or an advanced degree. You won't find many.
If that's true, then we need to consider the question: what are we preparing our gifted and talented students for? Almost certainly, we hope that they will develop extraordinary skill and expertise in some important field of knowledge; they'll be leaders, of a sort.
But, should we also be preparing our students for the second kind of leadership--the kind that involves interacting with other people in ways that elicit trust and support? Let me put the question differently: if we were to develop tests for relational leadership that are as sophisticated as our tests for positional leadership, would the same group of students score equally well on both? There's no way to know, because we don't have such tests.
We also do not teach leadership. Indeed, the lack of training in leadership is one of the huge gaps in the American system of education. Our universities offer classes about virtually every form of knowledge, skill and sensibility. We even offer generous scholarships to gifted athletes. But we make no effort to teach leadership in our university classrooms. In universities, leadership is learned by participating in extracurricular activities--in sports, service organizations, student government.
I haven't studied elementary and secondary school curricula. However, I still have children in school, and I notice their report cards. In the first few grades, kids get graded for a category known as "plays well with others." But in the upper grades, that category is dropped--as if getting along with people is no longer important, or as if kids learn all they need to know by the fourth grade.
Why is Leadership Education Important?
Why is leadership training important? Let me focus on three reasons. First, we must help our graduates make the transition from the classroom to the workplace. At the college level, we encourage students to develop independence of thought and action. Our courses are designed to encourage individual achievement, and that's what students are graded for. And then, send these young men and women out into the labor force where employers value . . . what? Teamwork! Many very smart college graduates experience culture shock when they discover that, in the real world, they need to rely on other people to get things done.
The recent college graduate also is likely to discover that the workplace is far more diverse than the college classroom. Interacting effectively with people of different ages and cultural backgrounds can be a major adjustment for people who have spent many years in the relatively homogeneous environment of a college campus
The second reason leadership training is important is this: most people eventually reach points in their careers at which their individual gifts are insufficient to get the job done. Eventually, the bright young bench scientist will be asked to lead the lab. Eventually, the gifted musician will be asked to lead the section, perhaps the entire symphony.
As we move up the career ladder, most of us reach a point at which we learn that we are no longer the smartest person in the organization. We're put in a position where our job is to hire and supervise and motivate other smart people. This can be a very difficult adjustment; and the more we value our individual expertise, the tougher the transition can be.
As educators, we need to help our students anticipate and cope with that transition. However, we ourselves may not be well prepared for this task. Why not? Well, take a look at the panels at this conference. They're all geared toward measuring individual talent and nurturing individual achievement
During the past century, we have invested enormous energy in the development of tests designed to measure an individual's potential and achievement in a wide array of fields. My own instinct tells me that some of these tests are deeply flawed, but that's a different issue. My point here is that we have barely begun to develop standards and metrics for leadership.
This leads to the third point: if we have no system for testing leadership potential, we simply fall back on our "gut" instincts. Our instincts tell us that the person who's likely to be the best leader will be the person with whom we feel most comfortable--the person whose background and interests are most like our own. That's the way managers are selected in a lot of organizations--by comfort level. And that's what causes many organizations to perpetuate "old boy" patterns of leadership.
The Military Example
Only one major American institution systematically develops leaders--the US military. That's why African-Americans began to achieve senior leadership positions in the military long before they began to achieve them in the civilian world: the armed services have a curriculum for leadership development. The standards are explicit, and everyone is taught what they are, and everyone is given an opportunity to develop them. Advancement in the military isn't a matter of whether you're in the right social set. Nor is it solely a matter of your technical proficiency. It is a matter of whether you have leadership ability.
We have the best military force in the world. Partly, that's because we spend enormous amounts of money on technology and training. But I think an even more important reason is that we invest heavily in preparing men and women for leadership. It is this dimension that distinguishes our armed forces from virtually all the others.
Now, I know what lots of you are thinking--that the military is a rigid hierarchical institution that has very little in common with modern civilian organizations. You're right in some respects. But the military does have two things in common with the most successful civilian institutions: it has a well-defined mission that everyone in the organization understands and supports, and it emphasizes teamwork.
Leadership in Wider Perspective
Let's think beyond the career progress of our students, to the needs of the nation. Regardless of the outcome of this election, I think we'd agree that in recent years, we've come up short on what a former president once called "the vision thing." Let me wax nostalgic on this for a few minutes.
