Challenges to the basis of giftedness and talent education

While the notion of someone being extraordinary in the most positive of terms is ancient, the more contemporary understanding of giftedness and talented is mainly American with roots in the 1970s Cold War United States. Since then, for good and for worse, American scholarship has dominated its research and practice. Although the study is now pursued globally, and for the same reasons which once triggered it in the United States, research follows, or is entirely built upon, American theories, models, practices, and more surprisingly, also American values. With the emergence of big data, however, behavioural genetics, epigenetics, the continued revelations of evolutionary research—all of which have emerged in the natural sciences after the launch of gifted American education—have left much, if not all, of the foundations on which giftedness and talent has so far been understood wanting. As much as there is a need to support gifted individuals in society by all means possible, few take into account that giftedness in the light of evolutionary dynamics is a dysfunctional social phenomenon. Scholars, practitioners and political leaders alike are often uninformed of, or even insensitive to, the consequences of solid recent findings in other disciplines than education and psychology. This keynote will address a few of the available evidence which are challenging both our current understanding of gifted education as well as the largely American cultural basis of how giftedness and talent have been defined to date. The general ambition of the world economy is to make every effort to harness talent worldwide for economic growth. However, this is an impossible objective with little or no support in objective empirical research if pursued in a large scale under a neoliberal ideology and its instruments of social and economic control.This was an invited keynote address to the conference, which invites all interested scholars from the Balkan countries including neighbouring Hungary and Romania. The conference is traditionally staged by the local Preschool Teacher Training College "Mihailo Palov" at Vrsac. It is an annual forum for informally discuss scholarly issues in relation to giftedness, talent and its education and understanding. This conference was the 25th anniversary conference chaired by Dr. Jelena Prtljaga