Are they different? When my parents were kids, they were less reticent to accelerate kids, and they thought of childhood differently. There was tracking, and trades, and some people who might've been nurtured in today's climate checked out and went to work rather than make an intellectual investment in school. Or you'd see 16-year-olds in college and there wasn't talk of how young they were (perhaps closer to the time when children worked at younger ages, compared to now when it seems like youth is more extended). In fact, I know a few who went to college without graduating high school, because they were ready, and states didn't have such strict four years worth of credits required rules for a diploma or college acceptance, if you could show you were ready. Plus, back then, not everyone went to high school, much less college. I know someone who surely would have been labeled gifted today, who has incredible spatial and mechanical talents, and could've done well in engineering. My mother's view on giftedness is much different than mine; as she's known how differently abilities present and how they've affected people she's known, both positively and negatively; sometimes the practicalities got in the way of nurturing a particular ability -- some were able to go to college, some got to be sports stars or musicians or artists, some had to go or chose to go off to work, and that was enough. But academia in general wasn't as accessible as it is now, and the population as a whole was far smaller -- in the U.S. it is double what it was when my parents were students, and access to education and information was less, pre-computers.
Going back to my childhood, which was roughly 30-40 years ago, after tracking started falling out of favor, I knew some gifted kids who fit the same variety of presentations as today. Some were the known as smart kids who didn't need to study, some were smart kids who goofed off all the time, and still got great grades, some went under the radar and hid their abilities, some never fit in and checked out (friend of mine dropped out, died of an OD, but was in the GT program as a tween).
I think nowadays, more kids might be identified because we can identify 2E better, and there's access to research on those "missed potential" kids. There's a climate now that at once envies the intellectually gifted because they get something different, while also disdaining intellectualism (because they "think they know so much"), but admires sports and arts performance that gets something different. And maybe for some on the cusp in a program that divides kids using percentiles around 95th, with kids in the 90-95th, there's a desire to have their kid identified because if not for the GT extension, they'd languish in an underfunded school that's rigid about in class instruction (no differentiation).
So really, could we say there is still a gifted population (which numerically increases as population increases exponentially), and a high achieving population (which overlaps with gifted, but isn't all of either population), but also there's a current emphasis on what the average person is capable of, what's expected of a particular age cohort. Which means there may be some who are added to the gifted cohort who maybe aren't true outliers, and it affects what the HG/PG kids can experience in an academic setting, but it's a group that also need something different from their age cohort.
Considering the future of labor in an automated society, I'm curious how education will continue to evolve. For all the benefits of computers for self pacing, one of my DC craves social interaction in learning, not computers.
