NEEDED RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATING HIGH ABILITY CHILDREN

Serious research on the gifted began some 70 years ago with the Terman studies, and has intensified in the last decade or so. Since many decisions on identification, education and counseling depend on the underlying conception of giftedness, a fruitful area of research involves the validity of various concepts. Research is also needed to ascertain the effectiveness of identification procedures, to determine what kinds of educational and socialization opportunities are needed to transform potential into performance, and better to identify and nurture giftedness in populations which are traditionally underrepresented. We need to understand better how affective characteristics can be nurtured, as well as the influence of family and community on talent development and ways of achieving the twin goals of equity and excellence.

     

Marxist state theory and state autonomy theory: the case of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education

Abstract

In recent times, there have been a number of critiques of Marxist and neo‐Marxist analyses of the state and education policy. These have drawn on postmodernist, ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ and state autonomy perspectives. While the postmodernist and ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ approaches have attracted critical response, to date, the state autonomy perspective has, to our knowledge, gone unchallenged. To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper analyses one writer's attempt, via an historical case study, to uphold state autonomy theory by detailing the ongoing relationship between one quasi‐state agency and the practice of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education. We argue that there are serious conceptual weaknesses in this latest attempt to apply state autonomy theory to educational policy analysis. The arguments in the case study under consideration are seriously compromised by a basically flawed hypothesis, a misrepresentation of contemporary (neo‐) Marxist education policy analysis and by a failure to look at ‘the big picture’.