The latest book that I’ve finished is A History of American Gifted Education (Jolly, 2018), a lively tome that should be required reading for any graduate student or scholar in the field.

Jennifer is a colleague, and we are guest co-editors on a special issue for a journal, and I am one of her associate editors at the Journal for the Education of the Gifted. We have also coauthored a preprint together. So, it would be inappropriate for me to review her book. But I still want to give my endorsement (done!) and a list of things I learned from reading the book.

• I knew that early gifted education was a product of its time, but I was never clear how much the Progressive Era’s focus on the individual was a key portion of the zeitgeist that allowed the field to emerge.
• Almost everything Jolly wrote about the 1940s through the early 1970s was new to me. This is a crucial era of gifted education, and research and developments from that time are rarely cited or discussed in the scholarly literature.
• Until the 1950s, all the developments in American gifted education seemed to emerge from scientists and researchers asking emerging questions. But starting in the 1950s, most of the changes and issues come from legal developments: new laws, federal reports, and changes to policy are the main drivers of gifted education.
• There are very few new questions in the field; most of today’s most pressing issues (e.g., the best definition of giftedness, the equity versus excellence dilemma, curriculum design for gifted students) have been in the field for over half a century. If scholars were more familiar with the field’s history, then maybe we could make some progress on these issues, instead of reinventing the wheel every 25 years.
• Terman and Hollingworth dominate the field’s early history (unsurprisingly), but there are a lot more figures from the pre-World War II era and immediate postwar period who deserve more attention from modern scholars: Guy Whipple, Paul Witty, Martin Jenkins, Ruth Strang, Ann Isaacs, and many other past scholars have a rich body of work that deserves to be mined by modern scholars. There are surely some hidden gems that these people have written that could be informative today.

I’ll definitely be citing this book in the future and referring to it often. It is well researched, and Jolly sticks to the facts. It should be an essential resource for the field for many years.

References

Jolly, J. L. (2018). A history of American gifted education. Routledge.