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Despite going through gifted education programs myself, I'm deeply skeptical of the concept of them in general, and I've only become more skeptical as new resea

• nopinsight 9y ago
  Einstein did receive good education and, perhaps more importantly, personal mentorship from his uncle and a family's tutor, who was a medical student, from an early age. All evidence suggests that his family cared very much about the quality of his education. His tutor went on to become a successful ophthalmologist who was well known for his success in treating cataracts. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Talmey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Talmey) http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/einstein/section1/ http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/einstein/section1/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein I agree with a sibling comment that the world probably misses out on many potential Einsteins because of inadequate mentorship and nurturing of high-potential children. I agree with you that many ideas from gifted programs should be implemented in curricula for 'regular' and above average kids as well.
  • foobarian 9y ago
    I think there is something to be said for the Central European protestant culture of hard work and valuing education. It's not a surprise to me.
    • taeric 9y ago
      Me thinks it was not the Protestant culture that was hugely influential for this case. :)
      • WillPostForFood 9y ago
        True, but Jews are an even more extreme of a culture valuing education and work. And it seems to work for them.
        • fjsolwmv 9y ago
          Let's not do the cryptoracism on HN, pease.
      • bloak 9y ago
        According to Wikipedia, Einstein went to a Roman Catholic school and his parents were "entirely irreligious". But that doesn't rule out some Protestant cultural influence, I suppose.
    • forapurpose 9y ago
      > Central European protestant culture of hard work and valuing education Is there evidence that such a thing exists? Is there a "Central European protestant culture" at all? A central European culture? That's a big place. Many people in many communities around the world value hard work and education; many Protestants in Central Europe do not.
• ineedasername 9y ago
  Also means that already high achievers get the support to perform even better while eveyone else gets nothing special. Set all expectations high, teach everyone critical thinking skills.
• jimhefferon 9y ago
  Teaching everyone with high expectations is a great idea. In practice, though, it means that some people flunk. (I'm not talking about the fact that some students require different instruction; for instance, some students are special education students. I'm talking about standard students.) Many school systems find that flunking folks requires a disproportionate amount of effort. There are ways to work through that, but in the end there has to be a public will to do it. At least in the US, there is a very large thread of public discourse that thinks the goal in the education system is to minimize the cost of educating other people's kids, not to maximize what they learn.
  • MsMowz 9y ago
    Another option is aggressively tutoring students who fall behind. Finland does this to great success. I'm not sure what the ratio is now, but at one point there was a tutor for every 7 students on average in Finnish schools. You're absolutely right that it would be costly and politically difficult.
    • jimhefferon 9y ago
      Yes, there has to be a will to do it. It is distressing that in the US at least there is a widespread movement in the other direction. It threatens to make shittier for us all (except those who are completely insulated, of course).
      • jacobush 9y ago
        And being insulated to avoid the crap is its own kind of shittines. Like living in a gated community not for fun but to avoid getting robbed.
  • crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    Removing the concept of failure from my mind has been instrumental in helping me unlock my potential. Society could probably benefit from this. Learn. Or learn not. There is no fail.
• majos 9y ago
  > and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did. I disagree with this. The fact that some young prodigies proved it early and eventually became productive adult geniuses is not, to me, evidence that young prodigies will show themselves. Rather, I would expect that there are more young Einsteins who do not receive adequate mentorship, resources, or opportunities to become old Einsteins. Some make it anyway. Ramanujan is an interesting case. By Hardy's estimate, he was one of the best mathematical minds of the 20th century, and he demonstrated clear mathematical talent by high school age. And he still barely made it, thanks to a fragile chain of people who recognized his talent and drive. It's very easy for me to imagine a world in which Ramanujan stays in India and remains a bureaucrat doing math on the side. But as I understand it, pedagogy for young Einsteins is still not that well understood.
  • MsMowz 9y ago
    If these students go through a process like Project Bright Idea, as I mentioned, they would get the resources and mentorship they need. If they can't demonstrate it after that, they probably don't have it.
    • crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      This suggests Project Bright Idea is a perfect system without bias or room for improvement. That strikes me as an unrealistic evaluation of the system. The safe assumption is if a child isn't thriving, we haven't learned how to teach them to do so.
  • eaenki 9y ago
    If you think Ramanujan was simply smart or "gifted" as society defines that term, you probably didn't look into his story deeply enough. A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and stated that the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Afterward he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes Kanigel, Robert (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: a Life of the Genius Ramanujan PS: I'm atheist.
