A Century of Contributions to Gifted Education

Illuminating Lives

Ann Robinson, Jennifer Jolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136578274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

A Century of Contributions to Gifted Education traces the conceptual history of the field of gifted education. Bookended by Sir Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius published in 1869, and Sidney Marland's report to the United States Congress in 1972, each chapter represents the life and work of a key figure in the development of the field.While the historical record of gifted education has previously been limited, A Century of Contributions to Gifted Education explores the lives of individuals who made fundamental contributions in the areas of eminence, intelligence, creativity, advocacy, policy, and curriculum. Drawing heavily on archival research and primary source documentation, expert contributors highlight the major philosophical, theoretical, and pedagogical developments in gifted education over the course of a century, providing both lively biography and scholarly analysis.

1

BIOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND PIONEERING IDEAS

Illuminating Lives

Ann Robinson

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

—(Edel, 1985, para. 41).

Gifted education is assuredly a nascent field. Although the classical Greeks have been credited with divine explanations of genius (Grinder, 1985) and Platonic visions of differential preparation for varying social roles (Tannenbaum, 2000), and examples of eighteenth-century child assessment practices and policies for educational opportunity appear in reviews (Shi & Zha, 2000), the modern, scientific beginnings of interest in the constructs of eminence, giftedness, precocity, and talent initially appear most visibly in concert with the nineteenth-century rise of psychology as a distinct discipline. In particular, the 103 years bookended by the appearance of Sir Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius in 1869 and U.S. Commissioner of Education Sidney P. Marland's Report to the United States Congress in 1972 provide a rich array of ideas about talent development and the people who initiated, applied, or popularized those ideas. The time period covered by Illuminating Lives is peopled by fascinating figures and offers the reader often surprising analyses of their contributions to gifted education. This text provides the first book-length examination of selected key figures in gifted education and of their conceptual and practical contributions to the field during a productive and prescient 100-year period. Although the book begins with the appearance of a British publication four years after the end of the American Civil War and concludes with a report to the U.S. Congress that coincides with a period of political and educational activism on behalf of gifted learners in the United States, the key figures in this book represent multiple countries and cultures. The book is overtly Western in its orientation, but in both the key figures and in the authors invited to investigate them, we have included individuals outside the United States. This international perspective is an important part of a broader understanding of gifted education.

Criteria for Selection

Because there are more worthy candidates for inclusion than any single text can accommodate, we used explicit criteria for selecting the individuals included in this book. The decision to begin with Galton and to end with Marland was deliberate because the period encompassed major historical trends in gifted education-early studies of eminence, the mental measurement movement, the rising interest in the scientific study of creativity and the attention to cultural diversity, the establishment of the gifted child movement through deliberate advocacy, and the importance of curriculum and programming to talent development in the schools.

The choice of key figures who appear in Illuminating Lives is based on three explicit criteria. First, the individuals were deceased at least seven years when we began the research project so that at the time of publication, each key figure will have been deceased for a minimum of a decade. Our reasoning for the choice of a decade was to let the conceptual dust settle, to provide some analytical distance between the key figure and his or her researcher, and to respect the sensibilities of living family members. Second, the key figures must have made foundational contributions to the field through scholarly activity or professional activism (e.g., through the constructs of intelligence, creativity, motivation, cultural or curriculum theory or advocacy) prior to the appearance of the Marland Report in the early 1970s. For example, proposing theory, conducting empirical research studies, founding advocacy and professional societies, engaging in systematic clinical or educational practices, or any combination of these activities were possible accomplishments that met our second criterion of a foundational contribution to the field. Finally, to be included in this project, archival research materials related to the key figure must exist and be accessible to the researchers authoring the chapters in Illuminating Lives. This final criterion was especially important to this project for several reasons. Gifted education is an excellent match for biographical research, although archival, documentary, and historiographic methods have yet to be applied widely to investigations of the field's own eminent contributors (Robinson, 2009b). One of the purposes underlying the Illuminating Lives scholarly project was to encourage biographical and documentary research in archival collections. The rigorous conventions of biographical research are not widely practiced by scholars in gifted education. We hope this text will entice other researchers into this endlessly and obsessively attractive form of scholarship (Robinson, 2009a).

The Importance of Biographical and Documentary Research

Our insistence on the use of documentary sources and the subsequent scholarly analyses of ideas through the vehicle of biographical study is not entirely self-indulgent. Important ideas do not appear fully formed as did the goddess of wisdom Athena, springing forth from the forehead of Zeus. Ideas come from people, and people are shaped by their contexts. We have an increased opportunity to understand our twenty-first-century thinking and theorizing if we examine the contexts, the events, the webs of ideas, and the people whose contributions built a field. To do so, we asked our authors to access original documents. What did they find? Biographer Leon Edel provides a compelling picture of the daunting task our scholars faced. In Principia Biographia, he notes,

