OP, can you supply a link to the Facebook page?
(madeinuk --- a couple very good points)
Either way, I suspect that more kids are identified as gifted today. Factors for this include the cutoff line being lower than it used to be, achievement being used as a substitute for IQ scores, and acceptance of single subtest scores rather reliance on overall IQ being above a threshold. The GAI is new-ish and picks up kids with say, slow processing speed but high cognitive ability, and presumably picks up people who would have been missed in 1975. But still, the achievement substitute and other factors are important.
I suspect that some of this is done in the name of being inclusive. It feels good to be inclusive. Yet too much inclusiveness pushes the 50th percentile in a gifted program to the left, and the kids the program was designed to serve end up being cheated.
In the 50s and 60s, US gifted programs had a specific purpose: to serve national interests in the space and technology races. The schools had to be serious about identifying kids with high cognitive ability. IMO, US education overall in the postwar period (to the late 60s or early 70s) reflected this fact: public schools were good and universities were cheap or free. And if you didn't go to college, it was all good, because there were lots of decent jobs out there.
That's changed. We lack national goals now. The US sense of community is diminished, society is much more competitive, and the corporate quest for profit has gone to extremes. Education is seen as something that benefits individuals, rather than society as a whole. Etc. So the response is predictable: everyone is gifted in some way, everyone can/should go to college because...$$, etc.
So it's not that people with IQs over 130 or 145 or whatever are different today. It's that (IMO), people gloss over icky facts and instead pretend that a) cognitive ability doesn't matter if you practice for 10,000 hours and 2) even if it did matter, all children are gifted.
Last edited by Val; 04/17/17 11:37 AM.
