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The case could be made that all of education should be about talent development, a view of schooling that focuses on the optimal, not the minimal, development of each student, Ms. Van Tassel-Baska suggests.
THE EARLIEST Western concepts of talent focused on what today we might call identification: observing and judging performance in specific domains valued by a society. This view has not changed very much since the days of ancient Greece. What has changed is that we have researched various constructs related to talent, such as giftedness, creativity, and motivation; our society has enlarged the domains of value to include more academic and nonacademic areas of learning; and our ways of observing talent have become more refined through testing specific aptitudes and general reasoning abilities. A monolithic view of giftedness simply as high intelligence has been displaced in favor of a multifaceted view of talents and abilities. That view continues to be extended and amplified in many ways.
In recent years there has also been a shift toward an emphasis on talent development as the central metaphor for gifted education. This contemporary trend might be traced to the publication of Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind, a work that excited the imaginations of many educators and inspired them to think about applying Gardner's ideas about multiple intelligences to classroom contexts and curricula.' Another precipitating event was the publication of National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent, a report that pointed out schooling practices that inhibit the development of America's talented youths.2 These two events in education have spawned many editorials, articles, and reactions from general educators and educators of the gifted; both groups see the trend in highly positive ways.3
Yet it is clear that the shift toward thinking about education as a talent development enterprise did not originate with Gardner or the national report. The work of Julian Stanley and his colleagues in the 1970s, for example, provided a major emphasis on precocious talent in specific academic areas.4 A. Harry Passow's work with Project Talent in the 1960s also focused the field on looking for talent to emerge in students through classroom-based approaches. Calvin Taylor in the 1960s and 1970s developed the "multiple talent totem poles," providing a theoretical and research base...