Like a few other people in this room, I came of age in the 1960s. That was a turbulent and divisive time. But it also was a time when this nation was blessed with leaders who had vision and great moral courage.
I remember a spring day in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy visited my hometown of Houston and gave a speech at Rice Stadium. There, I heard Kennedy announce that, by the end of the decade, this nation would land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. It was an audacious promise, because at the time, our space program was in its infancy. But we were a CAN-DO people back then. We responded to Kennedy's vision and his energy and, yes, to his audacity. We marshalled this nation's great resources and fulfilled Kennedy's dream.
I also remember a hot July day in 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall in Washington and pronounced his dream of racial harmony. Millions of Americans came to share his dream; and for several years, we made huge progress.
And I remember when President Johnson, in a State of the Union Address, promised to wage and win a war on poverty. And lest we forget, we made huge progress there, too. The poverty rate of elderly Americans declined dramatically because of increased spending on Social Security. And as a result of Medicare and Medicaid, millions of Americans gained access to decent health care.
The decade of the 1960s was a turbulent period, filled with tragedy--the assassinations of Martin, Medgar, Malcolm, John and Bobby, the divisive war in Viet Nam. But it also was a period of great triumph--in civil rights, social policy, science and engineering.
I mentioned the great speeches, but effective leadership is more than that. Yes, MLK will forever be remembered for his speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But his leadership also involved spending countless hours planning demonstrations, making hundreds of phone calls to raise money, and risking his life every day.
If you listen to the tapes of LBJ's telephone conversations, you realize that his effectiveness, also, involved making hundreds of phone calls, trying to convince members of Congress to support this or that program. Talk about the power to persuade! On those tapes, you'll hear every persuasive method imaginable. LBJ would use facts and logic, he'd use flattery, promises, threats, humor, sarcasm, and offers of everlasting gratitude. King, Kennedy and Johnson understood that leadership is not just great vision. It's also the detailed follow-up.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by trying to pull together three points. First, this association, and groups like it around the nation, have contributed greatly to our effort to identify and nurture gifted and talented students. In doing this, you have relied on a century of work in the fields of testing and pedagogy, and you are constantly improving the tools.
Second, as good the tools may be--and we all believe that they can be improved--they deal with only a portion of the attributes that our students need for their full development. They enable us to identify traits or propensities that are associated with specific forms of individual achievement. Existing standardized tests do not help us identify traits that may be associated with empathy, moral judgment, teamwork and leadership.
Third, then, we have an opportunity to expand the fields of testing and teaching. We must find ways to help young men and women appreciate the importance of leadership, and to develop their leadership potential.
Developing the tests and the pedagogy will take a lot of time and effort, and probably will entail a significant amount of controversy. Is it worth it? I think so. If we can't help our students develop the capacity for teamwork and leadership, we're shortchanging them. We also may be shortchanging our society by producing a generation of men and women who have wonderfully developed individual talents, but poorly developed social skills.
Our deficiency in leadership development is made more pronounced by two other developments. One is the emergence of technologies that enable people to interact in a virtual environment, without ever encountering one another physically. That's terrific in some ways, but one must wonder how a young person's sense of self and of social connectedness is affected by it.
Second, the current generation has never experienced military conscription. During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the vast majority of able-bodied young men served in the armed forces for at least a brief time. The draft was itself a reminder of one's obligation to society, and military service was a kind of unifying experience for several generations. Military service caused people from this country's many regions, religions, social classes and racial groups to serve some common purpose, to work for something larger than their individual self interest. Women didn't experience this social obligation directly, but they did experience it vicariously through the experiences of the men in their lives. Today, fewer than 15 percent of young men and a much smaller proportion of young women ever serve in the armed forces. This isn't an argument for returning to conscription. It is, rather, an observation that an important national experience no longer exists.
We live in a very complex society, one divided along many different dimensions. As our social quilt grows, it needs stronger and stronger threads to hold its many pieces together. How do we keep our individualism from tearing at the seams of our fragile social quilt?
More than ever, we need leaders who can remind us of our shared values, unite us around common purposes, and get us to think beyond our immediate self interest. I'm not talking here just about a President. We need people at all levels--thousands of people in each of our thousands of communities --to help us keep our social fabric woven together. We need to figure out how to produce more people like that.
