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A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common d

by habosa 10y ago

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? This will be highly correlated with race and socioeconomic status since we know that poor / minority communities don't have the best resources / results for early childhood development. 2. What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? "Smart" kids who never have to interact with anyone "below" them or "dumb" kids who never have to interact with anyone "above" them will have trouble navigating many social and professional situations. 3. "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. These parents are often the best advocates for positive change in their community. The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.

Aqueous 10y ago
4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots. We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'
- hawkice 10y ago
  > We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If we're smart, we set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students and 'smart' students gain from theirs. So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Even if you were to create a special "school for smart people only" and magically teleport all geeks there, I wouldn't be sure it would eliminate the problem of geeks being bullied. Bullying seems to be an emergent thing that comes up naturally in the sort of environment a school is - as long as kids have a "hierarchy of popularity", there will be some people at the bottom of it, and those are your bullying targets. Being a geek is a reason to find yourself at the bottom of the hierarchy, but so is being overweight, wearing glasses, being shy, being in a religious minority, etc. The particular reason doesn't matter to the bullying process, it's a free variable. I'm pretty sure that a school full of geek kids will find their own reasons to bully some of its students.
    - hawkice 10y ago
      I don't disagree per se, but instead of this happening, it frequently does not. I suspect it is because we are massively under-serving these kids, and they are all essentially bullying refugees. They know exactly how bad it is. Maybe if the torturous experiences were less universal they'd fall into those patterns much quicker.
    - jlebar 10y ago
      > Even if you were to create a special "school for smart people only" and magically teleport all geeks there, I wouldn't be sure it would eliminate the problem of geeks being bullied. First, note that the standard the school has to meet isn't "no bullying", but rather "significantly less bullying". I presume this is what you mean. Anyway: What is your evidence for this claim? Have you ever spent time in such a school and compared it to a regular school? Data point of N=1. I went to a special "school for smart people only". There was dramatically less bullying than the regular-people school I came from. But anyway the researchers are providing actual scientific evidence of this effect, and you appear to be arguing against it using, apparently, intuition based on no evidence whatsoever. "Yes, these experts say X, but that sounds unbelievable to me; therefore they must be wrong." Surely you do not endorse this sort of reasoning.
    - ebola1717 10y ago
      I went to a "double academically talented" middle school, and got bullied there, more than in my elementary school. Nothing to do with "smartness" or "geekiness" - middle school kids are just horrible lol
- ltbarcly3 10y ago
  Have you ever been inside a school? The stupid kids don't gather around to bask in the glow of the gifted kids. They DO gather around them and call them 'faggot' and trip them in the hallway, especially if they are smart but not athletic.
  - Aqueous 10y ago
    That's a failure of the school administration and disciplinary processes, and separating kids from each other based on perceived or measured intelligence is not going to solve it. Bullies are going to find a target whether there's a geek there or not. This is an argument for strict enforcement of anti-bullying policies, not isolating groups of kids from each other. As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
    - ltbarcly3 10y ago
      Yet another reason to concentrate those smarter kids so that the people with the most potential don't have it wasted by being forced to go to a school with a failed administration. In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        What stops the "smart kid school" from developing the same administrative problems as regular ones? Are "smart teachers" actually better at managing behaviour of pupils? Personally, I feel that the bullying problem might be less about individual teachers, and more about how the whole system is constructed.
        morgante 10y ago
        The smart kids have better things to do than bully each other.
- employee8000 10y ago
  This is unadulterated bullshit. The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction that you just made up. We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve. This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.
  - tabeth 10y ago
    You believe that the brightest children helping their more unenlightened peers will result in society losing out?
    - 67726e 10y ago
      No, it's unrealistic and doesn't happen so let's stop pretending it does.
      - tabeth 10y ago
        Who's pretending it happens?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - chrisdone 10y ago
    I do think that educating other people is important, because we don't live forever.
  - xorcist 10y ago
    > The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject. > We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.
- jahewson 10y ago