• touringcomplete 9y ago
  I was in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program in California. All I noticed was being pulled out of class for IQ tests. There were no IEPs, no extra homework, no special classes, nothing. The only thing I noticed was the music department of an elementary school tried to get me to play piano like some trained monkey but that didn’t work out very well. Also, being bused around 3 hrs (!) a day to a poor magnet school with gangs whom inherently hate smart white kids when there’s an elementary school a block from your house because of race quotas makes anyone resent affirmative action. I went to a private school for K-3 so was way ahead of public school by at least 2 grades, and was bored 4-7. Oh and then my parents wouldn’t allow me to participate in grade skips or an internship at IBM Research Bernal Road. fml. I had the same cookie-cutter education as everyone else. https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt
  • MiguelHudnandez 9y ago
    Ugh. That sounds terrible. In switching from private to public in California schools, I had a similar experience. Grade 3 was private, grade 4 public. There was little learning happening in grade 4, but my grade 5 teacher at a public school was one of the best influences in my life. I think individual attention is the single biggest factor. An experienced and observant teacher will find something in a pupil to drive their interest and enthusiasm. If one teacher has 40 kids to teach, that amount of attention is simply not possible.
  • TallGuyShort 9y ago
    I was similarly disappointed with "gifted" programs. Immigrated to the US and was suddenly far ahead of my peers, so was placed in a gifted program immediately (which I thought was weird since it was clear to me that the only reason I was "gifted" is because I had been taught faster and expected to learn faster and there was no reason the other kids weren't "gifted" except for the school system), and then again when I switched schools. In both cases what I was taught in the gifted program was useless novelties, but then I was required to return to the classes I missed those days and make up the work I missed. Looking back, all the gifted program did was make me even more socially outcast and add to my workload without an equivalent increase in my learning. I went from being an A student with a good group of friends to being a C student with 1 or 2 kinda friends and I mainly blame the gifted program, which I really got nothing out of except I learned the Fibonacci sequence at a young age. Everything else that I credit with helping me learn and be successful was stuff I learned at home.
• andrewprock 9y ago
  One problem is that heritability is not genetic, but more broad, and people mostly don't understand that. For example, your address is very heritable. Likewise, attendance to a given school is also heritable.
  • gwern 9y ago
    > For example, your address is very heritable. No, it's not. > Likewise, attendance to a given school is also heritable. No, it's not. Think about it for a moment, just in the twin study framework. You have monozygotic and dzygotic twins, and twice the difference in their correlation is the heritability. How correlated are the addresses of two dyzgotic twins? Well, they're going to live in... the same house. Just like monozygotic twins are. The exception will be cases of divorce, but the brokenness of their family will have nothing to do with their twinship & genetic relatedness and they will be about as likely to be split up either way (which is minimal). Since there is no difference, twice the difference is still zero, and therefore, the heritability will be zero. Or if that doesn't convince you, consider an adopted child; what address do they live at compared to their adoptive siblings, and what school do they go to? There certainly will be between-family differences, which will be genetic in the parents, but that falls elsewhere into shared-environment (because all the kids in a family will share the same parents putting them into a better or worse zip code/school) or possibly passive gene-environment correlation.
    • Armisael16 9y ago
      It seems clear to me that they meant inheritability.
      • gwern 9y ago
        As they are responding to a comment using 'heritability' in the standard behavioral genetics sense, and espousing a common misunderstanding of the concept, it's not clear to me at all that they meant something entirely different from heritability...
    • andrewprock 9y ago
• losvedir 9y ago
  > The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." I can't read the article because I've exceeded my limit, I guess, but how does this follow? For the purposes of a gifted program all that matters is that intelligence is real and measurable. It could be totally randomly distributed (ie not heritable) and it could still make sense to identify and specially educate smart kids.
• watwut 9y ago
  I would say that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable" is in no way in opposition to "gifted kind of education is something that would help everyone to achieve more". 1.) 50% is a lot of variance. 2.) There is more to learning and achievement then just where you stack against other kids. But also, Einstein had good education and his family cared about his education. Moreover, Einstein is effectively outlier - arguing that single most known and popular scientist is repeatable framework does not make sense.
• kahnjw 9y ago
  When I was in 3rd grade, I was placed in a remedial math course. My mother requested I be removed from it. I was. Today, I am a senior machine learning engineer working on my third math heavy degree. Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception. Now, many of my higher performing peers from 3rd grade are lost. Hopping from career to career, city to city without a sense of direction. A few of the high performers have gone on to do impressive things, but nothing shocking, nothing that is any more impressive than what my stoner friends and I were able to accomplish after a few extra years to mature. It took me more time to find that what I really enjoyed was engineering and math. Of course, this is a first person account, so take it or leave it. Worth noting that there is a whole lot of very bad education research, so anyone whipping out journal articles to prove a point should be cautious. The problem with treating "gifted" students differently is similar to gender bias in STEM, and racial bias in education overall. Some people are told they can, and other are implicitly told they can't. These messages get internalized by students, especially if you are unlike myself and don't have a mother who will stick up for you, and take you out of that remedial math course.
