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[THE FIRST SOVIET GUIDE TO EXPERIMENTAL METHODS FOR TALENT DETECTION] Detskaya odarennost’ [i.e. Gifted Children]

Mede, W., Piorkovsky, K.

Item #2418

Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniya, 1925. 120 pp.
23,5x15,8 cm. In original publisher’s printed wrappers. Tear of the
spine, fold marks on the front wrappers, minor hole in the lower
part of the rear wrapper (no text affected), but otherwise in a very
good condition.

Scarce. First and only edition. Translated from German by I.
Levinson. Edited by Boris Varshava. Text in Russian.
The first Russian translation of Walter Mede and Kurt
Piorkovsky’s book on experimental methods for identifying gifted
children, published in Moscow in 1925. According to the Russian
State Library, this is the only Soviet-era edition dedicated to the
subject.
The book came out against the backdrop of growing
Soviet interest in talent development during the 1920s. As the
USSR prioritized rapid cultural advancement, a pressing need
emerged to identify gifted children who could contribute to the
nation’s scientific, artistic, and industrial progress. Specialized
institutions such as the Stolyarsky Music School in Odesa (1933)
and the Leningrad Secondary Art School (1934) were founded to
provide talented youth with both general education and intensive
training. However, the official ban on pedology in 1936 halted many
experimental approaches to gifted education and ushered in a
more uniform, ideologically controlled system.
The edition opens with a substantial foreword by Boris
Varshava (1900–1927), a Soviet psychologist known for his work
in experimental research on suggestion and the development of
scientific terminology. In his introduction, Varshava discusses the
concept of giftedness, critically engaging with the authors’ more
essentialist views. He expresses disagreement with the notion of
establishing separate schools for gifted children, emphasizing
instead the decisive role of social factors and environment in the
development of talent. Varshava’s Marxist perspective foregrounds
the importance of nurturing conditions over innate ability, asserting
that Soviet psychologists could not accept the idea of a special,
biologically exceptional “constitution” for gifted individuals.

The main text defines giftedness as a high level of
development across a system of cognitive processes—specifically
attention, memory, thinking, imagination, motivation, and will. They
carefully present the test formats they considered most effective
at the time for assessing each of these components. Among the tests described are: “asking children to mentally multiply numbers
written on the blackboard while simultaneously listening to a
story they would later have to retell as accurately as possible,” or
“instructing them to cross out every instance of the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’
and ‘n’ in a printed text within a limited time.” The book also includes
the results of experimental testing carried out at Elementary School
No. 55 in Berlin and compares the test performance of 22 children
with the evaluations provided by their teachers. In its concluding
section, the authors analyze the data and highlight one of their
most striking findings: the most gifted children often came from
ordinary working-class families, reinforcing the idea that education
should be provided regardless of social background.

Worldcat shows
copies of the
edition at
University of
Pennsylvania
and Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek.

Price: $350.00