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I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon a

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids. I would have been far happier in middle school just hanging around other nice, smart people. (With a few exceptions, the smart kids tended to be kind). The mixture with the “gen pop” led to bullying, repeated physical abuse and harassment by other kids from ages 10-12. This was decades ago when physical abuse amongst minors was often ignored, even by police. By freshman year of high school, I was worn down and switched back to some non-honors classes mid-term. This unfortunately led to dysfunctional friendships with the “cool” kids (same bully crowd), introduction to drugs and a low achievement life. There was some form of Florence nightingale syndrome involved here, due to unresolved physical abuse leading to friendships with the abusers in high school. Separating gifted children for accelerated learning is great. Ignoring social development by blindly sticking all kids together in unstructured environments where bullying and physical abuse is allowed to persist will override any hope for some kids. I know, I was there. Still here.

widowlark 7y ago
I hope all is well now, thanks for sharing.
borski 7y ago
Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a world of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked. Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actually just learn, and not have to hide my report card or test scores as soon as I got them, because doing "too well" meant a beatdown after school. 2/3 of my MIT admission essays were about this experience, incidentally. [edit 1] Aside: one additional anecdote is that I was constantly getting in trouble before Stuy; I was always bored, because the work was easy, and nobody ever gave me additional work to do, so I would talk to the other kids. I was always an extrovert, and very bad at being bored; I could not sit in one place and just stare at the wall, or pretend to listen to a teacher drone on about some geometry thing I already knew. So I got in trouble constantly for distracting the other kids. That stopped in Stuy, because I wasn't bored; I was challenged. [edit 2] The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb.
- spurgu 7y ago
  Reading this and the parent post makes me think that prisons are actually kind of like elementary school except for adults. Same kind of bullying, establishing pecking order, repercussions of snitching etc. Although a lot more dangerous/scary.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked Can't we fix bullying in the first place ?
  - eloff 7y ago
    I wonder if it's better in old style schools not segmented by age. Then faster physical development gives much less of an advantage, and the immature younger students can have their behavior moderated by the older, hopefully more mature students. And older siblings can watch out for younger ones.
    - Filligree 7y ago
      Every study I've ever read says this is much better.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    Lots of child psychologists and teachers believe that parental involvement is key to stopping a child becoming a bully (eg parents actively engaging with their kids welfare) and the most common thing that stops parents being involved in bringing up their kids is poverty. Trying to fix poverty is weirdly controversial.
    - jcims 7y ago
      Is there some kind of consensus that bullies are predominately poor? Even if thats true on a quantitative basis, the bullies that count are the ones with social standing.
adamnemecek 7y ago
How old are you?
nostrademons 7y ago
I have a life story similar to you up through middle-school - second pick for G&T, bullied heavily, repeated physical abuse from peers, ended up hanging out with losers who were into drugs both in middle & high school. After that it diverges though - I switched to a charter school for high school, went to a top liberal arts college, then worked at a couple startups and had a pretty prestigious position at Google. I've still got some scars from that time, but on paper at least, I did okay. For me, being separated from the bullies made all the difference in the world. And it wasn't separation as in "hang around only with other smart kids" - my charter school was academically worse than the public school that I left behind, and like I said, I hung around with the stoners, rockers, and drop-outs. But the charter school focused explicitly on building community and accepting people for who they were. In short, it made it a point to address the emotional needs of teenagers that so many public institutions conveniently forget about. That made all the difference in the world. For you - if you can muster the money or get insurance to pay for it, I'd highly recommend seeing a therapist that works with trauma. This stuff sticks with you a long time, but it doesn't have to define your life.
- kick 7y ago
  I'm currently not in a position to be able to look up this stuff (making dinner), but Duke has done a lot of research on this stuff under their TIP program that basically everyone in this thread might be interested in: it validates your experiences in numbers as the default for gifted children/adolescents/teenagers when not helped structurally, and provides a reasonable amount of information and resources to try and offset some of their suffering. There's nothing to really help people who've already experienced it, but seeing the numbers somehow really helped to put it in perspective for me. It's kind of an epidemic at this point.
  - gct 7y ago
    I was in TIP. Hanging out with smart, kind kids every summer was the highlight of my year. Lotta great memories. Public school...not so much.
    - 7y ago
faceplanted 7y ago