  Funny, because as I remember it the dumb kids just devoted their efforts to beating the shit out of everyone else, and disrupting the class as much as possible. No amount of punishment would change their behaviour. 20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    I watched a lawyer from Texas talking about how he was trying to save people on death row. And he realised that to actually achive that goal, he needed to go back and stop them from committing the crime in the first place, and to do that he needed to fix the circumnstances that led them into crime. Basically, a texan lawyer re-inventing the northern european walfare state from first principles. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row_inmates/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row... " But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense. 16:09 I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive. 16:36 And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you." 16:57 And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." "
- jlebar 10y ago
  Perhaps it would be worthwhile for you to engage with the scientific literature cited in this article? These arguments are considered. Indeed, even in TFA: > Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, developing behavioural problems both at school and at home, leading to disengagement and dropping out of school. > When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance by their peers and minimise the risk of bullying and social isolation. We can disagree about these conclusions, but I hope we agree that if they're right, it's not morally right to send a gifted kid to a regular school on the theory that they'll set an example for those around them if the above is the cost to the kid.
  - urahara 10y ago
    These arguments seem to be true, but I'm sure there are similar facts telling us that without smart kids around other kids can be harmed in similar ways. So it is kind of smart kids well being against other kids well being. So why smart kids well being should be more important than others? Especially taking into account that smart kids tend to have better families and opportunities to get what they need without going to special schools, while "dumb" kids are often "dumb" because they have no choice and their need for support is more urgent.
    - jlebar 10y ago
      > I'm sure there are similar facts telling us that without smart kids around other kids can be harmed in similar ways My point is that rather than assuming things we think are probably are true, we should try to argue from data. Especially since people have studied this, both professionally and experimentally. I can think of plenty of ways that your argument might not be true. For example, per TFA, if gifted kids act up or intentionally tank themselves in "regular school", then maybe it's worse for everyone for the gifted kids to be in "regular school". Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But rather than making guesses based on nothing but our gut, why don't we consider the experts' studies and opinions?
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  N=1 anecdote, but I'd say your thesis is not only wrong, it is diametrically opposed to reality. Having seen both, crumbling local public school[0] and gifted state run boarding school[1] your story of the 'smart' kids setting an example never happened. Mostly, I think, because you underestimate just how far ahead they are. It's not a case of "things come easier"; it's "skip every class and show up on the last day and still out perform everyone else". As an aside, I learned more from my peers and participated more in the community when we had a shared foundation to work with. What you're advocating is a deeply lonely (and I'd argue psychologically damaging) experience and it really bothers me to see so many people in this thread want more people to experience it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_South_Carolina) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_School_for_Science_and_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
- BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
  You're asking parents to sacrifice the mental health (via bullying and social issues) (and thus physical issues likely stemming from mental health problems), intellectual development, future earning power, etc. of their gifted children to benefit others. Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea of sacrificing my children to a utopian project. These children also often develop social issues, as different IQ buckets have very different social norms (imagine how a 100iq normal person forced to socialize only with <65iq disabled folks would be affected).
- edbaskerville 10y ago
  A lot of vitriol in response to this (specifically, the uncritical accusation that this is "bullshit"). But you're right on. The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other. To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments. Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success): * Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels. * Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc. * Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item. * Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do. * Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be. * Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching. * Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.
- bloaf 10y ago
  Lets do remember the evidence suggests that home-schooled children tend to outperform public school children academically.
- loki49152 10y ago
  What's corroding the country at its roots is this despicably evil belief that each should be enslaved to all, living for others first. Have you heard the phrase, "Du bist nichts, das volk ist alles!" It's the tl;dr version of what you said.
FussyZeus 10y ago
I agree with the second especially. The whole point of School is to prepare you for the world we live in (it's effectiveness in many aspects is highly up for debate, but that's another discussion) and you will frequently find yourself in Real Life having to deal with people not necessarily like you. Further isolating people into given groups is only going to increase the social fracturing we already see taking place. Not to mention organizing people by intelligence is a shaky proposition at best, given our current best assessment, the IQ rating, is already proving to be inadequate as an objective measurement.
