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The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
Penguin
August 2006
On Sale: August 17, 2006
272 pages
ISBN: 1594200955
EAN: 9781594200953
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Critically acclaimed author Alissa Quart breaks the news
about an issue that will be of urgent concern to parents and
educators as well as adult readers with "gifted" pasts: the
dilemma of the gifted child. While studies show that
children who are superior learners do benefit from enriched
early education, the intensely competitive lives of
America's gifted and talented kids do have risks. The
pressure can have long-term effects in adult life, from
debilitating perfectionism to performance anxiety and
lifelong feelings of failure. Quart traveled the country to research the many ways in
which the current craze to "produce" gifted kids and
prodigies has gone too far. Exploring the overhyped world of
baby edutainment and "better baby" early education programs,
she takes a hard look at the claims about educational toys
and baby sign language. Taking readers inside the ever-more
elite world of IQ testing, she reveals the proliferation of
new categories of giftedness, including "terrifyingly" and
"severely" gifted and examines the true value of such
testing. Profiling the explosion of kid competitions-from
Scrabble(tm) and chess to child preaching-she uncovers the
dangers of such heated pressure to excel so early in life
and exposes the prodigy hunters who search science and math
fairs for teens to hire for Wall Street investment firms.
Critiquing the professionalization of play, she visits with
kids who've been identified as prodigies-from a
four-year-old painter whose works sell for $300,000, to an
eight-year-old professional skateboarder who is backed by
nine corporate sponsors. Surveying expert assessments of the
necessary role of unstructured play in child development,
she warns about the disappearance of recess and the pitfalls
of children's overstuffed schedules today. She also profiles
the growing divide in opportunities for wealthy kids versus
those from middle and lower income families who are losing
out as gifted programs at public schools are gutted in the
wake of the No Child Left Behind Act. How should parents and educators draw the line? How much
enrichment is too much, and how much is too little? What are
we doing to our gifted kids? Alissa Quart's penetrating
in-depth examination provides a much-needed wake-up call
that will spark a national debate about this urgent issue.
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