sociologies of health. Before joining Bristol, she held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, including being PI on a Wellcome Research Fellowship. She has published popular and scholarly works exploring how diverse publics access state welfare, analysing diverse case studies of child welfare, the NHS, and gifted children. Much of her work has employed and driven new analysis of 'experiential expertise', including her first book, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000.
Crane applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945, with the following results:
I looked to page 99 of my latest book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World, with some trepidation, without a clear sense of what chapter or what kinds of analysis would be there. What we see on this page actually feels, to me, central to the ethos and major claims of the final book – the page focuses on making visible and analysing the writings of children and young people themselves. Page 99 discusses a collective letter, written in 1979 by a group of ‘ninth and tenth graders’ in a giftedness programme in California, where, as you’ll see elsewhere in this book, such programmes were relatively prevalent. The ninth and tenth graders wrote to young people who read a British magazine, Explorers Unlimited, produced for child-members of a voluntary group, the National Association for Gifted Children. The ninth and tenth graders reached out, in particular, to share critique of the term, ‘gifted’. They wrote that, having received this label, they were ‘expected to always be straight A or on top’, and ‘push[ed] harder’ by teachers; they could also not always ‘live up to your expectations’. Instead, the children wrote, they’d like to simply be analysed and approached as ‘’human’, and understood ‘a little more’.Learn more about 'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World at the Oxford University Press website.
This letter, my page 99 argues, shows the ambivalence which many young people felt about the label gifted. And this specific letter, the next Explorers Unlimited edition recorded, merited many responses, with British children agreeing that ‘we are given a label’ and that ‘I felt just like that towards my parents’. The label then travelled, and held similar meanings for children across the Atlantic, despite very different political economy structuring around ‘giftedness’ (also discussed in the book). Some children, discussed elsewhere in the book, of course also loved the label ‘gifted’. Many children relished a sense of specialness attached to it, and in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, when ‘giftedness’ was typically taken very narrowly, to really mean rare, exceptional, special, children mobilised this label to reshape their relationships with teachers, friends, parents, and siblings. Yet other children found the pressure of the label too much, and questioned the arbitrariness of its application and also, significantly, the inequalities embedded in psychological and educational testing, which are also explored in this book. More children still felt ambivalent about this label – these mixed feelings are something that one of my PhD students, Buse Demirkan, is tracing at present through interviews.
Overall then, my book contributes to geographies and histories of childhood by arguing, foundationally, that we can and must trace the voices of the young and include these, and ‘age’ more broadly, as a critical category within our analyses. We can dismiss any claims that the young didn’t have political agency, or that their writings were never saved or recorded, and thus that their stories do not matter or can’t be accessed. With this in mind, the book traces the rise and fall of giftedness as a specific label, and the broadening out of this idea, with new connections to social mobility agendas, in the 1990s and 2000s. And central to the book is the complex ‘agencies’ exercised by young people – both empowered by ideas of their high intelligence, able to access new voluntary spaces, yet also inevitably entwined policy agendas around future leadership and, often, dismissed as critical thinkers with the assumption that any critique merely demonstrated the uniquely disruptive nature of their minds.
--Marshal Zeringue
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