Giftedness, ethics, and humanism

Abstract

This paper examines giftedness and gifted education from the point of view of humanistic ethical critique. While religious worldviews may conceptualize individual talent as something that human beings have received (as a “gift”) from God or (more generally) from a divine world-order, secular humanism may also implicitly presuppose a quasi-theological understanding of giftedness as something for which we might be expected to maintain a proper attitude of gratitude. Drawing on humanistic sources ranging from Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, Richard Rorty’s pragmatist challenge to the idea of human “answerability” to the world, and Primo Levi’s ethical criticism (in the context of his Holocaust writings) of the notion of providence, the paper argues that developing an appropriate stance toward whatever gifts and talents individuals may have is a matter of continuous ethical self-reflection that needs to be incorporated in gifted education.