I've been reading this thread and honestly I'm getting the impression that it matters far more what the kids are separated _from_ that whether they're separated at all. Which tallies with my own experience, in the UK there's secondary school and college (AKA sixth form) before university, which basically means the last two years of high school are separate from the first 5, you go to a different school (sometimes, some places have both on the same campus). And I made the choice to go to a college further out of my way that added 10 hours of cycling onto my commute every week pretty much so I'd never have to speak to anyone from my secondary again, the new place was just another college, no special grade requirements, but not being around the same people and being able to basically "reset" made my life so much better that I can't really argue that never separating kids is a good option.
seamyb88 7y ago
Sounds like you have some real problems in your society for that bad experience at school. Surely if you're the gifted individual you claim you are, you'll want to change society rather than seclude yourself from it as much as you can get away with. The non-gifted kids, whatever the fuck that means, don't deserve to bullied/abused either.
- borski 7y ago
  The non-gifted kids (to use your terminology) weren't bullied or abused. They were friends. They played sports together. I played sports too, just not with them, because I wasn't invited to. I wasn't 'cool.' I 'tried too hard.' I 'cared too much about learning.' Not sure what you're going for here?
  - seamyb88 7y ago
    I added a "non" to the word in the title of the post to indicate the opposite of that thing. But my terminology.
    - borski 7y ago
      You followed it up by "whatever the fuck that means," implying that you were unclear on what 'gifted' (or the opposite thereof) meant in the first place. I wasn't looking to get into a debate on what it means to be gifted or not, and thus I was making it very clear that I was using your verbiage, and not being disparaging.
- downerending 7y ago
  No one deserves to be bullied. And I'd be pretty okay with permanently removing bullies from the general population. That said, in my experience, the gifted/nerdy/aspy kids got the lion's share of the bullying. I still carry it with me decades later, and at least one of my comrades in misery killed herself because of it.
  - seamyb88 7y ago
sudosteph 7y ago
Middle school is just terrible in general, I think. Not that high school is much better. But middle school was easily the worst part of my life, though in retrospect I'm thankful it at least wasn't physical bullying. Still, the emotional toll messed me up pretty good. In my case, I still got bundled in with the "high achievers" in the IB honors program in HS, but it wasn't any better for self-esteem. The kids in that program weren't genuinely smarter or nicer for the most part - they just had parents who were wealthier and able to afford tutors/extra-curriculars plus stable home environments. The teachers in that program were incredibly unaccommodating to disabilities and there was a sickening elitism that the IB kids has towards everyone not in IB. The "normal" kids weren't the ones making me miserable, it was my peers. I eventually couldn't take existing in that state, and the toll it all took on my mental health came to it's reasonable conclusion in the form of self-directed violence. Eventually transferred schools. Almost dropped out, but found a loophole that let me take some community college classes for credit and graduate a semester early, so I still got through. Took me a long time to get perspective on all that. My only long-term friends I still have today from HS were from electives - they were skipping class and smoking up in HS. I never considered that option for myself (did no drugs at all back then), since I wasn't really interested in "coping" so much as getting out. But still, I don't think being separated helped at all. Sure I passed every test, but I was socially out of my depth the entire time. Just being surrounded by other young people in general can be a recipe for misery for people who can't fit in. I'd like to think online school would have been better, but not sure if being completely isolated would have just messed me up more in the long run. Edit: left out a key word, "physical" bullying. There was definitely tons of the other sort.
tyjen 7y ago
This anecdote resonates with the experiences encountered by my child. What's interesting about our case is that we move every 2-4 years and experience five different states and school districts--all public schools. For reference, our child ordinarily tests in the 99th percentile for the normal battery of tests the school psychologists administered. A Hawaiian school did not offer a G&T program due to a lack of funding for it. Participating in the normal classroom changed her to the point that it contributed to withdrawing her from school and we instead opted to home school. Coming from the mainland, Hawaii's general curriculum was behind and she became bored, faced relentless bullying from peers for being a "...know it all haole...," and found it difficult to make friends. She often came home with stories regarding the teacher spending significant time dealing with behavioral issues, negatively impacting instruction to the few children looking to learn. The teacher was also culpable for practicing a less engaging and micromanaging teaching style involving smothering children with worksheets during the school day, and forcing parents to initial all assignments and fill out learning logs at night. The teacher treated learning like a chore instead of a fun discovery process, and it killed her curiosity and motivation. After she was assaulted at her bus stop, we pulled her from school. Fortunately, we only lived in Hawaii for a short time period and I was capable of taking a hiatus from professional life to home school her until we moved from Hawaii. We involved her in local home school groups to facilitate like-minded friendships and the customized, self-paced curriculum enabled her to make substantial strides in her subjects. Thankfully the damage done to her was temporary and she resumed her happy normal curious behavior. In every other school with a G&T program, she has fit in and flourished. Good teachers, friends, and personal growth on her part. Not acknowledging that people have different aptitudes and motivations, then forcing them to learn from a cookie-cutter styled teaching program is a defunct social experiment gone awry. In our Hawaii case, it seemed like crabs in a bucket when it came to peer bullying. I get it, you're only as strong as your weak is a decent metaphor, but sometimes people and institutions are taking this concept to a degree that forces others down instead of boosting people up. I'm just guessing from personal experiences, but mixing students of all abilities appears to generate a net negative social welfare outcome.