- eastWestMath 10y ago
  It's pretty crazy. I'm a Canadian and went to public schools through school, now I'm doing my PhD. When I'm at summer schools or conferences with Americans, it's like half of those students had only ever interacted with other people in gifted programs at private schools.
- zepto 10y ago
  Except not. You do have to deal with people not like you in 'real life', but the conditions are nothing like school, wherein you are forced to do so under disadvantageous conditions. Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    On any given software team of more than 10 people, I can promise you at least 1 of them is regarded by the others as less skilled. The truth of that isn't relevant, the fact is even competent or highly skilled people may have a hard time presenting that skill verbally and/or in writing. And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
    - 10y ago
justin_vanw 10y ago
1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they would be disadvantaged because they would be more sickly and weak compared to the people we fed." 2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do. 3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.
- bleepbloop22 10y ago
  1. You didn't respond to his point. How do you decide who is "gifted?" How do you untangle that from race and economic class? 2. How do you untangle race and economic class from the sort of segregation you are proposing is okay here? 3. I don't think that this is really a response to the point. You're just saying it's unfair to the families who would rather their kids go to a good school instead of needing to fight for their kids to go to a good school. Which ... something something "government handouts." Also: private school vouchers to take "smart kids" to "good schools" aren't social engineering either? This isn't a coherent point. You sound very frustrated. I'd be interested in reading attempts to debate the points themselves instead of appeals to emotion.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  RE 1., your analogy to food is both misapplied and unhelpful. The choice here is between "better education" and "standard education", not between "better education" and "no education at all". You can't test the logic of that argument by applying it to the food case and expect a sensible result. Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.
AbcLala 10y ago
Gifted means generally high IQ. While one can trained and raise its IQ, from my understanding, it can help just for a few points. I can relate to the IQ wall in communication, I can relate to fail education, I can relate to stupid people with great education, I am lucky to have a good paying job considering my lack of formal education. If not properly handled, above than average IQ is actually more a problem than a great asset in western system (I won't talk about Asian countries, as I don't have first hand experience but the competition mindset should help)
jules 10y ago
That gifted students will be bored and not develop to their fullest extent, and perhaps more importantly, not develop the discipline to work hard in their formative years, is an argument for tailoring education to the student's ability. Asserting the opposite doesn't make it so. You argument comes down to impairing the education of gifted children in favour of improving the education of ungifted children. That is an argument if your top priority is equality of outcome, but one can question how wise that is if you care about the well being of all of humanity given the fact that it was a handful of geniuses who were responsible for a hugely outsized amount of progress.
zeteo 10y ago
> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. > What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? > "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them. Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
- magicalist 10y ago
  > It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.
  - Afton 10y ago
    "gifted track" is rarely a set program. It's usually a mechanism for providing individually paced opportunities and resources [edit: added this phrase] _at a different/specific school_. Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'. _edited for clarity_
    - magicalist 10y ago
      > "gifted track" is rarely a set program. It's usually a mechanism for providing individually paced opportunities and resources. ...which doesn't apply when the "track" is a set program at a different school.
xiaoma 10y ago
If you truly value your second point, then collecting outliers (at either end) into special schools is the way to go. This way, even exceptional students will regularly encounter peers who struggle more or less with various work than they do. If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.
reflexive 10y ago
> The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them. You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. Leaders usually spend all their resources reinforcing hegemony. And many of the people having the most positive effect on society will do it in a totally inconspicuous way. And many of those folks will come from bad schools, succeeding despite lack of institutional support. I suspect interpersonal support is a better predictor of positive contribution than institutional support. For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
  - reflexive 10y ago
    If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do. For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers. Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
These are all legitimate concerns. In my experience, growing up in South Carolina (some of the worst public schools in the US) the opportunity to go to a "gifted" (I hate that word, takes all of the emphasis off of effort or any actionable quantity) school for high school probably saved my life [0]. What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_School_for_Science_and_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
willholloway 10y ago
