Raise your hand if you can dunk a basketball. No one would say that everyone can dunk.

Raise your hand if you can dunk in your own way.
Notice: to say that you can dunk in your own way does not mean that you can dunk.

It means that you have moved from the objective plane of discourse to the metaphorical plane.

What if those who say everyone-is-gifted had argued that everyone has gifts? Well, that is different. The words gift and gifted occupy different levels of meaning. Gift is a colloquial term that we use to describe people’s best qualities; whereas, giftedness is a technical, professional term that educators use to describe really smart kids who require differentiated educations.

When people argue that everyone is gifted in their own way, they are confounding educational and social planes of meaning, logical and emotional planes of articulation and objective and metaphorical planes of intent. Perhaps in a social sense everyone has gifts, and perhaps many of these gifts should be valued as highly or more highly than educational giftedness. The gift of kindness, for instance, is a benediction devoutly to be wished. But having gifts, in the social sense, does not make you gifted, in an educational sense.

If deep down they know that not everyone is gifted, then what do the everyone-is-gifteds mean? Why do they insist that everyone is gifted, when they would never insist that everyone has perfect pitch? Why does the subject of giftedness generate this compulsive response?

Well, notice that everyone-is-gifted never initiates a conversation. No one comes up to you in the lobby and says, "By the way, I think everyone is gifted!" Everyone-is-gifted is always a response. It occurs during a conversation when someone has been discussing giftedness, and a look of discomfort spreads over another person s face, and then we hear the inexorable words: "Well, I think everyone is gifted in their own way.

It seems clear to me that this response is not a scientific proposition but a defense. Its motivation is moral and emotional. It is a defense of the value of children who are not gifted, and it is possibly a self-defense by a person who does not feel gifted and who is threatened by the implied comparison of the giftedness of others. ‘Everyone is gifted is a defense.

As a defense, the claim that everyone is gifted must win our notice and sympathy, for though everyone is not gifted, as we mean the word in gifted education, the deepest intention of the everyone-is-gifted proposition is not meaningless. Technically, everyone is not gifted, but philosophically and metaphorically, everyone is a gift. Everyone is equally someone -- someone who should not be neglected, or diminished, or overlooked or relegated to a lesser life by any system of definitions.

And there’s Hamlet’s rub. In standing up for the gifted, we must not care, or even appear to care, only for the gifted.

Do we appear to care only for the gifted? This idea is fundamentally unfair to gifted educators. If this were a conference of physicians meeting to discuss the appropriate care for children with cerebral palsy, would that indicate we were indifferent to the needs of children with leukemia? The idea is manifestly absurd.

Like those who say everyone is gifted, we too feel protective of the lives and happiness of 11 children, and with them draw our swords against the firebreathing definitions that would diminish the identity of anyone. That is what those who say everyone-is-gifted are doing, at logic’s expense: protecting all children from the threat of menacing language that seems to sort children by value.

Somehow, in our egalitarian society, the fact of gifted intelligence puts us in a state of ethical dissonance. What we know about gifted children appears to lash with what we know about social equality and universal human value. But the clash is artificial; it is illusory. It is a misclash. We are mixing the poles of high intellectual ability with the oranges of human equality. We are all equal, but we are not all identical; these properties exist at different levels of meaning.

No, being gifted is not a property pertaining to everyone. Giftedness is not ordinary; giftedness is extraordinary; this is the very pith and marrow of the term. Mozart, Shakespeare, Catherine the Great, Martin Luther King and Sylvia Plath were gifted. Like gifted children in our schools, these people had special abilities and special needs, and as a society we must be able to say so, to admire ability, to support ability, to celebrate ability and to nurture ability. It must be as socially acceptable to support genius that is intellectual as it is to support genius that is athletic.

Tragically, intellectual genius does not gather the public support that other forms of genius do. Even the word gifted is a weasel-word, equivocating about the value of intelligence. Intelligence is only a gift, the word suggests, a gift that was given to the recipient through no merit of his or her own. It was only a gift; it was not paid for. Intelligence is a gift that was given from without and is not a meritorious characteristic. If you are gifted, you shouldn’t deserve any credit for something that was only a gift.

It's just a gift.