nitrogen 7y ago
Everyone advocating for forced abolition of private schools and high-wealth public districts needs to read this thread. Hits too close to home. Bullying and peer pressure cause serious harm, not just emotionally but economically when good kids drop out of society. These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Bullying and peer pressure cause serious harm, not just emotionally but economically when good kids drop out of society. These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape. That's perhaps a good argument for having smaller free-and-equally-funded public schools with more within any given radius of every residence, with policies that leverage that to provide greater permitted and practical choice for students/parents independent of wealth, but unless freedom from bullying and peer pressure is desired to be gated by wealth I don't see how it opposes, in any way, abolition of either private schools or public districts with superior funding because the local residents are richer.
- rtpg 7y ago
  > These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape. The idea isn't to just get rid of private schools, but to take money that goes into that and finance better public education (which can still include ways for people to move around if needed!) Having a separate world for the rich means that kids who "don't fit in with the crowd" but don't have wealthy parents won't have any way out. In an alternate world where more money is invested in the public system, having wealth would no longer be a necessary requirement for having access to alternatives.
kazinator 7y ago
People separate as they go through life, and that should start in school. You shouldn't have to wait until you graduate.
pdonis 7y ago
> I wish I had been better separated from the other kids. I would have been far happier in middle school just hanging around other nice, smart people. As someone who had both experiences--being in classes that were separated for more advanced students, and being in classes that were not--I second this observation. I was much happier in the separated classes and got much more out of them.
zebraflask 7y ago
I think the tenor of what you're trying to express is that smart kids shouldn't be abused for being smart. Not a controversial opinion. Making them unnecessarily cut off from everyone else who isn't quite as "gifted" is worse, in a way. How is that kid going to get out of his/her bubble?
- spc476 7y ago
  I was part of the "gifted crowd" from 5th grade (9-10 years old) up, and not all of my classes were of the "gifted" variety.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  The thing about "bubbles" is they are inherently normist based on population or status with nothing backing their actual validity. They are recipocial no matter how fucked up the objective differences are. "Man what kind of fucked up bubble are you in if you think burrying or burning your grandma instead of eating her is normal?". To be frank we already let social norms over reason lead us into enough nightmares and stupid decisions - we shouldn't be encouraging them.
mynegation 7y ago
I started school in Russia in 80s. Back then there were no magnet schools in my small home town but now I realize that the ministry of education came up with a different solution to a bullying problem: a dedicated school for “special needs” children. I do not remember anyone being sent there for bad marks but repeated behavioral offenses would get you there. All the potential bullies were scared shitless to be sent there. It is one thing to be a bully and the strongest guy in the class and totally different to be in the class full of people exactly like you.
- Tade0 7y ago
  We (still) have the same thing in Poland. Interestingly, people actually graduate from these schools and sometimes go to college afterwards. I think it's a better system - why make the victim switch schools when obviously they aren't the problem here?
jancsika 7y ago
> Separating gifted children for accelerated learning is great. Ignoring social development by blindly sticking all kids together in unstructured environments where bullying and physical abuse is allowed to persist will override any hope for some kids. I had no idea that calls to public_policy return type bool.
rowanG077 7y ago
Your points don't have much to do with being gifted though. Is it fine if "normal" kids get physically assaulted and bullied?
mumblemumble 7y ago
I find this argument uncompelling insofar as "smart" is a crap proxy for "needs protection from bullying". And, insofar as kids who aren't particularly bright have every bit as much of a right to not be mistreated at school, if our key motivation here is keeping kids from being bullied, a solution that is only available to a select few kids who are sometimes perceived as having greater personal worth would be entirely missing the point. Bullying needs to be dealt with in a way that works for everyone.
- LaLaLand122 7y ago
  This! And as I did mention in another comment I still can barely believe the cases of bullying people describe here, they are horrible! I don't think bullying at such a level is a global problem. I suspect such huge bullying problems must be just a symptom of a deeper society issue. We had a kid with Down syndrome in class for 8 years of primary school and nobody did EVER put a finger on him. By 12 years old I had known my classmates my whole live, quite a few of them also from activities outside school. I didn't like all of them, we had arguments which were not always handled diplomatically, but we had some basic decency towards each other. Bullying and whether kids should be separated by ability are two orthogonal problems.

