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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-soc

• 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
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • crushton 10y ago
      Intellectual bullying is also a thing. Having the social intelligence not to be bullied or to form strategic alliances with bullies is useful and less likely to happen for these precious gifted geeks if they are placed together in an unrealistic safe haven. We are all in this world together. If anyone on this thread believes IQ determines social value they need to be bullied a bit more.
• 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.