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I realized that being selected for a gifted class wasn't so much about helping my peers as it was protecting the order of the classroom. If someone said today,

I realized that being selected for a gifted class wasn't so much about helping my peers as it was protecting the order of the classroom. If someone said today, "hey, these people are exceptional, let's isolate them from the people they seem to lead," I'd recognize it for what it was. When I look at former gifted kids, it's almost as though a generation of young leaders were sabotaged by appealing to their parents vanity. Sure, some kids need to get out of absurd public school situations, but knowledge these days is basically free. The only skills that matter for life outcomes are social and political, with things like abstraction and mastery a distant third. The theme among former gifted students I know is a kind of naivety where their social segregation deprived them of experience with the tools for how less abstractly oriented people must survive. It makes them soft targets for someone with a chip on their shoulder, a double digit IQ, and an instinct to lie to cover their weaknesses. Few would argue against the idea that, teaching kids to solve problems using intelligence and creativity over collaboration and management is to put them at a disadvantage. Problem solving is what talent does, it is not what management and leadership does. I'm sure there are many gifted students who are just fine, but the outcomes are arguably much more polarized than for typical students.

0815test 7y ago
Management and leadership involve plenty of problem solving! It's genuinely hard work, not just faffing around - that's just the stereotype that prevails among people who have never been in a management role in the first place. For one thing, if you're in management, there's probably a higher-level manager that you're accountable to! Funny how people seem to forget this.
- motohagiography 7y ago
  So the problems you solve in management are how to get people to solve problems, not the physical/logical problems themselves. It's not faffing around, and it's a higher level of abstraction, arguably something gifted people would be good at if they hadn't been trained to solve problems like a super IC.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    You specifically said that management doesn't involve "talent", "problem solving", "intelligence" or "creativity". And often the best managers are people who are just as familiar with the physical/logical domain as the concrete "problem solvers" - after all, much of the difficulty of "getting people to solve problems" is things like knowing when to call BS on someone vs. when there's an actual issue that's gumming up the work and that one should deploy resources on. Stuff that's way too hard unless you actually grok what's going on.

0815test 7y ago

Management and leadership involve plenty of problem solving! It's genuinely hard work, not just faffing around - that's just the stereotype that prevails among people who have never been in a management role in the first place. For one thing, if you're in management, there's probably a higher-level manager that you're accountable to! Funny how people seem to forget this.

motohagiography 7y ago
So the problems you solve in management are how to get people to solve problems, not the physical/logical problems themselves. It's not faffing around, and it's a higher level of abstraction, arguably something gifted people would be good at if they hadn't been trained to solve problems like a super IC.
- 0815test 7y ago
  You specifically said that management doesn't involve "talent", "problem solving", "intelligence" or "creativity". And often the best managers are people who are just as familiar with the physical/logical domain as the concrete "problem solvers" - after all, much of the difficulty of "getting people to solve problems" is things like knowing when to call BS on someone vs. when there's an actual issue that's gumming up the work and that one should deploy resources on. Stuff that's way too hard unless you actually grok what's going on.