widowlark 7y ago

I hope all is well now, thanks for sharing.

borski 7y ago

Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a world of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked. Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actually just learn, and not have to hide my report card or test scores as soon as I got them, because doing "too well" meant a beatdown after school. 2/3 of my MIT admission essays were about this experience, incidentally. [edit 1] Aside: one additional anecdote is that I was constantly getting in trouble before Stuy; I was always bored, because the work was easy, and nobody ever gave me additional work to do, so I would talk to the other kids. I was always an extrovert, and very bad at being bored; I could not sit in one place and just stare at the wall, or pretend to listen to a teacher drone on about some geometry thing I already knew. So I got in trouble constantly for distracting the other kids. That stopped in Stuy, because I wasn't bored; I was challenged. [edit 2] The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb.

spurgu 7y ago
Reading this and the parent post makes me think that prisons are actually kind of like elementary school except for adults. Same kind of bullying, establishing pecking order, repercussions of snitching etc. Although a lot more dangerous/scary.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked Can't we fix bullying in the first place ?
- eloff 7y ago
  I wonder if it's better in old style schools not segmented by age. Then faster physical development gives much less of an advantage, and the immature younger students can have their behavior moderated by the older, hopefully more mature students. And older siblings can watch out for younger ones.
  - Filligree 7y ago
    Every study I've ever read says this is much better.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Lots of child psychologists and teachers believe that parental involvement is key to stopping a child becoming a bully (eg parents actively engaging with their kids welfare) and the most common thing that stops parents being involved in bringing up their kids is poverty. Trying to fix poverty is weirdly controversial.
  - jcims 7y ago
    Is there some kind of consensus that bullies are predominately poor? Even if thats true on a quantitative basis, the bullies that count are the ones with social standing.

adamnemecek 7y ago

How old are you?

nostrademons 7y ago

I have a life story similar to you up through middle-school - second pick for G&T, bullied heavily, repeated physical abuse from peers, ended up hanging out with losers who were into drugs both in middle & high school. After that it diverges though - I switched to a charter school for high school, went to a top liberal arts college, then worked at a couple startups and had a pretty prestigious position at Google. I've still got some scars from that time, but on paper at least, I did okay. For me, being separated from the bullies made all the difference in the world. And it wasn't separation as in "hang around only with other smart kids" - my charter school was academically worse than the public school that I left behind, and like I said, I hung around with the stoners, rockers, and drop-outs. But the charter school focused explicitly on building community and accepting people for who they were. In short, it made it a point to address the emotional needs of teenagers that so many public institutions conveniently forget about. That made all the difference in the world. For you - if you can muster the money or get insurance to pay for it, I'd highly recommend seeing a therapist that works with trauma. This stuff sticks with you a long time, but it doesn't have to define your life.

kick 7y ago
I'm currently not in a position to be able to look up this stuff (making dinner), but Duke has done a lot of research on this stuff under their TIP program that basically everyone in this thread might be interested in: it validates your experiences in numbers as the default for gifted children/adolescents/teenagers when not helped structurally, and provides a reasonable amount of information and resources to try and offset some of their suffering. There's nothing to really help people who've already experienced it, but seeing the numbers somehow really helped to put it in perspective for me. It's kind of an epidemic at this point.
- gct 7y ago
  I was in TIP. Hanging out with smart, kind kids every summer was the highlight of my year. Lotta great memories. Public school...not so much.
  - 7y ago

faceplanted 7y ago

I've been reading this thread and honestly I'm getting the impression that it matters far more what the kids are separated _from_ that whether they're separated at all. Which tallies with my own experience, in the UK there's secondary school and college (AKA sixth form) before university, which basically means the last two years of high school are separate from the first 5, you go to a different school (sometimes, some places have both on the same campus). And I made the choice to go to a college further out of my way that added 10 hours of cycling onto my commute every week pretty much so I'd never have to speak to anyone from my secondary again, the new place was just another college, no special grade requirements, but not being around the same people and being able to basically "reset" made my life so much better that I can't really argue that never separating kids is a good option.