  • nopinsight 9y ago
    I have taught a few tens of gifted students. I could identify them based on a short test from grade 1 (5-6 years old) onwards. I could even identify some just by a short conversation. All of them went on to become successful in college (only a few have graduated so far). They consist of medical students in top medical schools in the country, one International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (currently at MIT), one International Chemistry Olympiad gold medalist (currently at U of Tokyo). All of them from a 200k-people city in a developing country and I only taught math to a few classes of these students (for about 4 years) before moving on to another education venture. I would say it is highly likely most of these students would go on to have very good careers. We still do not know whether they will achieve great things but their trajectory is much brighter than average kids. I agree that putting young kids in remedial classes could be problematic, but gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education.
• trisimix 9y ago
  Yes. Typically these programs are just better learning environments. Why they are reserved for the very technically gifted is a flaw in out romanticized societal belief that genius is the only way incredibly things can happen. Atleast in my opinion. Everyone can be smarter than they are, it's been hard to argue the efficiency of typically schooling for the past century but there's obviously great room for improvement. A great start would be teaching kids how to be happy, or even improving base education in impoverished areas. Lots of potential being lost.
• alex_young 9y ago
  Another way of looking at this data is to observe that the students most likely to outperform on IQ tests are those very students from wealthy backgrounds [0]. Is it any wonder that later life, those born with access to wealth and connections, do much better than those who find themselves in a lessor social cohort? If we accept the above correlation, there seem to be 2 likely explanations for this, outside of pure coincidence. One may posit that this relationship is due to some inheritable trait which causes high income earners to consistently produce offspring who make the same sound decisions they made based on intelligence. If this were true, I would expect to see far more high functioning individuals at the top of the economic pie. Purely observationally, this seems not to be highly correlated. There are lots of exceptions, but high income seems to be associated mostly with a history of high income. Alternatively, and I believe more likely, this difference can be explained by the difference in access to resources which wealth provides. If IQ is just a proxy for family wealth, what can or should we do about it? It seems most equitable to simply provide broad access to high quality education to those who can keep pace at a cost (both in terms of money and social friction) approaching zero. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/
  • waterhouse 9y ago
    Searching around a little bit... http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2465/Intelligence-Family-Twin-Adoption-Studies.html http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2465/Intelligence-Family-Twi... "In twin studies of over 10,000 pairs of twins, monozygotic (genetically identical) twins averaged an 0.85 correlation of "g," whereas for dizygotic (fraternal, like brothers or sisters) same-sex twins the "g" correlations were 0.60. These twin studies suggest that the heritability (genetic effect) accounts for about half of the variance in "g" scores." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ Cites this particular twin study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7945151 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7945151 "The powerful quantitative genetic design of identical and fraternal twins reared apart (112 pairs) and matched twins reared together (111 pairs) was employed to assess the extent of genetic influence on individual differences in cognitive abilities during the last half of the life span. General cognitive ability yielded a heritability estimate of about .80 in two assessments 3 years apart as part of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. This is one of the highest heritabilities reported for a behavioral trait. Across the two ages, average heritabilities are about .60 for verbal tests, .50 for spatial and speed-of-processing tests, and .40 for memory tests."
• SamReidHughes 9y ago
  > 50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable Note that this is a population-wide number, however real it is, and it doesn't really have anything to do with upper-end intelligence. You can't take a 95th percentile kid and make him an Einstein. What you can do is try to give every kid a non-abusive education system that treats them like somebody who can accomplish something. I think early age gifted programs are more useful in their role of not boring the smarter kids than, say, causing them to be educated faster.
• TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  I suspect you may have been misled on Plomin's paper. You should check it out, particularly the section on "Heritability increases dramatically from infancy through adulthood despite genetic stability". It's very readable. IQ has a weird characteristic in that heritability increases dramatically as we age. In youth the heritability of IQ ranges from upwards of 40%, but the really crazy thing is in adulthood that number skyrockets to values that recent research is showing may be north of 80%! So perhaps the goal ought not be to find young Einsteins, but 'old Einsteins'! In my opinion the reason for the success of 'gifted' programs is quite simple. In the US many children have little to no interest in actually learning. That leads to a poor environment for both teachers and the kids in the class that would like to learn. 'Gifted' programs help connect students who are interested in learning and teachers that would like to genuinely teach, instead of those just going through the motions for the paycheck. And that's going to lead to greater outcomes for everybody. Basically, education often devolves to the lowest common denominator, and in public classes that denominator tends to be very low. 'Gifted classes' don't really filter to amazing students, but instead get rid of the awful ones. [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105