I thought the passages below were key. Instead of the constant "Tall Poppy Syndrome" that many education "reformers" engage in, would be better to improve these programs for a wider array of students:
> If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.
> For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.
Are you saying you agree? It seems bordering on absurd to me. Why can't it be true that not every child has gifts? Isn't the point of being exceptional having qualities that set you apart from most people? Are there no exceptional children? Adults?
In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?
While there are some concerns that have been raised about bias within the tests themselves[1], in my experience the concern about testing among actual educators is usually that the tests are pitched as objectively "measuring intelligence" when in reality they measure a confluence of factors.
Intelligence is certainly a major factor but external factors such as having a stable home with quiet times that are conducive to studying, good nutrition, good role models, and good teachers play a major role as well.
There have been controversial attempts to control for those factors, for example by including information about the test takers socioeconomic status, but for the most part "intelligence tests" do not attempt to control for external variables. So it's impossible to tell how much of the delta in scores between two individuals reflects actual differences in their intelligence compared to differences in their environment and starting conditions.
The risk of tracking students solely based on such tests is that you end up compounding the existing penalties of having a bad environment.
Don't get me wrong, I think testing has an important role to play, but we should be honest and stop pretending that these are "intelligence tests".
Why would you expect someone who doesn't have a stable home life, good nutrition, or good role models to succeed in a gifted program? Why are these factors somehow distinct when determining whether a person is "intelligent"? How would failing the tests "compound" these problems if the outcome of failure is that nothing happens to you?
Edit: also your link doesn't cite any serious claim that these tests are inappropriate for use within a westernized country like the US.
> Why would you expect someone who doesn't have a stable home life, good nutrition, or good role models to succeed in a gifted program?
Interesting. To me it seems like intelligent students with negative environmental factors would yield the highest ROI from being admitted into a gifted program. Just look at the testimonials from commenters in this thread who came from humble beginnings and credit gifted programs with helping them climb the social ladder. Whereas sufficiently well-off kids have parents who can make sure they get excellent educational resources and will be fine regardless of how they score on some test.
> Edit: also your link doesn't cite any serious claim that these tests are inappropriate for use within a westernized country like the US.
To be clear, I agree that concerns about inherent cultural bias within the tests themselves are somewhat overblown. The real issue is that the tests do not solely measure intelligence and yet we act as if they do.
How would admitting someone to a gifted program affect their nutrition, or domestic situation? Many of the testimonials from commenters read as children who were under-stimulated, not malnourished. In this case there would be no reason to expect they wouldn't be able to meet the criteria (pass the test) of these programs.
Indeed placing smart kids into gifted programs does help them, that's why these programs should not be abolished. However IQ doesn't fluctuate that much over one's lifespan, so at worst we're missing some children on the edges, which is inevitable in any human system.
Gitfed programs are essentially a misnomer. It's really a program where they are given better resources, more attention, and good role models and peer groups. Viewed this way anyone would benefit from it.
> Intelligence is certainly a major factor but external factors such as having a stable home with quiet times that are conducive to studying, good nutrition, good role models, and good teachers play a major role as well.
Tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices [1] should make all of these things irrelevant except nutrition, since the tasks involved are things nobody really studies for.
> should make all of these things irrelevant except nutrition
That certainly looks like an improvement, but I would imagine that things like poverty and the student's home situation would still play a similar role to nutrition. That is: given two children of equivalent raw "intelligence", if one has a stable home situation with loving parents who stress focus and discipline and the other bounces between homes in the foster care system with no good role models, I would expect the former to score higher on just about any test you could give them.
> the tasks involved are things nobody really studies for
Perhaps that is true today, but I see no reason Goodhart's law would not apply -- if you start basing a student's educational opportunities on how well they score on an RPM test, then a cottage industry of RPM test prep will emerge. There are some tests that are exceedingly hard to train for (e.g. dual n-back comes to mind) but looking at RPM it doesn't seem like something that would take much practice to pick up some reasonable strategies.
