Gifted Children in the 1980s: What Changed?

By Jennifer Crane

Following Plato’s ‘children of gold’, philosophers, teachers, parents, and states have long been interested in the idea that a small percentage of children may have unusual ‘gifts’, which could be used for national and global benefit.  In the twentieth century, the idea of giftedness was popularised in Western Europe and North America after World War Two.  The American Association for Gifted Children was founded in 1946, and the British National Association for Gifted Children was founded in 1966.  The American Association made its slogan, ‘For a brighter future tomorrow, identify the gifted child today.’  Interest in gifted children was further invigorated in the US following the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, and Congress passed a gifted education programme under the name of the National Defense Education Act (1958).  Across Europe, voluntary agencies questioned whether gifted children could lead post-war reconstruction efforts and, later, heal East-West divides.

The modern history of giftedness shifted significantly in the 1980s.  In this decade, debates around giftedness became defined by two central tensions.  The first tension was around whether gifted children should be a national or an international resource.  Voluntary organisations such as the European Council for High Ability and the World Council for Gifted Children had been running for some years by this point, presenting collaborative global visions of how children may forge a new era of global peace and prosperity.  By contrast, however, individual countries were also increasingly in the 1980s representing gifted children as distinctively national assets.  In Britain, in particular, in the context of financial crisis and the resurgence of populist individualism, conservative tabloids emphasised that these children were the ‘most important asset that Britain possesses’, ‘our greatest hidden asset’, ‘the guardians of Britain’s future’, and a ‘huge, untapped source of Britain’s future prosperity.’  Not future global leaders, nor contributors to global economies, gifted children would instead reverse Britain’s perceived imperial and economic decline.

A second significant tension emerged in the 1980s: new critique of the very idea of giftedness.  This critique in part came from academia and several professions, as educational sociologists and psychologists began to explore how intelligence testing disproportionately identified white, middle, class boys.  Importantly however, children themselves also began to critique the idea of giftedness.  Indeed, teenagers and young adults who had been identified as ‘gifted’ in the 1960s and 1970s, now older, began to use the very organisations interested in giftedness to challenge this term.  Through voluntary newsletters and conferences, as well as newspaper articles and television interviews, many young adults argued that the concept was biased, inaccurate, and also missed what was valuable about people.          

Thus, the 1980s was a key decade in the modern history of giftedness.  In part, the 1980s were significant they saw the emergence of tensions bubbling away since the 1940s, when these debates began, and the ageing of the ‘first generation’ of so-called ‘gifted’ youth.  The tensions in these debates however also reflected broader tensions in the 1980s themselves: new strands of individualist thought, new interest in listening to and publicising children’s voices and opinions, and the work of a sensationalist media interested in narratives of family, failure, and success.

Since the 1990s and particularly the 2000s, the idea of ‘giftedness’ has been broadened significantly, not least by educational efforts under New Labour.  The idea that children should be trained or pushed to defend national or global ambitions has fallen further out of fashion, replaced by media and cultural concern about letting children have protected spaces and forums to ‘live their youth’.  The 1980s are thus a key moment in this history, and while the label ‘gifted’ may have been applied to only a small percentage of the population, it was significant because of this brief, fleeting, but intriguing suggestion that these children could solve all economic, political, diplomatic, and ideological crises of the age.

References

Jennifer L. Jolly. “Historical Perspectives: The National Defense Education Act, Current STEM Initiative, and the Gifted,” in Gifted Child Today 32(2):50-53, 2009.
Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Natalie Thomlinson. “Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1970s,” in Twentieth Century British History 28(2): 268-304, 2017.
Richert E Susanne. “Rampant Problems and Promising Practices in the Identification of Disadvantaged Gifted Students,” in Gifted Child Quarterly 31(4):149-154, 1987.
David Plotz. “The Nobel Sperm Bank Celebrity,” in Slate, 16 March 2001.

About the Author

Dr. Jennifer Crane is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Faculty of History, and a social and cultural historian of medicine interested in activism, policy, health, and childhood in modern Britain. Her monograph, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000: Expertise, Experience, and Emotion (2018) traces the emergence of an expertise of experience in late twentieth century Britain which, to an extent, challenged, subverted, and even overturned forms of medical, psychological, political, and legal power.  Her current research project brings analysis of these themes into a global context. In particular, she is interested in analysing how and why the ‘gifted child’ emerges as a category, and as a lived phenomenon.  

Cite this article as: Jennifer Crane, “Gifted Children in the 1980s: What Changed?,” in Changing Childhoods, 17 November 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/gifted-children-in-the-1980s.