ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Raising Exceptional Children: Psychology, Education, and Motherhood

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session examines how scientific, pedagogical, and cultural discourses and practices in Europe and Argentina shaped ideas of childhood, motherhood, talent, and exceptionality between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, the human sciences – especially psychology, pedagogy, and emerging forms of psychotechnics – played a central role in debates about national futures, citizenship, gender, and the cultivation of “exceptional” individuals. Our session explores how these practices and discourses interacted with broader projects of social reform, from maternal education and domestic pedagogies to experimental research on child prodigies and state-driven efforts to shape ideal citizens through mass schooling.
We analyze feminist discourses, psychological expertise, child-centered pedagogies, and the transnational circulation of scientific knowledge. The session highlights how genius, precocity, and talent became key concepts for negotiating the boundaries between the normal and the exceptional in child-rearing and child development. Across different geographical contexts, these ideas not only identified the “extraordinary child” but also prescribed the moral, emotional, and intellectual frameworks through which families, schools, and nations imagined their collective futures. In this way, the session examines gendered expectations, scientific classification, and the politics of education, showing how women and children were positioned as both experimental subjects and symbolic figures of modernity.
Drawing on visual culture, egodocuments, and scientific and pedagogical publications, we explore modern understandings of ability, aspiration, and social and gender differences, and analyze how these frameworks continue to inform contemporary notions of giftedness, childhood talent, and potential.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Victoria Molinari, Autonomous University of Barcelona

Individual Presentations

• Mother of Genius: Women, Motherhood, and the Making of Exceptional Children - Victoria Molinari, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Child prodigies, artistic genius and experimental psychology in early 20th century Europe - Andrea Graus Ferrer, Milà i Fontanals Institution, Spanish National Research Council

• Between Mass Schooling and Exceptional Citizens: Cultural and Psychological Discourses in Early 20th-Century Argentine Textbooks. - Sebastián Matías Benítez, Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA)

Session Organizers

• Victoria Molinari, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Andrea Graus Ferrer, Milà i Fontanals Institution, Spanish National Research Council