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There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childc

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and ours. Theirs, because if you’re going to be in school you should be challenged, and ours because they’d be able to start their professional lives earlier or with substantially more education, and hopefully skills.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
That's also why you practically never hear about anyone being left behind a grade. From the start of kindergarten to the end of high school, the everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it. I can't remember a single exception. In what other areas do the fastest and slowest do 13 years of work at nearly the exact same pace? The only difference allowed seems to be in AP classes, which are pretty limited in availability. If you imagine AP classes and stuff like that making maybe 2 years of difference in what you're actually taught, that's still putting everyone within 15% of each other.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  > everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it Couldn't be further from the truth in Germany at least. While in my school days (primary, middle, high) this carried a huge stigma, nowadays there are some regions (think "states") that have a system where primary school "takes as long as it takes" for every child. Basically, for i in range(3): school_year(kid) if kid.is_ready(): break
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I went to school in Germany met exactly one person who had to repeat a year. School in Germany is different in every state, you can't really generalize, but I don't think many children have to repeat a year
    - ido 6y ago
      I know several kids of friends of mine in Berlin and Vienna who repeat or have repeated classes. And these were not dumb kids, if anything I'd have guessed they are at or above average intelligence.
- qppo 6y ago
  It's sort of a "least bad" option. As in harms the least number of people. Schools are already struggling to handle incoming class sizes, they don't have the bandwidth to increase any throughput by holding older students back. To do so would be to the detriment of those incoming students and the teachers. (There's a good short scene in the Wire that sums it up but I can't find it). The problem isn't really that students don't get held back, it's that there is no capacity in the system to handle cases where someone should be held back. Almost across the board. I went to an affluent public school in the suburbs of a major city, and their solution wasn't to hold kids back. It was to differentiate enough between accelerated and decelerated programs to where they could essentially shovel the poor performing kids into a bucket where they wouldn't bother too many teachers or other students. I don't know the ethics of that. A lot of those kids I knew wound up dead from opiates, in jail, or still at home.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  Never hearing of a single person being let back sounds more like you grew up in a school district where the parents were wealthy or powerful enough to cause a big enough fuss that their kids were never left back. The practice seems less common but even if you're isolated in a gifted track of a school you'll still come across the kids who aren't in most programs.
- Xelbair 6y ago
  I remember a single exception. My friend was left behind because he literally skipped 400-ish hours in half year... for a 3 semesters in row.
enchiridion 6y ago
I agree. How do we change it?
- taneq 6y ago
  Fund education sufficiently that "No Child Left Behind" doesn't turn into "No Child Allowed Ahead".
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    And why do you assume that this is the sort of problem that can be solved with funding? Maybe we'd be better off with average classes of 60 plus putting students with others matching their skill levels, or some other orthogonal move. If I'm remembering correctly, school performance by state is basically uncorrelated with spending.
    - taneq 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure outcomes are inversely correlated with class size. That's why people pay for individual tuition. Smaller class sizes necessarily cost more per student. It's not a huge leap to conclude that more money per student spent on reducing class sizes will improve outcomes across the board. What happens, though, is that money is spent on small group or individual lessons for the special ed kids while any kid who's capable of doing so is left to fend for themselves.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    In the US spending per student on K-12 education has tripled since 1970. Achievement has been flat[1]. There’s no shortage of money. Practically unlimited education funding has limited effects on results[2]. It’s structural change that’s needed, like acceleration for all. [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/school-funding-system-not-broken-it-just-doesnt-work https://www.cato.org/blog/school-funding-system-not-broken-i... [2] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-costly-educational-failure https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-c...
    - 6y ago
HenryKissinger 6y ago
Counterpoint: the general level of maturity of an individual, and in particular their emotional maturity and their social maturity, do not strongly correlate with their intellectual maturity. Someone may be advanced enough to graduate at 18 with a bachelor's degree in a technically challenging field, but lack enough self-discipline, sense of responsibilities, or basic social graces and knowledge of social codes to realize their full potential. They might also feel alienated from their older peers. By moving through the education system at the same speed as their normal peers, they have more time to construct their personalities and learn what they really want to do later in life.
