Editorial: Nine Suggestions for Improving the Field of Giftedness in the Arab World

Abstract

This editorial problematises the field of giftedness in the Arab world, with the intention of taking all those involved outside their ‘comfort zone’. First, it is advised that Arabs should stop being submissive followers of Western literature (and thus remaining in an inferior cognitive position) and should rather be proactive and leading contributors to worldviews. Second, research on Arab giftedness should be contextualised and ‘culturalised’ by investigating the long-overlooked Arab-specific influences on gifted people. Third, there is a need to tackle the issue of ‘word stuffing’ and to instead promote efficiency in academic writing, bearing in mind that Arab academic writers habitually employ many words and sentences that contain few or even no meanings. Fourth, awareness campaigns and regulations should be initiated to restrict the deeply rooted ‘copy-and-paste’ culture, whereby many Arab academics copy (frankly, steal) from one another, resulting in considerable plagiarism and repetition. Fifth, researchers should dare to expose the field (and their datasets) to the cultural ‘taboo’ of genuinely critically reflective thinking. Sixth, it needs to be accepted that giftedness practitioners lack qualifications, as a result of which they tend to act spontaneously, with no academic basis. Seventh, some Arab institutions display an interest in the nurture of gifted students not for the sake of the gifted themselves but rather to look ‘cool’ and to polish their own public image. Eighth, the ideologically intense nature of the wider culture leads many researchers to emphasise certainty and ‘truth’, even though ‘doubt’ is the bedrock of academia. Last, giftedness should be institutionalised in tertiary education (as is the case in secondary education); as things stand, gifted university students miss out on the nurture they experienced at secondary school. It is hoped that these nine points will be regarded as a starting point for the philosophical foundation of an ‘Arab Critical School of Thought’.