Again, I still think testing is very useful, especially for spotting outliers in a similar-enough population and ensuring they get additional resources necessary to excel. I'm just skeptical about social scientists' claims that intelligence can be objectively measured by a multiple-choice test in a way that cannot be gamed by people with enough resources.
> the tests are pitched as objectively "measuring intelligence" when in reality they measure a confluence of factors.
"The first practical intelligence test was developed between 1905 and 1908 by Alfred Binet in France for school placement of children. Binet warned that results from his test should not be assumed to measure innate intelligence or used to label individuals permanently."
Also something like the presence of lead in your drinking water has strong, demonstrated effects on IQ for example. Some of the poorest communities in the US by the way have some of the highest lead contents in their water supplies BTW.
I was in one of these programs and here's how it worked. We all went into the cafeteria around 3rd grade and took a test like the SAT. Then we were evaluated individually in areas of math and pattern recognition. Those who scored the highest got out of Reading every week and instead went to an enrichment class where we learned miscellaneous "enriching" things like Shakespeare, architecture, programming, history of art etc.
The problem with this model is twofold:
1. First it ostracizes the ones in that enrichment class, and demotivates children left behind. It also causes rifts and resentment among friend groups. Every day the other children see Sam and Sally leave class and go to a "special kid room", and this turns into jealousy and bullying. The kids in the enrichment class feel bad for being there, and the kids not in the enrichment class feel bad for not being there. We learned a whole lot, but I think this model could have been implemented such that we could still have learned those things without the associated social costs.
2. It's not a great selection mechanism. For example, they passed over some of my friends who, in my experience, are way smarter than me. Why? Well one had slight dyslexia, but he was a math genius. Another is a music and art genius, but she wasn't great at numbers. So we have people who would have benefitted from these programs, arguably both have a very high IQ, and yet this whole process left them feeling "less than". They had to sit in boring, sad reading class while us "enrichment" kids were putting on a production of Macbeth. If that's the kind of thing we were doing, why wasn't my artist friend invited? Because she couldn't do algebra in 3rd grade?
So if there's so much social pressure, resentment, bullying, and the selection method isn't even that great anyway.... then what are these programs for? Can't we come up with a better model that enriches all kids? Instead of asking some magic sorting hat and trusting it's selecting the best students?
Anyway, that was my experience decades ago... maybe things are different now. Obviously I have no idea what's going on with 3rd grade social dynamics these days.
It certainly seems like the program you attended was poorly implemented. I was sent to a gifted program full time with other gifted peers collected from around the region. I was still often ahead of the class, and couldn't imagine how miserable I would have been if I was forced to learn at a regular pace.
Yes I agree we should be wary of setting up Lord of the Flies in our schools, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore the existence of children like Bluejay[1].
> Can't we come up with a better model that enriches all kids?
I think the basic answer is "no". Past a certain pace/complexity many children will simply be unable to keep up and retain information. We should strive to rid ourselves of the modern delusion that since everyone is equal morally, they must all be equally capable and have equal potential.
I don't mean to say we should enrich all kids in the same way though. I mean we should enrich them along axes that are important to them or interest them. Having enrichment and non-enrichment programs is only really one step removed from saying everyone is equal. You're now drawing a distinction, but now we need to wonder: why this distinction in particular, and is it really distinguishing the way we think?
For instance, why aren't we putting all the kids into a room and testing their artistic aptitude, and funneling the kids who are the best artists into elite art programs to foster that ability? Why were IQ tests the only tool used to distinguish students? My wife's school had various different "academies" with disciplined focus areas -- arts, music, sports, etc. - which sound like a good way to do things.
I guess my general point is that all children deserve enrichment, not just the high IQ ones. And even if the high IQ children are more needing or deserving of this enrichment, the methods I've experienced used to make the determination as to who is of high IQ are heavily flawed, although my experience is out of date.
>2. It's not a great selection mechanism. For example, they passed over some of my friends who, in my experience, are way smarter than me. Why? Well one had slight dyslexia, but he was a math genius. Another is a music and art genius, but she wasn't great at numbers. So we have people who would have benefitted from these programs, arguably both have a very high IQ, and yet this whole process left them feeling "less than". They had to sit in boring, sad reading class while us "enrichment" kids were putting on a production of Macbeth. If that's the kind of thing we were doing, why wasn't my artist friend invited? Because she couldn't do algebra in 3rd grade?
