The ethics of gifted education: what can we learn from medical ethics?

In developed countries, education, like medical provision, is a key focus of social welfare. Recent years have seen a tendency to compare education to medicine in the call for evidencebased policy and practice (Hargreaves 1996; Slavin 2002). The problematical aspects of this are significant and have been explored elsewhere (Parlett and Hamilton 1987; Thomas 2004). In this chapter, I suggest an area for more fruitful comparison between the two domains: a consideration of how the ethical principles informing the medical profession might shed light on the ethics of gifted education.