From the attic.

Sandwiched between the NAGC November meeting and Thanksgiving, the annual meeting of the Roeper Review Editorial Advisory Board took place the weekend of November 17 and 18. In addition to discussing the business of the journal, a primary agenda item was to give much appreciation to the three editors who completed their 3-year term and to vote on three new members to serve on the Editorial Board.

Linda Brody, Donna Ford, and Nancy Robinson will have completed their position on the Editorial Board the end of this year. We owe them much for helping this journal usher in what I hope will be a new era in a new century for gifted education. All have given much time and reflection to their roles as editors and carefully used their areas of expertise as reviewers. I am also grateful that each has accepted a continued role with this journal as a Contributing Editor.

Bonnie Cramond, Tracy Cross, and Maureen Neihart were elected as the new members to the Editorial Advisory Board. All three are current Contributing Editors of the Roeper Review and very familiar with the mission and activities of the journal. Tracy and Mo have served a previous term as Advisory Board Editors. I cannot imagine any other three people that I would prefer to join our Board as we bridge to the 21st century.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did more than just usher in a new era of geopolitics. It served as a powerful metaphor for both the necessity and the possibility of breaking barriers that once seemed impregnable. Less than 10 years later the information technologies break down cultural and competitive boundaries by giving us the infrastructure and potential to democratize information and flatten hierarchies. Even so our brains remain wired to old patterns.

The journal is in its twenty-third year of publication. One of my fears is the threat this stability can bring to the excellence of the Roeper Review, particularly if we are unable to transcend the applause of yesterday's approaches. Rather than developing mechanisms for leveraging knowledge, our continued success makes it very easy for us to unconsciously erect barriers to possibilities and opportunities about which we haven't thought of yet.

Gifted education is about value. If what's really valuable about gifted education is it's ability to generate, leverage, and disseminate innovation and knowledge so that we can teach gifted children, then alliances among different schools of thought of gifted education or between education and psychology (as examples) will be primary forces for bridging to the 21st century as opposed to today's traditional education format.

I am convinced that in the near future more of what we value will be knowledge-value as opposed to tangible assets The educational structures we have in place for gifted education today are inadequate to cope with these imperatives of innovation-driven, knowledge-based global thinking and action. We will need to pay greater attention to our students' intellectual capital base and help them learn how to leverage their knowledge. We will need to pay greater attention to our own intellectual capital base as teachers and teachers of teachers. The resulting gifted educational structure will at times be chaotic, bubbling, and often frenetic. That may seem disruptive and chaotic but the challenge will be to seize those times and make them work not just for the generation of ideas in gifted education but for their implementation as well. It means surviving change.

It is my hope that this Editorial Board and myself will provide its readers with sources for positive turbulence, whether it is forming alliances with thinking outside the mainstream of gifted education or on the fringes. The importance of what we do will become more difficult to assess by performances on tasks defined in classrooms or on standardized achievement tests. Rather, the importance of what we do will depend on whether our gifted students are willing to explore ideas on their own, use what they have learned outside of the classroom, and pursue issues with passionate curiosity.

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