These are exceptions. Skills tend to be highly correlated at both the low and high end: people good at math also tend to be good at reading/writing. Also, many gifted programs may only focus on a single subject or are individualized, such as being accelerated in math but grade level at reading.
>1. First it ostracizes the ones in that enrichment class, and demotivates children left behind. It also causes rifts and resentment among friend groups. Every day the other children see Sam and Sally leave class and go to a "special kid room", and this turns into jealousy and bullying. The kids in the enrichment class feel bad for being there, and the kids not in the enrichment class feel bad for not being there. We learned a whole lot, but I think this model could have been implemented such that we could still have learned those things without the associated social costs.
Welcome to the real world. This is what life is like. Life is not fair. Why do Google employees earn more than Amazon warehouse workers.
There is a great, and true, line from a very old Simpson's episode [1] about how early childhood "sorting" can have an outsized impact on someone's life. And there is plenty of other evidence (e.g. see Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers) that a lot of arbitrary differences are just magnified by this early childhood sorting.
The argument against the name "gifted and talented" isn't that some children have gifts that are different from others, it's that the sole arbiter of whether a child is "gifted", as if it were something anointed by Jesus, is not that they did well on some standardized test in kindergarten.
I definitely agree with the author, something like "accelerated learning" is a much better name
At the end of that episode, after being tracked into a genius school due to cheating on his intelligence test, Bart confesses that he's "just a regular dumb kid," and begs to go back to regular school. So I'm not sure it's making the point you intend.
But as much as I love the Simpsons, I'm not sure of its value as evidence in a policy discussion either way.
Yikes, talk about missing the forest for the trees.
I'm not using the Simpsons episode as "evidence", I just thought Mrs. Krabapple's statement of "Now I don’t want you to worry, class, these tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and success, if any." was such a hilarious statement, and while of course it is hyperbolic, does have evidence to support the gist, that leading kids into different "tracts" at such an early age can have an outsized effect on their life, and that effect can be unwarranted based on what can be small differences in the "cutoff" to get into gifted programs.
Schools should design the education to the needs of the individual. If a "tract" would benefit everyone then the education program should be changed for everyone.
The Simpsons episode however is more designed towards the social status aspect. If being in a gifted program grants status, without any connection to the education conducted within the program, all we are simply describing is moving kids into segregated groups of those that has money and power and those that doesn't. The actually program itself has no meaning and could as easily be renamed as the rich people club (private schools?) with the same education material and program as everyone else.
When it comes to people on the lower end of the IQ spectrum, we do see that a single test would not work to determine which tract a student should follow. A failing test could be a sign of low IQ where the student need to be at a school for children with special needs, or it could just be a temporary setback where the regular program is perfectly suitable. In border cases there would basically be an extended period of testing and trial attempts to see which one would be best suited to the individual.
In theory the same process should be on the higher end of the IQ spectrum. If you got a border case where a individual is just slightly above or below the qualifications for a gifted program then what would be best for the individual would be to extended the testing phase and see where they develop best.
I think you’re actually in agreement with the GP. The quote:
“Now I don’t want you to worry, class, these tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and success, if any.”
— Mrs. Krabappel
As you pointed out, Bart admits to cheating and gets sent back to his ordinary class. The GP’s point is that these tests merely determine who will be admitted to the “gifted and talented” classes, not who will succeed in them, and the Simpson’s episode bears that out. If there were a more accurate way of predicting success in gifted classes then we should use that instead of standardized test scores.
I don't want to get into a whole thing over this Simpsons episode, which I think everyone agrees is moot, but he fails in the new class because he cheated and used someone else's score, not because the scores (absent cheating) aren't predictive of success.
Viewing IQ as accelerated learning is a pretty good model on how to perceive gifted programs. Two cars can have different accelerations and engines, but which one can travel furthest will still depend on the environment. In addition, faster accelerated has its own associated risks. All cars are still unique and can still be admired as acceleration isn't everything in life.
