Children’s exceptional minds as socio-economic resource

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. The agendas that motivated their studies varied, including eugenics, mental hygiene, professional guidance, and an attempt to improve schooling while increasing educational efficiency. Intelligence tests became a widespread tool, but as several articles have demonstrated, they were not the only method to explore children’s minds and capacities. In the particular case of child prodigies, psychological examinations were expected to contribute knowledge about mental traits, such as memory, because in these cases such traits appeared magnified. The present volume aims to shed light on the social and scientific agendas supporting the use of categories like «child prodigy» and «gifted child», and to explore the impact they achieved beyond the limits of psychological science.