| Summary: | This article examines a niche space: youth clubs created by small voluntary organizations for ‘gifted children’ in 1970s and 1980s Britain. It asks how individualism shaped
everyday life and demonstrates how youth culture was much broader than just the
permissiveness that dominates the literature. Gifted children are currently missing
from accounts of modern Britain, which focus on mainstream educational categories.
Yet, including them in our analysis provides new insights into the diversity of youth
cultures that existed in these decades. Drawing on new uncatalogued archives, and
centrally poetry, letters, and stories from young people themselves, the article shows
that conservative and radical visions co-existed. Young people shaped their own
culture, subverting and challenging ideas of themselves as distinctive future leaders.
|
|---|