- apsec112 6y ago
  When I was a teenager, I felt much less alienated from adults than I did from high school students, who lived in a weird, artificial, often hostile social bubble with rules unlike anywhere else: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
- georgeburdell 6y ago
  Does any of that matter if they move through the system faster if they ultimately, as the abstract suggests, don't suffer psychologically by age 50? Whether they're "socialized" seems unrelated to whether they find personal happiness.
- njovin 6y ago
  One could also argue that emotionally mature(er) students have their emotional growth stunted by being forced to study and socialize with the less mature students.
- pariahHN 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be done with accelerated individuals not experiencing that school environment - just expand existing dual-credit systems and make it possible to spend your four high school years doing dual credit for the entire common core curriculum in your normal high school environment. That alone would probably make a huge difference. Not sure what the equivalent for trades would look like, I don't know enough about the academic process for those. But my high school had an auto shop, so it would be doable in at least one place for at least one trade. Academic progression does not necessarily have to be tied in lockstep with social development.
austinl 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree, and came out so disillusioned with the public education system that I'm struggling to decide what the right answer will be for my children. I understand that many kids are not this way, but I was the type that read physics textbooks while in elementary school. We had a mentorship program that paired kids with someone from two grades above (e.g. 1st graders with 3rd graders). My reading level was always higher than my mentors' and it made me furious (and probably insufferable). I feel like my entire time in school was spent getting it out of the way so I could study things that genuinely interested me. I would love for my children to not feel that same constraint, but instead feel free to go deeper at their own pace. I'd recommend this talk by Sir Ken Robinson on this topic generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
- bamboozled 6y ago
  Have you considered this is a problem that's pretty specific to you and what while your experience might suck. It also sucks for kids who can't read well, period. I think while schooling is far from ideal, most kids aren't reading physics books in elementary school. Many kids are struggling to cope on several different fronts.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Have you considered that the psychological effects on said children are not ignorable even if there is only a small minority of them?
    - bamboozled 6y ago
      Sure, I'm saying that it goes both ways.
      - TomMarius 6y ago
        I think everyone in this discussion recognizes that and in no way has tried to suggest anything different. Here we are talking about the unusual children and their (different from most others AND each other) needs.
avs733 6y ago
another perspective would be the education is about more than just cognitive development...
colechristensen 6y ago
I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing. From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do things which were to me trivially easy. There was this constant social distance and having to put on a sort of mask in order to interact with my "peers". At the same time everyone around me was always telling me how smart I was. Everything was easy until it wasn't and my subconscious was simply unprepared to cope with not everything being trivial and socially making it very hard to actually be myself around people because of this very strongly built in assumption that nobody cares about what I think in conversation (amongst other things) so that I simply couldn't think of anything to say. The struggle is real and never really has gone away.
- MaximumYComb 6y ago
  I was identified in middle primary school and had to change school to attend another school that had a class for gifted children. I proceeded to take the top grades at that class. I finished primary school close to my 12th birthday, years ahead in basically every category. There was no option to continue in any program for high school so I was sent to the local high school, an impoverished school where the majority of the effort goes to controlling poor behaviour as opposed to education. The solution of the school was to just let me stay in a normal class doing not a great deal of learning for a few years. I spent some very unhappy years between ~15 and 24. I wish I'd had the chance for a different youth. EDIT: unhappy, not happy
  - dhshahsndeisjwn 6y ago
    > n impoverished school where the majority of the effort goes to controlling poor behaviour I think this is the real issue, irrespective of 'gifted' status. I failed the 11+ in the UK but spent my entire teenage years bored out of my mind and in fear for my physical safety. At 16 I switched to a school where classes were less chaotic and thrived. I graduated with a high 2:1 from Cambridge, so although I'm not 'gifted' in any precocious sense, and probably wouldn't have been picked up by these programmes, I was capable of some kind of academic achievement. The focus on one end of the bell curve who visibly suffer more than others in the middle obscures the real problem: public schools are underfunded and understaffed. There's a reason why private education provides class sizes of 10-15: At that level teachers are _able_ to respond to the individual needs of all children. Hiving off <5% into special classes for gifted might be good for those children, but it is socially regressive and ignores the problem for those who remain in sink schools.
