By Nathan Safir
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published in the Fall 2019 Magazine.
Airing in March of 2000, “The Simpsons” season eleven episode “Bart to the Future” offers a glimpse into the year 2030. In this future, Lisa Simpson becomes President of the United States following the unsuccessful term of the previous president, Donald Trump. The uncanny ability of “The Simpsons” to forecast the future has been well documented, with “Bart to the Future” among their most impressive predictions. Not only did “The Simpsons” capture Donald Trump’s ascension, but it also correctly predicts what the response to a Trump presidency would be. Lisa Simpson poses as a precocious, messianic figure, wielding her intellect to right the wrongs of her predecessor. This exact mythology exists in our culture today as the concept of “the gifted kid.”
Several candidates in this year’s Democratic primary have branded themselves to fit this gifted kid archetype — namely, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang. These candidates have all combined degrees of policy wonkishness with a general nerdiness to win over the hearts of voters (to varying degrees). They have also each put their own spin on the gifted kid persona. Warren’s tactic of unveiling lengthy policy proposals (see her slogan: “Warren has a plan for that”), combined with her background as a Harvard Law professor, assures her status as a gifted kid candidate. Buttigieg’s resume — valedictorian, Harvard grad, Rhodes Scholar, U.S. Naval Reserve Officer, hometown mayor, etc. — looks like a LinkedIn algorithm running for president. Coupled with his poised demeanor and references to Ulysses, Buttigieg possesses all the cultural signifiers to be a top-tier gifted kid candidate. Lastly, former entrepreneur and underdog of the group, Andrew Yang, advocates for imposing a sort of business logic onto federal government, evidenced by his campaign selling merch onto which solely the word “MATH,” short for “Make America Think Harder,” is printed. Yang has also promised to deliver the State of the Union speech in Powerpoint. This crop of candidates has campaigned on using their legal, professional, or entrepreneurial proclivities to optimize government.
The gifted kid archetype that has dominated the 2020 Democratic primaries is a stark contrast to the grander narratives of the 2016 primaries. The revolutionary potential of Bernie Sanders’ campaign and charges of conspiracy against the DNC and Clinton Foundation have been replaced, for better or for worse, by mere technocratic debate. Could it be that in the past few years, the mythology around gifted children has been revitalized to a degree at which it can shape our political reality? And perhaps more importantly, what does this mean for the future of our country?
—
Gifted and talented education began with Lewis Terman, the movement’s unofficial father. In 1916, Terman published the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Five years later, Terman began what has remained the longest running study of gifted children. The Genetic Studies of Genius follows the lives of 1500 high-IQ children through adulthood and is supported by Stanford University to this day. In concurrence with this study has been the increasing implementation of gifted education programs in schools across the country. The most notable aspect of these programs are not the resources provided (which tend to just be logic puzzles and board games in many schools), but the delineation of giftedness in and of itself, the distinction of gifted individuals. Gifted education programs were considered a beacon of hope, an investment in the future of the country.
In the current cultural imagination, the aura around the gifted child has dimmed. “Gifted kid burnout” is a widely discussed phenomenon on the Internet, in which people who claim to have been formerly identified as gifted now find themselves discontent and mediocre. More bleakly, researchers in education have found that gifted programs tend to discriminate against students of color, some even comparing the situation to apartheid. Even Terman found in his study that obstacles in receiving an education or a lack of opportunity prohibited the high-IQ individuals he studied from fully expressing their intellects. Gifted youth, often considered the makers of the nation’s future, are plagued by the same structural problems we hoped they could solve. Yet, for some, the myth of the gifted kid remains pristine. For some, a Lisa Simpson must arrive to clean up after Donald Trump.
Beyond the Democratic nominees, cultural artifacts from the past decade have affirmed our collective buy-in to the gifted kid mythology. The television program “The West Wing,” winning more Emmy awards than any show before “Game of Thrones,” is symbolic in this regard. The fictional president in “The West Wing,” Josiah Bartlett, is like a grown Lisa Simpson — an impossibly brilliant Nobel Laureate in economics. The series’ plot revolves around glorifying bureaucracy and political compromise, such as when the Democratic president appoints a conservative judge to the Supreme Court. “The West Wing” represents the gifted kid fantasy of putting the smartest people in charge and letting them govern uninhibited by ideology or the material effects of their actions.