Gifted and talented programs are one type of solution when fast learning children in combination with a somewhat supporting environment create a situation where they do no longer fit in the regular system, having to artificial slow down their own learning and development as a person. Racial disparities in this context is likely caused by a difference in supporting environments occurring much earlier in the childs life.
IQ is environmentally malleable; particularly relevant to this, nutrition near the time of the test is relevant, and this is strongly associated with socioeconomic status, even moreso before children enter school where meal programs exist as a levelling force. Processes like NY once-and-done test at 4 years old maximize the disparities produced this way (later start or multiple chance programs that test in school mitigate some of that disparity.)
but the IQ test still isn't racially biased. You are just pointing out that there are multiple influences on IQ and multiple mitigations to mitigate the environmental factors.
The gifted program selection process making use of the test is racially biased, and there is limited (though some) ability to mitigate that while still using the test. Whether the test is racially biased in some abstract sense detached from the context of use is irrelevant.
Can you provide a source to support that claim that doesn't rely solely on racial disparity demographics that is based on a modern and recent gifted/talented (in the last 10 years)? I'm honestly interested. My local school based their ideas behind removing G&T on some arguably statically flawed meta studies by John Hattie.
You know what is absurd? How about the idea that you should segment children at a young age, before they are anywhere close to fully developed mentally, emotionally, or physically, and publicly label some as "gifted" and some as "normal". What could possibly go wrong?
The only part of that which is dumb is the ill-advised label, which can easily be changed. Everything else makes sense. Borderline intellectually disabled people and Terence Tao-level prodigies should not be in the same class. That is the dumbest fucking idea ever.
I mean, we already segment children at similar ages based on physical/athletic capability. It's very clear to sports coaches that not every child is capable of developing into an internationally competitive athlete. Why doesn't the same apply to the thinking parts of our meat exactly?
Hell, with some sports and arts if you haven't already been doing it at least a year by age 7 and live (or move to) somewhere with one of a handful of teachers/coaches who are top-tier at teaching young beginners, and have parents able and willing to pay for lessons from them while you're still very young, you're never going to be truly great no matter how hard you try if you try to break into it starting at, say, age 14. It's my understanding that tennis and playing violin are both more-or-less like this, for instance. Gymnastics and some kinds of dance, too, I think. Like, if your kid's 10 and they aren't already damn serious about some of these things, you can just cross those possibilities off their list for the future.
Probably any sport or art in which people tend to peak very young (early 20s), or that have opportunities available for young participants that will effectively lock them out of further high-level advancement if they miss them (because you're expected to have done those if you're "serious"), are like that.
There are kids age 7 that are brighter than grown ups age 47. And those kids can get bored when they are forced to practice the alphabet when they write short stories already, and such things.
Imagine someone forcing you to sit at a desk and practice spelling of basic English words?
And they can lose faith in school. And also it can be harder for them to find friends, when their thoughts and interests are a lot more grown up than their classmates.
It's a simple recognition of an observable and predictive reality - that some people are much more intellectually capable than others. Do you disagree that this is a fact?
Recognizing reality and adapting to it is the opposite of dumb.
The label could change but it wouldn't make much difference except for politically.
Those people are one in a million. The vast majority of "gifted" programs will never encounter a single child like that in the history of their school.
There's a bell-curve isn't there? It's pretty hard to ignore the differences between people 4 standard deviations apart in IQ (70 vs 130). There are plenty of people in both categories. 1/100 is not that many.
Surprised I need to spell out what should be the obvious to an educated crowd, but intelligence is a spectrum with gradations of smart and gradations of stupid. The 90th percentile learns much faster than the 10th percentile and mixing them into the same class will handicap the 90th percentile, or leave the 10th percentile behind, or both.
I'm not sure what you mean by "those people", but the actual cutoff where you start having problems with people being extremely bored comes well before you hit one in a million; it's closer to one in a thousand, in my experience.
