Goodness Personified: The Emergence of Gifted Children (Social Problems and Social Issues) - Softcover

Leslie Margolin

9780202305271: Goodness Personified: The Emergence of Gifted Children (Social Problems and Social Issues)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0202305279 ISBN 13: 9780202305271

Publisher: Aldine Transaction, 1994

In Goodness Personified, Leslie Margolin challenges the most common assumptions underlying gifted education. His analysis of the gifted child movement shows how scholars formed the concept of giftedness in their writings, how they provided detailed documentation of the characteristics such children were thought to embody, and how they managed to spread that vision to a community of believers. In doing so, he demonstrates that social "assets" as well as social "problems" can be viewed as social constructions, the products of competing claims. The author explains how gifted education is the obverse side of the "pedagogy of the oppressed," how it supports racism and classism, and singles out the children of the affluent for training in dominance. In exposing the role of gifted education in propagating social inequality, Goodness Personified questions the academic rigor of such teaching. Margolin shows that, rather than focusing on core academic subjects (math, science, language, arts, etc.), the gifted child curriculum has instead focused on articulating the prerogatives of the white upper class. Pulling back the curtain on familiar scenes and images, Goodness Personified illustrates how the various procedures used to confirm the personal and social traits associated with giftedness serve at the same time to support and confirm the nongiftedness of those who are excluded. Margolin shows that the effects of gifted education are global and systemic, affecting the way all children are seen.

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Review:

"... provocative and elegantly written... a fascinating deconstruction of a powerful myth." -- Contemporary Sociology

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