Education without Compulsion: Toward New Visions of Gifted Education

Overview & Synopsis

The aim of this paper is to induce doubt about the ethical rightness of compulsory education laws and inspire educators to imagine and begin to make a world in which there are many different forms of gifted education. The paper does this in three ways. It paints a polemical picture of gifted education as a minor variation on public schooling and describes the contradictions and limitations this entails. It presents a short history of education in the United States to support the claim that compulsory schooling aims to shape the character of children in the interests of religion, government, corporations, and other groups. It argues that compulsory schooling is inconsistent with the liberal democratic value of the right to self-determination. The paper also offers a conception of education for self-development as one vision of what gifted education could be were it freed from the strictures of compulsory schooling.