seamyb88 7y ago

Sounds like you have some real problems in your society for that bad experience at school. Surely if you're the gifted individual you claim you are, you'll want to change society rather than seclude yourself from it as much as you can get away with. The non-gifted kids, whatever the fuck that means, don't deserve to bullied/abused either.

borski 7y ago
The non-gifted kids (to use your terminology) weren't bullied or abused. They were friends. They played sports together. I played sports too, just not with them, because I wasn't invited to. I wasn't 'cool.' I 'tried too hard.' I 'cared too much about learning.' Not sure what you're going for here?
- seamyb88 7y ago
  I added a "non" to the word in the title of the post to indicate the opposite of that thing. But my terminology.
  - borski 7y ago
    You followed it up by "whatever the fuck that means," implying that you were unclear on what 'gifted' (or the opposite thereof) meant in the first place. I wasn't looking to get into a debate on what it means to be gifted or not, and thus I was making it very clear that I was using your verbiage, and not being disparaging.
downerending 7y ago
No one deserves to be bullied. And I'd be pretty okay with permanently removing bullies from the general population. That said, in my experience, the gifted/nerdy/aspy kids got the lion's share of the bullying. I still carry it with me decades later, and at least one of my comrades in misery killed herself because of it.
- seamyb88 7y ago

sudosteph 7y ago

Middle school is just terrible in general, I think. Not that high school is much better. But middle school was easily the worst part of my life, though in retrospect I'm thankful it at least wasn't physical bullying. Still, the emotional toll messed me up pretty good. In my case, I still got bundled in with the "high achievers" in the IB honors program in HS, but it wasn't any better for self-esteem. The kids in that program weren't genuinely smarter or nicer for the most part - they just had parents who were wealthier and able to afford tutors/extra-curriculars plus stable home environments. The teachers in that program were incredibly unaccommodating to disabilities and there was a sickening elitism that the IB kids has towards everyone not in IB. The "normal" kids weren't the ones making me miserable, it was my peers. I eventually couldn't take existing in that state, and the toll it all took on my mental health came to it's reasonable conclusion in the form of self-directed violence. Eventually transferred schools. Almost dropped out, but found a loophole that let me take some community college classes for credit and graduate a semester early, so I still got through. Took me a long time to get perspective on all that. My only long-term friends I still have today from HS were from electives - they were skipping class and smoking up in HS. I never considered that option for myself (did no drugs at all back then), since I wasn't really interested in "coping" so much as getting out. But still, I don't think being separated helped at all. Sure I passed every test, but I was socially out of my depth the entire time. Just being surrounded by other young people in general can be a recipe for misery for people who can't fit in. I'd like to think online school would have been better, but not sure if being completely isolated would have just messed me up more in the long run. Edit: left out a key word, "physical" bullying. There was definitely tons of the other sort.

tyjen 7y ago

This anecdote resonates with the experiences encountered by my child. What's interesting about our case is that we move every 2-4 years and experience five different states and school districts--all public schools. For reference, our child ordinarily tests in the 99th percentile for the normal battery of tests the school psychologists administered. A Hawaiian school did not offer a G&T program due to a lack of funding for it. Participating in the normal classroom changed her to the point that it contributed to withdrawing her from school and we instead opted to home school. Coming from the mainland, Hawaii's general curriculum was behind and she became bored, faced relentless bullying from peers for being a "...know it all haole...," and found it difficult to make friends. She often came home with stories regarding the teacher spending significant time dealing with behavioral issues, negatively impacting instruction to the few children looking to learn. The teacher was also culpable for practicing a less engaging and micromanaging teaching style involving smothering children with worksheets during the school day, and forcing parents to initial all assignments and fill out learning logs at night. The teacher treated learning like a chore instead of a fun discovery process, and it killed her curiosity and motivation. After she was assaulted at her bus stop, we pulled her from school. Fortunately, we only lived in Hawaii for a short time period and I was capable of taking a hiatus from professional life to home school her until we moved from Hawaii. We involved her in local home school groups to facilitate like-minded friendships and the customized, self-paced curriculum enabled her to make substantial strides in her subjects. Thankfully the damage done to her was temporary and she resumed her happy normal curious behavior. In every other school with a G&T program, she has fit in and flourished. Good teachers, friends, and personal growth on her part. Not acknowledging that people have different aptitudes and motivations, then forcing them to learn from a cookie-cutter styled teaching program is a defunct social experiment gone awry. In our Hawaii case, it seemed like crabs in a bucket when it came to peer bullying. I get it, you're only as strong as your weak is a decent metaphor, but sometimes people and institutions are taking this concept to a degree that forces others down instead of boosting people up. I'm just guessing from personal experiences, but mixing students of all abilities appears to generate a net negative social welfare outcome.

