WASHINGTON -- This American age, it has been said ad nauseam, is the age of the instant "celebrity" -- but the word goes uneexaminined, for no longer does it mean someone honored for specail achievements. Rather, when one looks at our fleeting "celebrities," they are the most common and tedious among us.

That is why a very special and different type of conference, The Seventh World Conference on Gifted and Talented Children, to be held in Salt Lake City Aug. 3-7, is of particular interest. It will focus on children and the modern celebrity's nemesis -- the other "c," "creativity."

Perhaps the great British historian Arnold Toynbee, put America's greater need for fostering our native creativity best in his speech before an earlier such conference in 1967 when he warned:

"America has been made the great country that she is by a series of creative minorities: the first settlers on the Atlantic seaboard, the founding fathers of the Republic, the pioneers who won the West. These successive sets of creative leaders differed, of coiurse, very greatly in their backgrounds, outlooks, activities and achievements, but they had one important quality in common: All of them were aristocrats."

Our rough frontier ancestors, aristocrats? "They were aristocrats by virtue of their creative power," he insisted, "and not by any privilege of inheritance, though some of the founding fathers were aristocrats in the conventional sense as well -- the common quality that distinguished them all and brought each of them to the front was the power of their creative leadership."

Celebrity, at least today, feeds our passive qualities and confirms the traits of our lowest common denomenator: rock stars, Donna Rices, Oliver Norths. Most of what they do takes little talent, but they make people "feel good" (and sometimes bad) just because they have so minimal talent and have spent so very little time developing what they do have.

I recall a leading Hollywood director telling me a few years ago how and why Hollywood had changes so dramatically. "There used to be a star system," he said. "By the time someone became a 'star,' he had worked and worked to be good so everyone respected him. Today, for every rock star up there who has 'made it' there are 20,000 kids out there saying, 'I'm just as good as he is' -- and they're right!"

If one needed any further examples of this, on the wondeffule Fred Astaire special just after his recent death, one of his dancing partners recalled how Astaire would spend two weeks perfecting one little turn of the heel. That is the dedication of the creative talent.

Creative talent is not easy. It does not soothe, saying everybody is really alike. Indeed, it challenges and even rejects much of society. Toynbee has shown how virtually all the great creative geniuses of history -- from Buddha to Gandhi to St. Thomas -- first had to denounce society in order to create. This is bothersome -- but it is also necessary to rejuvenate society in healthy ways.

But a few fervent people in America and indeed the world, see the need for training in or at least a greater opening to the creative mind. Led by the University of Utah's Professor Calvin Taylor, chairman of the conference that will bring together creativity specialists from all over the world, the group also includes such unique new-style men as Dr. Luis Alberto Machado, who was Venezuelas's (and the worl's) forst "minister of intelligence."

Professor Taylor, who has worked with creative youths for many years, firmly believes that one can teach in specail ways to realease creative talents. His method is a contrast to an educational system that he characterizes as "almost totally focused upon the teaching and especially testing only for knowledge."

Moreover, this work comes at a crucial moment in American history, when serious Americans are realizing with a kind of horror the extent to which our culture has been debased and our educational levels lowered -- and what that will do to us in the world. And there has always been in the American psyche, as Toynbee put it, "the perverse notion -- that to have been born with an exceptionally large endowment of innate ability is tantamount to having committed a large prenatal offense against society."

If we are to fulfill our next destiny in the world -- "to help the indigent majority of mankind to struggle upward toward a better life" as he put it -- then America must treasure and foster all the creative ability that she has in her." We are blessed that at least some people in America are aware of this.

Georgie Ann Geyer is a syndicated columnist.