Which means that the NYC public schools (the subject of this conversation, recall) have ~1000 kids like that right now.
Now their various "gifted" programs do take more kids than that; the bar for such things is often at the 95th percentile, not the 99.9th.
And the cost to society when even one of them falls short of their potential is incalculable.
Most people really don't end up mattering that much. If we can identify the ones that will matter, and do so far enough in advance, it's impossible to argue that we won't be better off for having done so.
If they can't get ahead because a public school didn't give them an extra workbook to mess with, then they don't have anything remotely resembling "incalculable" potential.
I'm not saying we shouldn't treat prodigies differently. I'm saying that 99.99% of these "gifted" kids aren't anything like prodigies and that the money aimed at them is better off spent elsewhere.
Umm...IQ scores tend to be stable throughout life, and ability early in life is predictive of ability later in school. Kids who are slow in kindergarten, with few exceptions, do not go on to be whizzes in the 5th grade. Also, it's not like gifted programs are only limited to kindergartners.
Not just IQ: "A study from the University of Minnesota, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that conscientiousness — a family of personality traits that combines being disciplined, focused, tenacious, organized and responsible — is the personality trait that best predicts work-related success across the board in life. This includes everything from performing well at work, to managing work-life balance, to being successful in training and learning, and even leading a happier life."
This is actually one of the central points of the book "Mindstorms" by Seymour Papert, who invented the Logo programming language. He contended that the early sorting of children into good/bad at math is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That children who are told they are good at math seek out math, while those who are told they are bad at math actively avoid it. And you can see this effect decades later. My wife was told she was bad at math at a young age, and despite getting As in algebra and trig, and an A in physics, she still thinks she's bad at math. Even after objectively measuring that she performs within the top 10% of her peers at a particular subject, she still thinks she's bad at it. That's how bad this is for children.
The irony here is that I first learned the Logo language in one of these enrichment programs.
Papert is/was wrong. I was a year ahead in math in school and taught myself machine programming when I was 11. Nobody encouraged me to do this. Quite the opposite. Other kids did everything they could to discourage it and nobody understood what programming was and why it was useful to learn. That didn’t stop me at all.
I'm glad you persevered, but I don't think your experience means he was wrong. It just means it's not a universal truth that applies literally to everyone, which I don't think he ever suggested. He wasn't really talking about people like you and me who are highly motivated to learn this subject. He was more talking about people who had no idea about the field being discouraged before they even had a chance to find that spark.
Fair enough. There is another theory that basically says that you get interested in what you are good at. The feeling of mastery gives you the motivation to get even better. That seems to be a better fit for my experience. But of course YMMV.
I was a year ahead in math as a kid and was bored out of my skull with the slow pace of teaching. Being able to join a class of likeminded kids would have been brilliant.
Not the parent poster, but I'd say every child (and adult!) has gifts - every child is exceptional - just maybe not in an academic context, of course. I find the labeling of 'gifted' connotes a certainly quality that isn't necessarily intrinsic among students who would find accelerated learning environments beneficial. And that's what it is, if you are speaking from an equity-based standpoint - an effort to ensure that each student has access to a learning environment that meets their potential.
In regards to racial biases towards IQ tests, it isn't necessary for the tests themselves to have racial bias. These tests aren't given out to all students, they must be recommended for it by their teachers. Maybe certain teachers would display less bias in a 'this student seems bored by the lessons' line-of-thinking versus 'this student seems gifted'. I have no idea about that part.
> but I'd say every child (and adult!) has gifts - every child is exceptional
Isn't this basically nonsense? Are you sure every child is exceptional in some way? How do you know? Have you measured? How would you react to a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable child? Would your worldview just collapse? What does the word "exceptional" mean to you?
> quality that isn't necessarily intrinsic
Why does the intrinsicness of the property matter?
> learning environment that meets their potential
How would you label people who have high potential? What about low potential? Now, in the interest of clarity and simplicity, what single word would you use to label each category?
> aren't given out to all students, they must be recommended for it by their teachers
To my knowledge they are given out to all students at a particular grade/age - YMMV. If teachers must select students then clearly teacher bias would be a factor.
