interpretation draws on our experiences in working with academically able children, their families, their teachers, and the schools they attend. It also emerges from our own experiences as students in schools and as parents.
But this book is not about gifted education in the usual way, as a variety of "instructional technology"; rather, it interprets the intellectual and cultural contexts of gifted education.
We have been troubled all along by how difficult it is for American schools to respond appropriately to the gifted. In seeking to explain why schooling so seldom does what it ought to do even for bright students from advantaged circumstances, we have been led to consider how and why U.S. schooling fails to care for intellect and develop the talents of all children. It is past time, in our view, to consider gifted education in the wider context of educational purpose.
Thus, our more general topic is schooling, and why it is as it is, and what ought to change.
With few exceptions, however, the most widely considered proposals for making schools better have nothing to do with education. Instead, they are about greedcorporate, state, and individual. If we could admit more widely that this is the covert aim of schooling, more of us might experience an anger that leads us to resist such influence.
But, as some of the sources in this book insist, we are rapidly losing the ability to talk about such things as greed and its relation to our own intellectual and moral well-being. The fault, in part, is our schooling.
In this book we pose an alternative in stewardship of the intellect. This doesn't sound very practical, but it is of much greater worth than a relentlessly instrumental schooling in which greed deflects every higher purpose.
We all had good teachers, after all; we remember who they were and what they did for us. They respected our minds, whatever state of disorder or confusion reigned inside. They helped us understand difficult matters.
They disclosed things to us that were hidden before. And they extended themselves in just these ways toward many more students, and through such generosity modeled an alternative to greed. This is what stewardship of the intellect looks like in the institution of schooling. We find consider-able hope in the fact that many of us do experience good teaching even with things the way they are.
These brief statements simplify matters too much for people particularly concerned with education, which is why we offer the longer interpretation between these covers. We have been writing this book for at least 10 years, and maybe much longer than that, maybe since we were adolescents trying to make some sense of things in three quite different American high schools.
Though obscurely, this book represents who we are now and how we got that way. It captures the anger and arrogance that permit us to write about these matters at all. But that anger and arrogance ought not to disguise who we are in ordinary life: We have regular jobs, we have the usual troubles, we are too seldom able to do the right thing in terms that approach what we truly believe.
We bite our tongues too often, despite the sharpness of our critique in this book. The dilemma we are writing about is our own.
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