21st-Century Perspectives on Human Potential: Commentary on the Rethinking Human Potential Special Issue*

I am honored to have the opportunity to offer a few thoughts on the four articles that make up this special issue on Rethinking Human Potential and add a few of my own thoughts on the topic. It is a timely and relevant topic for the field of gifted education, a field that has been undergoing a series of challenges to its assumptions and practices in recent years. This special issue can be seen as another effort to help the field find a set of assumptions about the nature of giftedness to guide its practices in the 21st century. The fact that this special issue focuses on “human potential” and not giftedness and/ or talent immediately tells us that very broad issues will be examined, that big questions will be posed, and that the possible answers to these questions may shake the foundations of the established field. Indeed, that may be the goal of this special issue. The contributors all give credit to the century of work in the field that preceded them and see their efforts as building on the valued work of their predecessors. Before commenting on each of the contributions, let me put my bona fides on the table for being qualified to comment on the topic of human potential. I spent a year as a member of the Van Leer Project at Harvard working with Howard Gardner (this issue) and others on the “Project on Human Potential.” It was this project that spawned Gardner’s now-famous theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983). A few years later, Lynn Goldsmith and I published our 10-year study of child prodigies (Feldman, 1986) under the title, Nature’s Gambit: Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential. Although being not the only focus of my interests, the study of human potential has been a central one for me for many years.