Let us image the great table of biography-for biographers need larger tables or desks than most writers. It is piled high with books and papers: certificates of birth and death, genealogies, photos of deeds, letters-letters filled with rationalizations and subterfuges, exaggerations, wishful thinking, deliberate falsehoods, elaborate politenessess-and then, testimonials, photographs, manuscripts, diaries, notebooks, bank checks, newspaper clippings, as if we had poured out the contents of desk drawers or of old boxes in an attic: a great chaotic mass of materials, not to forget volumes of memoirs by contemporaries-how they abound in some cases!-and the diaries and notebooks of these contemporaries, and often biographies of the subject written by other hands. All this material, assembled out of the years, will make its way into the mind-and the heart-of the person who has gathered it. (Edel, 1984, p. 42)

Our authors, indeed, found themselves in many cases confronted by archival largesse. Some visited institutional archives (VanTassel-Baska on Galton; da Costa and colleagues on Binet; Jolly on Terman, Marland, and Witty; Robinson and Simonton on Cox Miles; Hébert on Torrance; Rogers on Isaacs). Other researchers were able to access archives digitally (Worrell on Du Bois, Hertberg-Davis on Hollingworth, Davis on Jenkins, Borland on Goldberg, Kronborg on Strang, Robinson and colleagues on Passow). A third group of authors investigated privately held papers and interviewed living family members and colleagues (Henshon on Ward, Cohen and colleagues on Taylor, and Piirto and Kellar-Mathers on Meeker).

In some cases, key figures who could have been included in this volume were ineligible because we could not locate an accessible archive or one does not appear to exist. Two examples are instructive. Our initial list of key figures included Joy P. Guilford. On the strength of his 1950 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association calling for the scientific study of creativity, Guilford was a candidate to be a foundational contributor to the field of gifted education. We determined his papers had possibly been exported to a society in Japan, but there the trail ran cold. Perhaps the appearance of this volume will bring forth individuals who know of the existence and location of Guilford's personal and unpublished professional papers. If so, this book has contributed to the field beyond the work between its covers. In the second example, the documentary pursuit has a happier conclusion. Virgil Ward also appeared on our initial list. Electronic searches did not uncover an institutional archive, and phone calls to former colleagues and students left us tantalizingly close to Ward's papers but unable to find them. In the end, a fortuitous suggestion from colleague and Ward co-author Bruce Shore led us to Ward's former student, Maurice Fisher, who had stored some materials from his mentor in the basement of his home. Subsequently, Dr. Fisher led us to Professor Ward's daughter, Rebecca. The Ward papers were found in private hands and made accessible to our project! Absent the tenuous chain of events that led to these privately held papers , Illuminating Lives would lack the chapter on a foundational scholar who counted the theory of differential education of the gifted among his many achievements. Biographical research is a thrilling pursuit as well as a scholarly investigation.

The Organization of Illuminating Lives

Readers of this text will no doubt have their own favorite candidates whose lives and contributions do not appear in this volume. We hope that other biographical and analytical works will materialize and that we regain lost archives and missing voices. In the meantime, we are fortunate to have found sufficient primary material to trace the development of several important ideas over time. For conceptual convenience and in keeping with our biographers' preference for a flowing narrative that unfolds over time, the text is organized chronologically in four sections: Foundational Pioneers (Galton, Binet, DuBois); Great Investigations (Terman, Hollingworth, Cox Miles); Cultural Diversity, Creativity, and Crisis (Witty, Jenkins, Torrance, Taylor, Dabrowski); and Curriculum, Advocacy, and Policy (Goldberg, Passow, Ward, Meeker, Strang, Isaacs, Marland). Within the four sections, the chronology is not so strictly observed; we avoided cutting the conceptual and historical flow made by our key figures to fit a procrustean bed of birth and death dates.

The individual chapters are generally organized in two parts. First, the key figure is introduced through a biographical sketch. Next, the authors analyze the major contributions of the person and link these contributions to gifted education. The similarity among the chapters ends there. Again, the variability across authors certainly accounts for some of the differences, but the differences are also a function of the kinds of archival and documentary materials available on the key figures and the ease with which these materials can be searched through catalogues or finding aids. Our authors encountered both thick and thin documentary sources. In some cases, extensive archives exist for a key figure. For example, the Galton Archive at the University of London contains a vast collection of papers in one area and the preserved experimental devices invented by Galton in another. In addition, Galton letters and documents are also found in the collections of the British Library and in other archival collections of his Victorian contemporaries. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has digitally preserved an extensive collection of materials on W. E. B. Du Bois, including searchable textual documents and photographic images. The robust papers of Catharine Cox Miles are embedded in her husband's collection at the Center on the History of Psychology in Akron, Ohio, but other relevant documents are found in family archives at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and within the Terman papers at Stanford University. In these cases, authors were both bedeviled by thick archives and blessed by well-organized finding aids. Other authors worked with thin archives. For example, the Paul Witty papers located at Northwestern University are limited and largely focused on Witty's contributions to his work in reading rather than to gifted education. In this case, the thin archival evidence was buttressed by interviews with a former student of Witty's, Dr. Walter Barbe, who supplied personal stories and additional documentary materials. What documents were preserved, how they are preserved (digitally scanned or fragile originals), how they were made accessible (catalogued and digitally searchable, catalogued and hand searchable, digitally scanned, but uncatalogued, uncatalogued and thus hand searchable only), and where they are preserved (university or institutional archives, casually accumulated, or privately held) all affect the kind of biographical research that authors could carry out for this project. All biographers and historians face the problems of too much diffuse and unrelated material, too little relevant material, or gaps in the record that invite dangerous inferences. Across the authors in this volume, each of these problems confronted one or more researchers and affected the nature of the chapter that could be written.

