> The problem is one of understimulation The problem (for all the students, not just the cleverest ones) is that school curriculum is necessarily insipid, and

> The problem is one of understimulation The problem (for all the students, not just the cleverest ones) is that school curriculum is necessarily insipid, and school pedagogy provides very little direct practice and delayed, often unhelpful feedback. A huge amount of time is wasted on organizational overhead, other students can be tremendously distracting, and meaningful learning is often cut off by scheduled class changes. The primary focus is on memorizing and regurgitating atomized and decontextualized definitions, factoids, and formulas, and students are discouraged from asking and answering their own questions, solving their own problems, or doing their own research. Perhaps worse, there is an excessive focus on getting the “right answers”, which discourages risk taking. Motivated students who have learned some meta-cognitive skills can often learn entirely independently without any human interaction more efficiently than they can from a typical classroom studying a typical school textbook and doing assigned homework. Working 1:1 with an expert tutor/mentor/coach for at least a few hours per week (and then spending the rest of the time on independent practice) is dramatically more effective. Of particular note for clever students, this allows for students to try problems and projects of much larger scope and much greater difficulty than the typical curriculum has room for. But nobody has figured out how to scale this affordably to the whole society. One lucky thing in the software industry is that the tools are very interactive and there are lots of opportunities to get various kinds of feedback even when working independently.