Segregating gifted children in with the regular population will one day soon be seen as child abuse. It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism. We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom. It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.
- cema 10y ago
  Segregating gifted children in with the regular population Do you mean desegredating, that is, keeping them in? If so, I agree, it may be bordering on abuse. I have only anecdotal evidence to support it, but I suspect there may have been studies.
  - kazimuth 10y ago
    That's about as good as actually having studies, right?
    - cema 10y ago
      I am not sure what your point is. No, it is not sufficient to make a policy decision, for instance. But if I have to go and vote on this issue, it is at least something I could base my judgment on.
BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
I think resentment of this kind of social engineering is a major key in recent US political shifts. Let's talk about the basics. If a kid can learn more difficult material and the kid wants to, most reasonable people would agree that the kid should go where that is an option. This basic sense of the world is blocked by social engineers obsessed with n-th order effects who ignore the fundamental issue. Let's do the basics, folks.
huehehue 10y ago
I've unfortunately been on all ends of this -- in gifted programs throughout grade school, until high school, where I missed out because my parents (and myself) didn't know there was an application process. Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people. I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.
jasode 10y ago
>What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? I'm wondering how you feel about "smart" kids like Terence Tao.[1][2] At age 14, he was in enrolled in college instead of attending high school with his "less smart" peers. At age 17, he was a graduate student at Princeton instead of being a senior at high school with other kids his age. (And working backwards from those 2 points in his timeline, he was in highschool when he should have been in middle school, etc.) Should the young Terence Tao regardless of intelligence be denied the ability to "remove" himself from the school he is "supposed" to go so that other kids can benefit from his intellect? If at age 8, he's pulled from regular school to attend high school instead, are his parents selfish? Is there a political movement to force all geniuses to stay with their age group and normally assigned school to fulfill a societal goal? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao [2] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.h...
- htns 10y ago
  Frankly it seems to me he was railroaded into an academic career. Makes me wonder if gifted programs are ultimately in the student's interest.
ergothus 10y ago
I have views on both sides of this: * On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education. * On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split the class into two for that section. Once I slipped into this lesser "higher" class, I felt I could never move up to the higher/higher class because I never learned ahead enough to meet the needs of the next pre-test. (It never occurred to younger me to read ahead in the book. So much for being gifted.) So I think the arguments you list ALL have validity and should absolutely be taken seriously. OTOH, I think current schools do a poor job of keeping talented or more educated students engaged, which can drag down things for everyone. I don't know what the answer is - you've done a good job of talking about why separate schooling is a bad solution - but I think the status quo is also a bad solution. (that said, I'm in favor of raising educational opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged first, because I'd rather have talented-but-only-adequately-taught people in a world of adequately taught people than I would have a world of poorly taught people save for a few bright stars)
URSpider94 10y ago
My reply: 1. There are standard tests and evaluations for giftedness, these can be given at any time past age 4. They are about thinking and behavior, not achievement. Years of study shows that these traits don't generally change much with age. So called "late bloomers", if they are gifted, would almost certainly have been gifted much earlier in life but maybe not identified. 2. I think this is a valid point, but I'd propose that this be addressed more by making sure that kids are interacting with peers outside the academic context. Putting kids in the same classroom where they are underserved on either extreme simply because it's good to socialize seems like the wrong priority to me. 3. This is an artifact of how we identify giftedness today. Giftedness exists in all cultures and socioeconomic groups. Today, only the most motivated parents get their gifted kids identified. We could fix that with a national initiative to identify gifted students. Additionally. Not that this is necessarily your argument, but motivated parents do not make children gifted. No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically. Likewise,profoundly gifted kids given very few opportunities can be and are still gifted.
- emiliobumachar 10y ago
  > No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically Proper early nutrition will. There's no bottom for parents' motivations, nor to their capacity, unfortunately.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    Improper early nutrition sure will.
ianai 10y ago
I'll definite the gifted kids as the one's the others get picked on - and say that they should definitely have options to study elsewhere.
harpocrates 10y ago
This. Yes. As someone who was classified as "gifted" and went to one of these special programs, your third point is a common occurrence. All that aside though, I think the very notion of gifted-ness is harmful (in a labelling sense) to both the are's and the are-not's. Your first two points are relevant on this. For that reason, I'm not sure we should even discuss/judge gifted-ness, regardless of whether it even exists.
gvd 10y ago
How about we make society more equal instead of sending people that stand out already even quicker to the "top".