In a similar vein, Malcolm Gladwell has built a career as one of the most popular nonfiction writers of the past ten years by assuming the role of the gifted kid messiah. The general formula for one of Gladwell’s pieces is applying various and eclectic modes of thinking, ranging from Jesuit religious doctrine to cognitive psychology, to a current issue. The resulting solutions from this methodology fall all over the political spectrum. He has sided with those believing that large private universities should be forced to redistribute their endowments and with right-wing writers on issues of police brutality. Gladwell’s work, like “The West Wing,” seems to exist in a vacuum from which ideology or social structures are conspicuously absent — only out-of-the-box thinking can provide solutions. These are only a handful of names among the countless gifted kids dominating this cultural milieu — one could write even more about “Hamilton” writer Lin Manuel Miranda, “Vox” editor-in-chief Ezra Klein, or statistician-turned-pundit Nate Silver. The gifted kids have escaped the classroom and migrated to our writers’ rooms, media outlets, and televisions, turning society into logic puzzles on a global scale.
Our fascination with the gifted kid permeates through not only cultural criticism, but also the realm of politics. In addition to the aforementioned presidential candidates, some of the most popular political commentators also exhibit this “gifted kid” quality. Ben Shapiro, by many measures the most popular political pundit in America, routinely calls his opponents’ arguments “irrational” and asserts his arguments are based on “facts and logic”. Shapiro also matches the gifted kid archetype in his appearance, speaking quickly like a high school policy debater. Shapiro’s rise to stardom, much like the success of Warren, Buttigieg, and Yang, was in many ways a response to Donald Trump’s presidency (Shapiro has been one of the most vocal Trump critics among conservatives).
Many critiques of President Trump are not directed at his policy, but at his general dishonesty, broad criticism of journalists and the media, and alleged cooperation with Russian disinformation campaigns. President Trump has served as a symbol for the increasing skepticism and complexity of information apparatuses, from traditional media (or “fake news”) to social media. The disorder of President Trump’s statements and the 2016 election, combined with the influx of information provided by the internet, produced a resurgence of the gifted kid mythos. This resurgence, however, has had consequences. Warren and her supporters revel in “having a plan for that,” but as evidenced by her rather moderate healthcare plan, Warren’s proposed policy often does not reflect her progressive rhetoric. Conversely, Buttigieg’s gifted kid demagougery hides his comparatively less detailed policy proposals, while Yang’s advocacy for mathematical supremacy obscures the structural causes of inequality. Political discourse has been dominated not by an urgency for material change, but a desire to make sense of our governmental and political institutions. Yet, the gifted kid fails to ask whether these institutions are worth making sense of.
So how do we end the gifted kids’ dominance? Maybe the answer lies not in replacing the gifted kids, but in replacing the pedagogy at the foundation of gifted education. In a paper titled “Paradigm Shifts in Gifted Education,” C. Owen Lo and Marion Porath describe the changing philosophies underlying the gifted education movement. In Terman’s time, Lo and Porath write, the defining paradigm shift was the “demystification” of gifted individuals through positivism, the idea that IQ could be quantified and studied. But now, research at the cutting-edge of gifted education has shifted its focus from identification (i.e. who can be gifted) to transaction (how one can be gifted). Lo and Porath identify a “growing distaste for identifying a special population who would traditionally be served in a gifted program” and a “growing interest in making education gifted.”
So what if the Harvard-educated writers of “The Simpsons” grew up under this conception of gifted education? What if instead of the myth of a messianic Lisa Simpson solving the world’s problems, our cultural fantasy centered on a world in which everyone’s capacity for brilliance was recognized? What if instead of technocratic quibbling, politicians were interested in bold, egalitarian change?
Perhaps, if the “growing interest in making education gifted” is implemented in schools, this ideology will be propagated through the cultural and political spheres as well. But for now, the future may be in the hands of Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, and the rest of the gifted kids.
Sourcess:
“Bart to the Future” – The Simpsons (TV show episode)
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-pete-buttigieg-bio-age-family-key-positions-2019-3
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-politicians-who-love-ulysses
Minton, H.L. (1988). Lewis M. Terman: pioneer in psychology testing. New York, NY: New York University Press.
“The Supremes” – The West Wing (TV show episode)
Season 4 of Revisionist History – Pushkin Industries and Malcolm Gladwell (Podcast season)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234478/