Giftedness and Swedish Exceptionalism? Gifted Pupils in Primary and Compulsory School, 1842–2022

Abstract

Giftedness in school has in the twenty-first century grown as a field of research in Sweden. Some claim that giftedness and gifted children’s needs were long ignored by the education system for historical and cultural reasons, and it is only in the past two decades that a slight change in view has occurred so talented pupils’ learning has been highlighted. In this article, this often-reproduced image is questioned. Instead, taking a longer educational, historical perspective, is it argued that as early as the nineteenth century the authorities took some account of differences in talent; that giftedness received a great deal of attention from the state after the First World War; that the need to adapt education organizationally or pedagogically to pupils’ different giftedness was extensively covered in the first two curricula of the new compulsory school system in the 1960s; that the authorities required schools to adapt their learning activities to the needs of gifted pupils; that these views and demands rested on contemporary research and school commissions; that the Swedish school system’s growing segregation and decentralization since 1990 has meant that the curricula thereafter are now significantly vaguer than the earlier ones regarding giftedness; and finally, that there today is a significantly greater risk than in the 1960s–1980s that the needs of gifted pupils are forgotten.