by habosa 10y ago

Aqueous 10y ago

4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots. We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'

hawkice 10y ago
> We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If we're smart, we set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students and 'smart' students gain from theirs. So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Even if you were to create a special "school for smart people only" and magically teleport all geeks there, I wouldn't be sure it would eliminate the problem of geeks being bullied. Bullying seems to be an emergent thing that comes up naturally in the sort of environment a school is - as long as kids have a "hierarchy of popularity", there will be some people at the bottom of it, and those are your bullying targets. Being a geek is a reason to find yourself at the bottom of the hierarchy, but so is being overweight, wearing glasses, being shy, being in a religious minority, etc. The particular reason doesn't matter to the bullying process, it's a free variable. I'm pretty sure that a school full of geek kids will find their own reasons to bully some of its students.
  - hawkice 10y ago
    I don't disagree per se, but instead of this happening, it frequently does not. I suspect it is because we are massively under-serving these kids, and they are all essentially bullying refugees. They know exactly how bad it is. Maybe if the torturous experiences were less universal they'd fall into those patterns much quicker.
  - jlebar 10y ago
    > Even if you were to create a special "school for smart people only" and magically teleport all geeks there, I wouldn't be sure it would eliminate the problem of geeks being bullied. First, note that the standard the school has to meet isn't "no bullying", but rather "significantly less bullying". I presume this is what you mean. Anyway: What is your evidence for this claim? Have you ever spent time in such a school and compared it to a regular school? Data point of N=1. I went to a special "school for smart people only". There was dramatically less bullying than the regular-people school I came from. But anyway the researchers are providing actual scientific evidence of this effect, and you appear to be arguing against it using, apparently, intuition based on no evidence whatsoever. "Yes, these experts say X, but that sounds unbelievable to me; therefore they must be wrong." Surely you do not endorse this sort of reasoning.
  - ebola1717 10y ago
    I went to a "double academically talented" middle school, and got bullied there, more than in my elementary school. Nothing to do with "smartness" or "geekiness" - middle school kids are just horrible lol
ltbarcly3 10y ago
Have you ever been inside a school? The stupid kids don't gather around to bask in the glow of the gifted kids. They DO gather around them and call them 'faggot' and trip them in the hallway, especially if they are smart but not athletic.
- Aqueous 10y ago
  That's a failure of the school administration and disciplinary processes, and separating kids from each other based on perceived or measured intelligence is not going to solve it. Bullies are going to find a target whether there's a geek there or not. This is an argument for strict enforcement of anti-bullying policies, not isolating groups of kids from each other. As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
  - ltbarcly3 10y ago
    Yet another reason to concentrate those smarter kids so that the people with the most potential don't have it wasted by being forced to go to a school with a failed administration. In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      What stops the "smart kid school" from developing the same administrative problems as regular ones? Are "smart teachers" actually better at managing behaviour of pupils? Personally, I feel that the bullying problem might be less about individual teachers, and more about how the whole system is constructed.
      - morgante 10y ago
        The smart kids have better things to do than bully each other.
employee8000 10y ago
This is unadulterated bullshit. The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction that you just made up. We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve. This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.
- tabeth 10y ago
  You believe that the brightest children helping their more unenlightened peers will result in society losing out?
  - 67726e 10y ago
    No, it's unrealistic and doesn't happen so let's stop pretending it does.
    - tabeth 10y ago
      Who's pretending it happens?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisdone 10y ago
  I do think that educating other people is important, because we don't live forever.
- xorcist 10y ago
  > The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject. > We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.
jahewson 10y ago