Foundational Pioneers: Polymaths and Provocateurs

In terms of archival richness and both lively and contentious analytical scholarship across multiple decades, the individuals appearing in the section of the book focused on foundational pioneers provide an intriguing set of portraits and an enduring set of conceptual concerns. Sir Francis Galton has been identified as the grandfather of gifted education (Stanley, 1976). VanTassel-Baska (this volume) claims him as the father of gifted education but points out he never formally studied gifted children per se although he secured data on a variety of measures of child physical and psychological variability. A member of a prominent family that included the Darwins and the Wedgewoods who had prospered in the china pottery trade, Galton made original contributions to multiple fields-statistics, criminology, geography, and psychology. His Victorian habits of collecting and counting translated into ingenious data collection devices and practices, while his Victorian values of accomplishment and improvement led him to investigate eminence and ultimately to endorse the tenets of eugenics. He is a troublesome figure for the modern scholar of gifted education-a brilliant innovator whose enthusiasms led to dark beliefs and presaged even darker practices. His inclusion in Illuminating Lives posed a challenge for his author and will pose challenges for his readers, but his life is also an exemplar of the problems of presentism and revisionist analysis that are integral issues in biographical and historiographic research (Lovett, 2006). Historians caution that our interpretation of events is bounded by chronology and our current worldview. Applying a twenty-first-century lens to a nineteenth-century life can mislead as well as enlighten. Instead we must enter Galton's world and extract the numerous insights, lessons, and cautionary tales that exist there.

While Galton was charging Londoners a few pence to enter their vital statistics into the register in his anthropometric laboratory and proposing the sale of baby books to proud parents in order to collect data on a very young sample, his contemporary, Alfred Binet, was busily observing his daughters and developing what he termed individual psychology. While the appearance of Binet in a book devoted to gifted education might be reasonably assumed to rest on his development of an intelligence scale for children, Binet has other claims on our field. English-speaking readers have not had the opportunity to read Binet's original works but have had to rely heavily on those that have been translated. The works in English translation do not represent the full range of his oeuvre. In addition to theoretical and experimental work on children's thinking and personality, Binet investigated the “creative imagination” of writers, investigated the cognitive strategies of mental calculators and expert chess players, and worked with teachers and school administrators to carry out pedagogical investigations in the real world of the schools rather than in the brass and glass laboratories of the late nineteenth century. Binet theorized about and studied several constructs, samples, and practices relevant to gifted education-intelligence, creativity in writers and actors, extreme cases such as mental calculators and chess experts, and pedagogical practices adapted to individual differences. Binet and Galton exchanged letters as did many intellectuals of the time, but their interests in individual differences diverged. Galton maintained an abiding interest in adult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Contributors
• 1 Biography, History, and Pioneering Ideas: Illuminating Lives
• 2 Sir Francis Galton: The Victorian Polymath (1822–1911)
• 3 Alfred Binet: A Creative Life in Measurement and Pedagogy (1857–1911)
• 4 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and the Talented Tenth (1868–1963)
• 5 Great Investigators
• 6 Lewis M. Terman: A Misunderstood Legacy (1877–1956)
• 7 Leta Stetter Hollingworth: A Life in Schools (1886–1939)
• 8 Catharine Morris Cox Miles and the Lives of Others (1890–1984)
• 9 Creativity, Cultural Diversity, and Crisis
• 10 Paul Witty: A Gentleman Scholar (1898–1976)
• 11 Dr. Martin D. Jenkins: A Voice to be Heard (1904–1978)
• 12 Calvin W. Taylor: A Man of Many Talents (1915–2000)
• 13 Illuminating Our Understanding of Creativity: The Life and Legacy of E. Paul Torrance (1915–2003)
• 14 Kazimierz Dabrowski: A Life of Positive Maladjustment (1902–1980)
• 15 Building Practice, Advocacy, and Policy
• 16 Miriam L. Goldberg: A Scholar of First Rank (1916–1996)
• 17 A. Harry Passow: Curriculum, Advocacy, and Diplomacy for Talent Development (1920–1996)
• 18 Virgil S. Ward: An Axiomatic Approach to Work and Life (1916–2003)
• 19 Ruth May Strang: Leading Advocacy for the Gifted (1895–1971)
• 20 Ann Fabe Isaacs: She Made Our Garden Grow (1920–2001)
• 21 Mary M. Meeker: A Deep Commitment to Individual Differences (1921–2003)
• 22 Sidney P. Marland Jr.: The Commissioner (1914–1992)
• 23 Concluding Thoughts on a Century of Contributions to Gifted Education
• Index
• Plates