The vast majority of people have zero outstanding skills or talent. It’s just a fact. A tiny minority of people are the ones that produce the art/products/music/tech/politics/… that actually move humanity forward. Unless you lower your expectations of what it means to be “gifted” so low that it has no useful meaning.
"Gifted programs" are not objectively perfect tests of gifted-ness. They select for some fairly specific mix of traits/skills that a school district has chosen to call "gifted"; then, if you don't pass this arbitrary test, well then you are considered "not gifted."
But this is wrong wrong wrong, so wrong that it's almost a trivial logical fallacy: just because most dogs have 4 legs, doesn't mean that all 4-legged animals are dogs, nor that a dog with 3 legs stops being a dog. Testing for "dog-ness" by counting 4 legs, is wrong. Likewise, just because a school district designs an arbitrary test of "gifted-ness", doesn't mean that all children who pass it are gifted, nor that children who don't pass it have no gifts. These tests cannot possibly capture the full range of human gifts.
You are arguing a strawman that the person you replied to never stated. Yes exceptional people exist, this was never under debate and that poster did not claim otherwise. But "gifted" programs do not perfectly identify all exceptional people across all dimensions of exceptionality with universal perfect accuracy. Replacing "gifted" programs with accelerated learning programs could achieve the same goal of offering advanced learning for SOME exceptional students, without going through the fundamentally flawed and oversimplified binary sorting process that inaccurately labels all students as either "gifted" or "not gifted".
I'm just not sure why we have to get so bent-out-of-shape about the naming of things. Whether someone is an "accelerated learning student" or "gifted" is a difference of the utmost minute semantics. Just because a gifted program doesn't perfectly identify students doesn't mean it's not a gifted program.
Why have we become so terrified of assigning adjectives to people? Why can't a person be "smart" or "dumb" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "strong" or "weak" or "disabled" or "retarded"? Just because some of these things are subjective doesn't mean that they are useless. Why have we started to pay such close attention to the feelings of some people assigned to categories they don't care for? "gifted" is just a word to denote such a category. If people don't like being "not gifted" they will learn to dislike "non-accelerated learning student" just as well.
I think the reasons are certainly cultural. Underneath it all, some of the reasons for adjective-assigning reticence are:
1. An expansion of the concept of 'harm', so that now even casual word usage is thought to be evidence of causing harm. (ex: "Indirectly suggesting some students are 'not gifted' harms them")
2. Operating on an ideal that we are all born equal (not speaking of 'rights' here, but competencies, value to society, etc.). We are but a blank slate, to be molded by social structures. Any unequal outcome on anything has to be a sort of 'systemic discrimination'. (ex: "I see that there's some group that is underrepresented in that gifted program, therefore they obviously are discriminated against")
3. Operating as if humans do not have free will. Any underperformance on anything is not their fault, it's "the system".
I agree with your assessment. I guess I'm having a hard time coming up with any way to oppose these trends beyond finding them laughably absurd. Do you have any suggestions for how to seriously engage with proponents of these ideas?
I certainly haven't tried extensively yet, so I'm really just speculating here. I think one of the growing challenges to objectively and critically thinking through issues in the West (particularly America) is the growing obsession with 'groups' over 'individuals'.
America seems to be rekindling a bent for things like racial essentialism and wanting to bring the idea of identity groups to the forefront of any conversation on anything. This tendency has a way of clouding the underlying reality on any given issue. Culturally, there is an expectation that you must reinforce these ideas in conversation, and pay lip service to the group-based narratives or else be labeled a 'group-ist'. It then becomes very difficult to actually talk about the underlying principles and factors at play on any given issue.
My personal take is you have to sort of utilize this group-based thinking yourself as a sort of trojan horse, to then attempt to highlight the true underlying principles/factors at play in the conversation. It's a way to sort of short-circuit the uncritical thinking that many have around issues of the day.
Why oppose it at all? Why get so hung up on the term? If anything, "accelerated learning" seems like a better term for these programs than "gifted and talented". Gifted and talented are non-specific and poorly-defined terms. Accelerated learning is exactly what it sounds like.