Funny, because as I remember it the dumb kids just devoted their efforts to beating the shit out of everyone else, and disrupting the class as much as possible. No amount of punishment would change their behaviour. 20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  I watched a lawyer from Texas talking about how he was trying to save people on death row. And he realised that to actually achive that goal, he needed to go back and stop them from committing the crime in the first place, and to do that he needed to fix the circumnstances that led them into crime. Basically, a texan lawyer re-inventing the northern european walfare state from first principles. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row_inmates/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row... " But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense. 16:09 I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive. 16:36 And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you." 16:57 And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." "
jlebar 10y ago
Perhaps it would be worthwhile for you to engage with the scientific literature cited in this article? These arguments are considered. Indeed, even in TFA: > Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, developing behavioural problems both at school and at home, leading to disengagement and dropping out of school. > When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance by their peers and minimise the risk of bullying and social isolation. We can disagree about these conclusions, but I hope we agree that if they're right, it's not morally right to send a gifted kid to a regular school on the theory that they'll set an example for those around them if the above is the cost to the kid.
- urahara 10y ago
  These arguments seem to be true, but I'm sure there are similar facts telling us that without smart kids around other kids can be harmed in similar ways. So it is kind of smart kids well being against other kids well being. So why smart kids well being should be more important than others? Especially taking into account that smart kids tend to have better families and opportunities to get what they need without going to special schools, while "dumb" kids are often "dumb" because they have no choice and their need for support is more urgent.
  - jlebar 10y ago
    > I'm sure there are similar facts telling us that without smart kids around other kids can be harmed in similar ways My point is that rather than assuming things we think are probably are true, we should try to argue from data. Especially since people have studied this, both professionally and experimentally. I can think of plenty of ways that your argument might not be true. For example, per TFA, if gifted kids act up or intentionally tank themselves in "regular school", then maybe it's worse for everyone for the gifted kids to be in "regular school". Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But rather than making guesses based on nothing but our gut, why don't we consider the experts' studies and opinions?
lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
N=1 anecdote, but I'd say your thesis is not only wrong, it is diametrically opposed to reality. Having seen both, crumbling local public school[0] and gifted state run boarding school[1] your story of the 'smart' kids setting an example never happened. Mostly, I think, because you underestimate just how far ahead they are. It's not a case of "things come easier"; it's "skip every class and show up on the last day and still out perform everyone else". As an aside, I learned more from my peers and participated more in the community when we had a shared foundation to work with. What you're advocating is a deeply lonely (and I'd argue psychologically damaging) experience and it really bothers me to see so many people in this thread want more people to experience it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_South_Carolina) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_School_for_Science_and_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
You're asking parents to sacrifice the mental health (via bullying and social issues) (and thus physical issues likely stemming from mental health problems), intellectual development, future earning power, etc. of their gifted children to benefit others. Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea of sacrificing my children to a utopian project. These children also often develop social issues, as different IQ buckets have very different social norms (imagine how a 100iq normal person forced to socialize only with <65iq disabled folks would be affected).
edbaskerville 10y ago
A lot of vitriol in response to this (specifically, the uncritical accusation that this is "bullshit"). But you're right on. The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other. To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments. Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success): * Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels. * Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc. * Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item. * Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do. * Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be. * Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching. * Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.
bloaf 10y ago
Lets do remember the evidence suggests that home-schooled children tend to outperform public school children academically.
loki49152 10y ago
What's corroding the country at its roots is this despicably evil belief that each should be enslaved to all, living for others first. Have you heard the phrase, "Du bist nichts, das volk ist alles!" It's the tl;dr version of what you said.

