What Matters is the Deployment, Not the Possession of Gifts: A Tribute to Marcia Gentry

ABSTRACTThe late Marcia Gentry sought equity in the identification and instruction of the gifted. This was a noble and proper goal: Inequity has been a problem in the field of giftedness since the very beginning. A related challenge that feeds into the inequity problem is that educators often look for the wrong thing. What matters is not merely how gifted a person is, or how many gifts they possess, but rather what they do with those gifts. Many of the problems in today’s world derive from people who are gifted and then use their gifts for selfish and even narcissistic ends. A model is needed that takes into account one’s deployment of gifts, not just one’s possession of them.KEYWORDS: deployment of giftsgiftednesshistorical causal chainsintelligencetransformational giftedness Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert J. SternbergRobert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His PhD is from Stanford and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and has won the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science. His latest books are Adaptive Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and (with Judith Glück) Wisdom: The Psychology of Wise Thoughts, Words, and Deeds (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His textbook with Judith Glück, The Psychology of Wisdom: An Introduction, is also with Cambridge (2022). robert.sternberg@cornell.edu