"Accelerated learning program" describes the program, whilst "gifted student" describes the person. -- I think that's a significant difference. Putting labels on people can lock them into certain roles (like "not gifted"). But "I didn't join that program" sounds more neutral to me.
I'm guessing some kids who would fit in those programs, might feel it's not for them, simply because they don't think about themselves as "gifted"? Maybe especially often kids from a poorer background?
Regarding these two in particular, they were stops on a euphemism treadmill:
Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974,[18] also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"
Mentally disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly-used insults. The medical diagnosis was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into a pejorative against those with mental disabilities. More specific diagnoses were created, like "autism", but—while less common--"autistic" is still sometimes used as an insult. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although "What are you, special?" has begun to crop up as a school-yard insult.[23] As of August 2013, the Social Security Administration replaced the term "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability".[24] Since 2012, that change in terminology has been adopted by the National Institutes of Health and the medical industry at large.[25]
I'm aware of the euphemism treadmill. What I don't understand is why we cater to the sensitivities of the people who keep it going. Names for things should be as clear, unambiguous, and, crucially, permanent as possible. We have a hard enough time communicating as-is. The constant change and inconsistent versioning of the protocol does far more harm than good.
> What I don't understand is why we cater to the sensitivities of the people who keep it going. The constant change and inconsistent versioning of the protocol does far more harm than good.
Part of the trouble we have with communicating between one another has to do with the fact that the inner states of interlocutors are only partially observable to one another. i.e. I have no idea what you are feeling in your head and what you have experienced apart from what you communicate to me through expressions or words, and vice versa. You can use any words you want with a person, but you have no idea how the words you use will impact their internal state. You can make a guess, but it's not guaranteed.
When some words are used by bullies to bring violence onto other children, it adds a new dimension to an otherwise benign word. I play the violin and the word "retard" is used often, because it means to play the music "slowly". But when it's also being used as an invective against a child by a bully, well now it has a darker meaning.
I can go through life simply saying this word without thinking about other people's feelings. But it's going to change the way some people perceive certain conversations. For instance, if I am conversing with someone who has not played violin and does not speak French, and has only seen this word being used by bullies to make other children feel lesser, or has been bullied themselves using such words, that is going to increase anxiety in the internal state of this person. They will wonder why I am using that word, and they may question whether or not I have bullied people in the past using that word. They may recall memories of themselves being bullied. Now all of a sudden the conversation is derailed just because you said the word "retarded", even without any ill-intentions.
While it would be nice if we could write down a word and settle on a definition for all time, that's never going to happen. The reason for this is we will never be able to settle on a universal dictionary definition for all words, and even if we could, no person can really know the dictionary definition of all the words they use, so it definitions would end up being ad hoc anyway. The meaning of words therefore comes from the dictionary as well as our own personal experience with the way those words are used. Unfortunately, we all have different experiences with the way words are used -- for me the word "retard" is the word I see at a beautiful violin solo before I play it. For others it's the word they hear before getting stuffed in the locker. In order to maintain copasetic conversations with all individuals I encounter, I strive to understand these "sensitivities" as you call them, but really they are just different perspectives, and no one is more or less valid than another.
People's internal emotional states are their own to manage. Language is a tool for communication, and we should strive to maximize its effectiveness in that capacity. This is done by eliminating as much ambiguity as possible.
Since people's internal states are unknowable, it's impossible to predict them accurately 100% of the time. Dictionaries provide an oracle for parsing language. If we're forced to consider how people might feel in response to any factual statement that we make, we end up in absurd situations[1].
I'm suggesting that we shift the burden of managing emotional states away from the speaker and towards the listener. Just like with laws (codified social/behavioural protocol), so with language (codified communication protocol) ignorance of a word or definition is your problem, not everyone else's. Don't impose your ignorance on others. If you're not sure, the right thing to do is ask "Why are you using that word? What does it mean?" not jump immediately to offense.
In order to maintain copasetic (great word, thank you for it) conversations, I personally strive not to be offended by anything and expect others do the same.
