Revolt Against the Giftedness Industry
Refuse the categories. Reject the experts. Reclaim your mind.
Painful: Lately I keep seeing more and more posts explaining why “exceptionally gifted” is supposedly something fundamentally different from “gifted.” And then that there is also a substantial difference between exceptional and extreme giftedness (EPG).
But do we really understand the harmful side effects of this ever‑more fine‑grained labeling?
No, I have no ambition to make myself popular by saying this. But let’s not avoid the discomfort and instead look more deeply at the giftedness gap: the growing divide between theoretical discourse and the lived, material reality of gifted individuals.
In this way, giftedness risks becoming a closed entity. A domain that presents itself as a source of truth — legitimized by an apparent consensus. But consensus is not truth. Consensus mostly mirrors itself and restricts the conversation. What falls outside the dominant frameworks — normativity, ethics, existential dimensions — is simply left out.
Moreover, science is not an objective enterprise in an absolute sense. It is valuable as long as it asks questions that can be meaningfully answered within its method. But when we elevate that method to the only lens, we create an incomplete picture of giftedness. A picture in which, I’ve noticed, especially adults fail to recognize themselves.
To what extent does this one‑sided approach actually contribute to the well‑being of the people it concerns?
The fact is that theoretically trained professionals now dominate almost every meaning-making process around giftedness — from universities to “experts by experience.” That creates blind spots. Trend dominance. Exclusion. A subtle form of elitist thinking, wrapped in care.
The bitter irony? Children growing up under this narrative today carry an increasingly heavy burden. Everything gets interpreted, analyzed, measured. But is it actually understood?
We want the best for our children. That’s human. I understand that. The question is only: is this truly what’s best?
In my experience, academics and experts by experience are often in denial about their own limitations. There is a fundamental difference between understanding something and being something. Between reading about it and having lived it.
If something is not your experience, it is not your truth. Then you are repeating someone else’s words. That can be intellectually correct, but it carries no weight. No tension. No transformation, as I wrote in my previous post.
Giftedness is not a template. Not a step‑by‑step plan. Not a business model. It is a way of perceiving that structurally changes your worldview. Those who have not lived it themselves can describe it — but cannot carry it.
When we approach giftedness purely cognitively, we miss the embodied dimension of perceiving, processing, and responding.
That is my point.
And that’s why it fascinates me. And why it continues to fascinate me.
The education system breaks down, it's not made for children(there were very good ideas in the past with attention for the physical,mind and soul)but even they are hijacked by the state nowadays.
So the conclusion is that it's made for the state and not for the child. It becomes politics and has nothing to do with the making of a wonderful human. But you can see this for a long time ago allready.
So take care parents and make your own descision!
100% What stands out to me is how these ever finer distinctions always seem to appear when a system starts losing control. The more a system feels unstable, the more it categorizes, defines, and controls.
Nuance isn’t the problem. But hyper-labeling shifts the focus from lived experience to expert authority. History shows us how powerful that move can be: once institutions claim definitional control over human identity, it becomes very easy to shape narratives, and even weaponize them. The early 20th century gave us more than one example of what happens when classification merges with ideology.
I’m not saying we’re anywhere near that with "giftedness". But the mechanism is structurally similar: define, standardize, interpret, and then slowly distance people from themselves.
At some point, the question becomes whether we are understanding giftedness more deeply or whether we are just "managing" it better. And those are not the same thing.