There is a lot of debate about whether it’s good to apply the label ‘gifted’ or bad. Certainly a lot of people reject the label, possibly because gifted is a terrible word and there is ambiguity as well as misconceptions about what being a gifted adult is. There doesn’t seem to be much discussion about the merits and drawbacks of adults identifying themselves as gifted; however, there is endless argument about whether identifying children as gifted helps or harms them. Some people believe applying the label of gifted demotivates children – if they are told they are ’smart’ they will think they do not have to work. Some people seem to think that the label will set children apart from their peers creating social difficulties. For others, telling children they are gifted will resolve any issues in a child’s life, whether they be educational in nature or otherwise, a kind of magic bullet. So, is the issue the label ‘gifted’ specifically or how we apply labels generally?
One of the problems with a label like ‘gifted adult’ is that people use labels so that the person IS the label. In his article The Pathologizing of a Culture (though in the context of his article, he’s referring to the labels applied to diagnoses. Please note: I am NOT suggesting that being gifted is a psychological diagnosis!), Mel Schwartz suggests that a label
…..has become confused with being an actual entity. [Labels] should be a practitioner’s best effort to describe and summarize an individual’s challenges and circumstances and correlate that evaluation to a DSM descriptor. Instead it has become concretized to be an actual thing. [.....] The [label] is a description, our best attempts to summarize the great complexity and inestimable variables that account for a person’s life. The only certainty is a prevailing uncertainty in this most subjective science. [A label is] one of describing prevailing circumstances seen through a subjective filter. But we lose sight of the intention to describe rather than to construct. When the person becomes the diagnosis, we lose the ability to see that thought created the [label], makes an attribution of that thought to a human life and then steps back in denial of the whole process.
Schwartz makes a good point – labels are a subjective shorthand and are often used to reduce a the complexity of an individual to one dimension. Obviously, using a label in a reductionist, inflexible way is not helpful.
On the other hand, labels can also be useful. Louise Porter wrote a terrific article, Twelve Myths of Gifted Education (yes, it’s about children but is has a lot of general information about giftedness – well worth the read) in which she deconstructs much of the academic research on giftedness. Porter makes the same argument as Schwartz: a label is not a person, just a way of describing the shared characteristics of a small group who differ from the larger group. Porter also reminds us of the basic Stats 101 fundamental: correlation is not causation. Much of the arguments about labeling gifted children make this basic error of confusing correlation with causation. Are gifted children less motivated because they have the label ‘gifted’ or would they be anyway? And really, are the gifted people any more or less motivated than the general population anyway?
So why label? For me, having the experience of my life explained by someone else, having words put to it, is affirming. To re-consider some of the qualities that I thought were particular to me as part of a shared experience is helpful. I think differently and have emotional responses that are are often out of step with people around me. I appreciate having some context for my unusual perspective and I am less likely to see it as ’something wrong with me’ personally but to recognize it within the framework of my being a gifted adult. In Porter’s article, she points to research with gifted teenagers. The majority of the teenagers did not see the label ‘gifted’ as negative but something that simply confirmed and explained what had already been their experience. For gifted adults, who are much less likely to be in school and have more life experience behind them than the children and teenagers documented in much of the research on giftedness, our reasons for identifying as gifted will likely not be about education. However, I think there is value in label whether it be that individual people have their experience confirmed and explained, or for a sense of community or a basis for more information or possibly even provide a foundation for gifted adults to expand beyond who they might have been without the label.
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