FussyZeus 10y ago

I agree with the second especially. The whole point of School is to prepare you for the world we live in (it's effectiveness in many aspects is highly up for debate, but that's another discussion) and you will frequently find yourself in Real Life having to deal with people not necessarily like you. Further isolating people into given groups is only going to increase the social fracturing we already see taking place. Not to mention organizing people by intelligence is a shaky proposition at best, given our current best assessment, the IQ rating, is already proving to be inadequate as an objective measurement.

eastWestMath 10y ago
It's pretty crazy. I'm a Canadian and went to public schools through school, now I'm doing my PhD. When I'm at summer schools or conferences with Americans, it's like half of those students had only ever interacted with other people in gifted programs at private schools.
zepto 10y ago
Except not. You do have to deal with people not like you in 'real life', but the conditions are nothing like school, wherein you are forced to do so under disadvantageous conditions. Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  On any given software team of more than 10 people, I can promise you at least 1 of them is regarded by the others as less skilled. The truth of that isn't relevant, the fact is even competent or highly skilled people may have a hard time presenting that skill verbally and/or in writing. And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
  - 10y ago

justin_vanw 10y ago

1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they would be disadvantaged because they would be more sickly and weak compared to the people we fed." 2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do. 3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.

bleepbloop22 10y ago
1. You didn't respond to his point. How do you decide who is "gifted?" How do you untangle that from race and economic class? 2. How do you untangle race and economic class from the sort of segregation you are proposing is okay here? 3. I don't think that this is really a response to the point. You're just saying it's unfair to the families who would rather their kids go to a good school instead of needing to fight for their kids to go to a good school. Which ... something something "government handouts." Also: private school vouchers to take "smart kids" to "good schools" aren't social engineering either? This isn't a coherent point. You sound very frustrated. I'd be interested in reading attempts to debate the points themselves instead of appeals to emotion.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
RE 1., your analogy to food is both misapplied and unhelpful. The choice here is between "better education" and "standard education", not between "better education" and "no education at all". You can't test the logic of that argument by applying it to the food case and expect a sensible result. Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.

AbcLala 10y ago

Gifted means generally high IQ. While one can trained and raise its IQ, from my understanding, it can help just for a few points. I can relate to the IQ wall in communication, I can relate to fail education, I can relate to stupid people with great education, I am lucky to have a good paying job considering my lack of formal education. If not properly handled, above than average IQ is actually more a problem than a great asset in western system (I won't talk about Asian countries, as I don't have first hand experience but the competition mindset should help)

jules 10y ago

That gifted students will be bored and not develop to their fullest extent, and perhaps more importantly, not develop the discipline to work hard in their formative years, is an argument for tailoring education to the student's ability. Asserting the opposite doesn't make it so. You argument comes down to impairing the education of gifted children in favour of improving the education of ungifted children. That is an argument if your top priority is equality of outcome, but one can question how wise that is if you care about the well being of all of humanity given the fact that it was a handful of geniuses who were responsible for a hugely outsized amount of progress.

zeteo 10y ago

> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. > What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? > "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them. Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.

magicalist 10y ago
> It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.
- Afton 10y ago
  "gifted track" is rarely a set program. It's usually a mechanism for providing individually paced opportunities and resources [edit: added this phrase] _at a different/specific school_. Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'. _edited for clarity_
  - magicalist 10y ago
    > "gifted track" is rarely a set program. It's usually a mechanism for providing individually paced opportunities and resources. ...which doesn't apply when the "track" is a set program at a different school.

xiaoma 10y ago

If you truly value your second point, then collecting outliers (at either end) into special schools is the way to go. This way, even exceptional students will regularly encounter peers who struggle more or less with various work than they do. If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.

reflexive 10y ago

> The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them. You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".

erikpukinskis 10y ago
If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. Leaders usually spend all their resources reinforcing hegemony. And many of the people having the most positive effect on society will do it in a totally inconspicuous way. And many of those folks will come from bad schools, succeeding despite lack of institutional support. I suspect interpersonal support is a better predictor of positive contribution than institutional support. For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
- reflexive 10y ago
  If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do. For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers. Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago

These are all legitimate concerns. In my experience, growing up in South Carolina (some of the worst public schools in the US) the opportunity to go to a "gifted" (I hate that word, takes all of the emphasis off of effort or any actionable quantity) school for high school probably saved my life [0]. What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_School_for_Science_and_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...

willholloway 10y ago

Segregating gifted children in with the regular population will one day soon be seen as child abuse. It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism. We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom. It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.

cema 10y ago
Segregating gifted children in with the regular population Do you mean desegredating, that is, keeping them in? If so, I agree, it may be bordering on abuse. I have only anecdotal evidence to support it, but I suspect there may have been studies.
- kazimuth 10y ago
  That's about as good as actually having studies, right?
  - cema 10y ago
    I am not sure what your point is. No, it is not sufficient to make a policy decision, for instance. But if I have to go and vote on this issue, it is at least something I could base my judgment on.

BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago

I think resentment of this kind of social engineering is a major key in recent US political shifts. Let's talk about the basics. If a kid can learn more difficult material and the kid wants to, most reasonable people would agree that the kid should go where that is an option. This basic sense of the world is blocked by social engineers obsessed with n-th order effects who ignore the fundamental issue. Let's do the basics, folks.

huehehue 10y ago

I've unfortunately been on all ends of this -- in gifted programs throughout grade school, until high school, where I missed out because my parents (and myself) didn't know there was an application process. Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people. I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.

jasode 10y ago

>What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? I'm wondering how you feel about "smart" kids like Terence Tao.[1][2] At age 14, he was in enrolled in college instead of attending high school with his "less smart" peers. At age 17, he was a graduate student at Princeton instead of being a senior at high school with other kids his age. (And working backwards from those 2 points in his timeline, he was in highschool when he should have been in middle school, etc.) Should the young Terence Tao regardless of intelligence be denied the ability to "remove" himself from the school he is "supposed" to go so that other kids can benefit from his intellect? If at age 8, he's pulled from regular school to attend high school instead, are his parents selfish? Is there a political movement to force all geniuses to stay with their age group and normally assigned school to fulfill a societal goal? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao [2] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.h...

htns 10y ago
Frankly it seems to me he was railroaded into an academic career. Makes me wonder if gifted programs are ultimately in the student's interest.

ergothus 10y ago

I have views on both sides of this: * On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education. * On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split the class into two for that section. Once I slipped into this lesser "higher" class, I felt I could never move up to the higher/higher class because I never learned ahead enough to meet the needs of the next pre-test. (It never occurred to younger me to read ahead in the book. So much for being gifted.) So I think the arguments you list ALL have validity and should absolutely be taken seriously. OTOH, I think current schools do a poor job of keeping talented or more educated students engaged, which can drag down things for everyone. I don't know what the answer is - you've done a good job of talking about why separate schooling is a bad solution - but I think the status quo is also a bad solution. (that said, I'm in favor of raising educational opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged first, because I'd rather have talented-but-only-adequately-taught people in a world of adequately taught people than I would have a world of poorly taught people save for a few bright stars)

URSpider94 10y ago

My reply: 1. There are standard tests and evaluations for giftedness, these can be given at any time past age 4. They are about thinking and behavior, not achievement. Years of study shows that these traits don't generally change much with age. So called "late bloomers", if they are gifted, would almost certainly have been gifted much earlier in life but maybe not identified. 2. I think this is a valid point, but I'd propose that this be addressed more by making sure that kids are interacting with peers outside the academic context. Putting kids in the same classroom where they are underserved on either extreme simply because it's good to socialize seems like the wrong priority to me. 3. This is an artifact of how we identify giftedness today. Giftedness exists in all cultures and socioeconomic groups. Today, only the most motivated parents get their gifted kids identified. We could fix that with a national initiative to identify gifted students. Additionally. Not that this is necessarily your argument, but motivated parents do not make children gifted. No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically. Likewise,profoundly gifted kids given very few opportunities can be and are still gifted.

emiliobumachar 10y ago
> No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically Proper early nutrition will. There's no bottom for parents' motivations, nor to their capacity, unfortunately.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Improper early nutrition sure will.

ianai 10y ago

I'll definite the gifted kids as the one's the others get picked on - and say that they should definitely have options to study elsewhere.

harpocrates 10y ago

This. Yes. As someone who was classified as "gifted" and went to one of these special programs, your third point is a common occurrence. All that aside though, I think the very notion of gifted-ness is harmful (in a labelling sense) to both the are's and the are-not's. Your first two points are relevant on this. For that reason, I'm not sure we should even discuss/judge gifted-ness, regardless of whether it even exists.

gvd 10y ago

How about we make society more equal instead of sending people that stand out already even quicker to the "top".