ABSTRACT
This quote is taken from the report of a cross-party Standing Committee of the Australian Senate which spent two years investigating school provisions for gifted and talented pupils. The Committee was critical of the low level and poor quality of the provisions that it observed and noted that ‘many academically talented children not only fail to achieve their potential but actually drop out of school in large numbers’ (ibid., 1988:4). Their report concluded that ‘most Australian schools do not appear to make any provision for the education of gifted children’ (ibid., 1988:82). During the 1970s and 1980s many schools that might otherwise have developed provisions for their most able students were deterred by the concern that such provisions might be perceived as ‘elitist’. The extreme egalitarian ethos of this period led to a misunderstanding, among many teachers and teacher unionists, of the concept of equality of opportunity. Equal opportunity requires that all students, regardless of their level of ability, should be encouraged and facilitated to develop their potential to the fullest. Unfortunately, however, this was often misinterpreted as implying that no child should be given an educational ‘opportunity’ that was not appropriate for, or available to, his or her classmates.