nitrogen 7y ago

Everyone advocating for forced abolition of private schools and high-wealth public districts needs to read this thread. Hits too close to home. Bullying and peer pressure cause serious harm, not just emotionally but economically when good kids drop out of society. These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Bullying and peer pressure cause serious harm, not just emotionally but economically when good kids drop out of society. These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape. That's perhaps a good argument for having smaller free-and-equally-funded public schools with more within any given radius of every residence, with policies that leverage that to provide greater permitted and practical choice for students/parents independent of wealth, but unless freedom from bullying and peer pressure is desired to be gated by wealth I don't see how it opposes, in any way, abolition of either private schools or public districts with superior funding because the local residents are richer.
rtpg 7y ago
> These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape. The idea isn't to just get rid of private schools, but to take money that goes into that and finance better public education (which can still include ways for people to move around if needed!) Having a separate world for the rich means that kids who "don't fit in with the crowd" but don't have wealthy parents won't have any way out. In an alternate world where more money is invested in the public system, having wealth would no longer be a necessary requirement for having access to alternatives.

kazinator 7y ago

People separate as they go through life, and that should start in school. You shouldn't have to wait until you graduate.

pdonis 7y ago

> I wish I had been better separated from the other kids. I would have been far happier in middle school just hanging around other nice, smart people. As someone who had both experiences--being in classes that were separated for more advanced students, and being in classes that were not--I second this observation. I was much happier in the separated classes and got much more out of them.

zebraflask 7y ago

I think the tenor of what you're trying to express is that smart kids shouldn't be abused for being smart. Not a controversial opinion. Making them unnecessarily cut off from everyone else who isn't quite as "gifted" is worse, in a way. How is that kid going to get out of his/her bubble?

spc476 7y ago
I was part of the "gifted crowd" from 5th grade (9-10 years old) up, and not all of my classes were of the "gifted" variety.
Nasrudith 7y ago
The thing about "bubbles" is they are inherently normist based on population or status with nothing backing their actual validity. They are recipocial no matter how fucked up the objective differences are. "Man what kind of fucked up bubble are you in if you think burrying or burning your grandma instead of eating her is normal?". To be frank we already let social norms over reason lead us into enough nightmares and stupid decisions - we shouldn't be encouraging them.

mynegation 7y ago

I started school in Russia in 80s. Back then there were no magnet schools in my small home town but now I realize that the ministry of education came up with a different solution to a bullying problem: a dedicated school for “special needs” children. I do not remember anyone being sent there for bad marks but repeated behavioral offenses would get you there. All the potential bullies were scared shitless to be sent there. It is one thing to be a bully and the strongest guy in the class and totally different to be in the class full of people exactly like you.

Tade0 7y ago
We (still) have the same thing in Poland. Interestingly, people actually graduate from these schools and sometimes go to college afterwards. I think it's a better system - why make the victim switch schools when obviously they aren't the problem here?

jancsika 7y ago

> Separating gifted children for accelerated learning is great. Ignoring social development by blindly sticking all kids together in unstructured environments where bullying and physical abuse is allowed to persist will override any hope for some kids. I had no idea that calls to public_policy return type bool.

rowanG077 7y ago

Your points don't have much to do with being gifted though. Is it fine if "normal" kids get physically assaulted and bullied?

mumblemumble 7y ago

I find this argument uncompelling insofar as "smart" is a crap proxy for "needs protection from bullying". And, insofar as kids who aren't particularly bright have every bit as much of a right to not be mistreated at school, if our key motivation here is keeping kids from being bullied, a solution that is only available to a select few kids who are sometimes perceived as having greater personal worth would be entirely missing the point. Bullying needs to be dealt with in a way that works for everyone.

LaLaLand122 7y ago
This! And as I did mention in another comment I still can barely believe the cases of bullying people describe here, they are horrible! I don't think bullying at such a level is a global problem. I suspect such huge bullying problems must be just a symptom of a deeper society issue. We had a kid with Down syndrome in class for 8 years of primary school and nobody did EVER put a finger on him. By 12 years old I had known my classmates my whole live, quite a few of them also from activities outside school. I didn't like all of them, we had arguments which were not always handled diplomatically, but we had some basic decency towards each other. Bullying and whether kids should be separated by ability are two orthogonal problems.