Robert J Sternberg - The Palgrave Handbook of Transformational Giftedness for Education

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Many countries, including but not limited to the United States, have a variety of forms of special education . Often, however, this special education strongly emphasizes seriously under-performing students rather than ones who greatly exceed expectationsthat is, students who are gifted . Why?

Students who under-perform are at risk not only for being unfulfilled educationally, but also for becoming a serious drain on societal resources, in terms of potentially needing financial or other help to succeed in or even adapt to a hyper-competitive world that does not always have a lot of room for those who have not received the education they need to succeed in that world. Gifted children, in contrast, often are viewed already as profiting from the educational system and needing, if anything, fewer rather than more resources.

Almost certainly, a better way of viewing gifted students would be to view them as crucial to the betterment of their nation and the world. Gifted students could be transformational, but are they?

Sternberg (2020a, 2020b) has suggested that a problem with much of gifted education in the United States is that it is viewed as largely transactional: The educational establishment invests in the education of gifted children, and in return, the children perform at high levels on traditional measures of academic success. They do well on statewide or nationwide standardized tests, they earn high grades in school, and perhaps they even attend prestigious universities from which they receive prestigious degrees. But whether they use their education to benefit anyone beyond themselves is not part of the bargain.

Sternberg (2020a, 2020b) has argued that gifted education should not be focusing on developing transactionally gifted children who view themselves as giving something and then, in return, getting something (high grades, good test scores, good university admissions, financial aid for school, etc.) that will benefit them but perhaps no one else. Instead, perhaps gifted education should focus on developing transformationally gifted children who view their giftedness as a means to help society attain a common goodthat is, they use their gifts to make a positive, meaningful, and enduring difference to the world (Sternberg, 2017). School officials might be more willing to invest in gifted education if they felt more assurance that the financial and other resources they invest would improve society rather than merely stuff personal bank accounts.

The goal of this book is to present diverse conceptions of what identification and instruction of the gifted would look like if the focus of gifted education were primarily transformational rather than transactional. What if gifted education did not focus so much on acceleration vs. enrichment, or pull-out versus in-class integration, but rather on how to be gifted in giving backin using ones gifts to create a better world?

Education is often lacking at presenting to children the kinds of problems that the world needs to confront in the future. Instead of focusing on the kinds of problems students will confront when they go out into the world, it focuses on problems whose characteristics largely are limited to the context of schooling. This book focuses on what education would look like if it prepared gifted students to transform the worldto make it a better place for all, not just for those who receive extra resources from schools in return for being labeled as gifted. The focus is thus on giftedness as applied to solving the numerous and often severe problems the world faces, at many levels. Transformationally gifted people seek to make the world a better and more just place. They try to make a positive, meaningful, and possibly enduring contribution to changing things in the world that are not working. They may do this in a smaller context, such as a local one, or in a larger context, such as a global one. But they do not view giftedness merely as a transaction whereby, in exchange for being labeled as gifted, they accrue benefits to themselves, such as a more prestigious education, more income, or residence in a more exclusive community.

The primary intended audiences for the book are scholars and educators of the gifted, as well as policymakers concerned with the gifted, as they are the ones who potentially could change the way in which gifted education is done. However, we believe the transformational model potentially could be applied to all students, so that we would hope that the book also would have readers among scholars, educators, and policymakers in all realms of education. We believe that a further audience for the book will be students of gifted education and parents who have an interest in gifted education , even though they have not been trained in it.