Children’s exceptional minds as socio-economic resource

Abstract

This special issue entitled «Managing giftedness in contemporary society» analyzes how the category of giftedness has been mobilized in different areas —education, mental testing, and childrearing— to manage, classify, nurture, and even exploit commercially children in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first decades of the twentieth century, educators, pedagogical experts, pedologists, and psychologists, together with some physicians, drew attention to the existence of children whose intelligence and talents exceeded the average.