> While it would be nice if we could write down a word and settle on a definition for all time
I mean, we can and many languages with prescriptive dictionaries do. All we have to do is collectively agree that clear communication is more important than people's feelings. The value proposition seems clear enough.
> People's internal emotional states are their own to manage. Language is a tool for communication...
It is not very good communication to not consider how people understand what you say.
Communication has two ends and simply blaming people for not understanding you when you were aware that a word has multiple meanings in general usage makes no sense.
Also, word meanings change through usage. A non-pejorative word becomes pejorative. Ignoring that is not good communication.
This is not just about "internal emotional states" but simply what the word means to someone else objectively. I.e. "internal rational states", if you will.
A word whose common usage has become pejorative is in rational fact, and in any up-to-date definition, pejorative. If you are not trying to be pejorative, you achieve better communication by not using it. Even if in the past it did convey what you wish it still did.
What we name something is not semantics, it's a foundational component of how we view and shape the world around us. In a very real sense we are incapable of thinking of things without naming them and the name we give them informs how we think of them.
Also, we are not 'terrified' of adjectives - we are 'terrified' of a world that is unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival. If our monkeybrains were unable to evolve social constructs allowing the cooperation and common action of more than 7 people we'd still be stone age apes barely capable of using tools.
The key social "technology" that enables that is empathy with a monkey whose experience doesn't match the small tribe of individuals we're personally capable of caring about. It's an abstraction that enables everything else and it's important.
> unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival
I'm having a hard time parsing this, but I think you're arguing that the world is getting less empathetic, and therefore less cooperative? I disagree, and think the reverse is true. The more we can disregard emotions and work as cogs in a machine, the more productive we ultimately are. It's exactly this capability that allows us to cooperate in groups of many hundreds of thousands: the ability to interface with each other not as emotionally complex primates, but as executors of a function.
No, i'm not saying the world is getting less empathetic. I am saying that in order for humanity to survive as more people interact with more people it is necessary for empathy to increase at a similar rate and scale.
Natural human empathy has very, very low limits. You can only really care about 7 or 8 people at any given time. The rest is social constructs that allow a sort of abstract empathy where in-groups are gradually expanded.
Human civilization simply doesn't work without this kind of social construct. We degrade to feces-slinging apes pretty quickly.
The critique is fair. I suspect the original 'test kids in Kindergarten and fast track the best performing for the next 12 years' has its roots in the Sputnik moment and the need to rapidly create a high performing STEM population. Accuracy wasn't necessarily a primary goal.
That being said, not sure what the alternative is. On one hand, challenging students to the limit of their abilities and bump them higher as soon as they exhaust a level is a laudable goal. Alas, as long as the educational pedigree is used in competitive scenarios (grant, internships, jobs), this will simply create an inflationary pressure to bump everyone to the top level and degrade the top level quality to the lowest common denominator.
We are missing a objective bar, for example a hard standardized exam to gate college admissions. Such an exam becomes an incentive for developing strong programs. Time to take a clue from China's gaokao. Alas this requires that we come to terms that not all schools, not all programs, not all demographics, not all kids are equal, which doesn't seem to be something XXI century America is willing to publicly accept.
I don't get it, either. We also recognize that NBA guys are amazing athletes who few people could every dream of becoming, then why can't we acknowledge that some people are born better at academics? Do people really think that anyone can become Terrance Tao, who could clearly articulate what a group is at age 7?
It does seem like our culture (and perhaps humans more broadly) obsesses over the superficial veneer of words/semantics, instead of the underlying reality that the words represent.
For example, I believe this conversation around these programs would be different if they were called something like the "Harder work program".
I think IQ testing is prohibited at least in California for African American's? Is this true? Does this extend to things like admissions exams for gifted programs?
My high school program was called the Accelerated Learning Program way back in the 1980s. Is that not a common name for it?
I hated when any teacher referred to me as gifted, incidentally. I thought it had an implication that my performance was bestowed on me from some outside power. A little too woo-woo for my teenage self.
> If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.
> For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.