HOTHOUSE KIDS: THE DILEMMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

Book ID/图书代码： 08880006B04167

English Summary/英文概要： 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.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 倍受评论家称赞的作家Alissa Quart此次又发起了一个紧迫话题的讨论：神童教育该何去何从？这个话题无疑对那些家长、教育家以及那些曾有着光辉童年的成人们有着特别的意义。尽管研究表明神童们受益于良好的早期教育，但过于大的竞争压力和近乎疯狂的生活将会给这些天才儿童带来长期的精神压力，严重者可能会影响其成人后的生活，因为太过追求完美而遭受挫折，焦虑，以至于产生终生的失败感。

Awards/获奖情况：

About the Author/作者介绍： Alissa Quart is the author of the acclaimed book Branded. She writes opinion pieces and book reviews for The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine. A former gifted child, she started writing novels at age seven and won numerous national writing competitions. She is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
Alissa Quart 是倍受褒奖的Branded一书的作者。她为纽约时报写书评，儿时聪明过人的她七岁时就开始写小说，赢得过无数全国性写作比赛的奖杯。毕业于哥伦比亚新闻媒体学院。

Format:HARDCOVER

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Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

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