lordnacho 6y ago
I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resources. When I was a kid, you wouldn't even know that physics was a thing until quite late in your education, and you'd need quite the motivator to go to a library to see what exactly it was. Why not make it so that every kid who wanted to learn something could start crawling that ladder at their own pace? Kids who want to learn math can spend more time on that and advance, kids who want to write poetry can learn about that, and so on. What is the rationale for keeping everyone together, other than timetabling issues? I'm sure you can develop soft skills without having to do it with people who happen to be in the same ability level. Everyone knew a kid who was extraordinary at sports, but that didn't seem to stop them being friends with everyone. Likewise any other skill. I was quite fortunate to have a math teacher who gave me extra classes, out me on the math team, and pushed me up a year. Without that I might have gotten bored.
- dgellow 6y ago
  > I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. Just a guess: as far as I understood US parents are very good at lobbying schools administration, and a lot of them would hate to see that some kids are smarter or more advanced than theirs. Now regarding your ladder idea, in some cantons in Switzerland and some Bundesländer in Germany the school system is split in 3 lanes: - a "gymnasium" lane that prepares you for university, mostly focused on theory and go further into technical topics - a "general" lane that prepares you for white collar apprenticeships, more general knowledge courses - a "labour" lane that prepares you for blue collar apprenticeships, provide more practical courses and learning support Lane names don't really matter as they are different from place to place, but that's the general idea. Also apprenticeships opportunities are not locked based on the lane you went to, that's just the general idea. And you have multiple ways to move from one lane to another at any point during your school life if you don't fit for some reasons, with some conditions (for example you need quite good grades to move from "general" to "gymnasium"). The difference I've seen between the Swiss and German approach is how early kids are split. In my swiss canton that was after our 6th grade, so roughly at around 13 year old. In Germany that's around 10 year old. PS: keep in mind that both Switzerland and Germany have high level of autonomy for cantons/Bundesländers, so things can be drastically different from place to place.
zozbot234 6y ago
> There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality "It's harder to manage" is an argument against it. The gold standard is mastery learning (everyone learning at their own pace, separately for every subject; and true mastery is expected before you move on to something that builds on previous learning), which includes acceleration as a special case but also allows proper "deceleration" for those who need some thorough catch up.
jstewartmobile 6y ago
be careful what you wish for. per GBS: "all professions are conspiracies against the laity"
mathattack 6y ago
It’s an economics and policy issue. K-12 schools are measured on bringing kids up to grade level. They aren’t measured on getting kids ahead once they’ve met minimum standards. Based on how we measure and invent them, it’s more efficient to invest in pulling kids up from the bottom. (This isn’t an unworthy social goal, just adds work to parents of gifted kids)
currymj 6y ago
consider it from an alternative perspective — sending a 14 year old to grad school to get their PhD by 20 is putting them in a 60-hour-a-week high pressure job that causes mental breakdowns in many adults. i don’t doubt that academic acceleration has many advantages for smart kids but i do not think “getting” to give up your teenage years for a few extra years of high pressure work is one of them.
- _archon_ 6y ago
  I propose that a 20 year old phd will have many options open to them, including taking an easy job and spending their own time on an interesting hobby. If a person can be educated with the information and methods to succeed, they should be better able to interact with the world. Slowing down a person with the potential to finish formal education so that they can spend more time being spoonfed isn't going to improve their chances. Also, if one chooses a grinding slog of a job, it's better to be a 20-year-old phd. Presumably, they're getting paid well, and they can start on their early retirement fund from better positions vis a vis a generic 20 year old. I am unconvinced by your argument.
brightball 6y ago
I’ve always felt like the answer to this is many smaller schools that are more peer oriented, rather than large community schools. Combined with large community wide after school / sports programs. This is actually similar to the home school model now where home school students can participate in sports. Home school groups are figuring this out too. I always assumed home schooling was just being taught by your parents but seeing how some of these groups work to form small schools of about 20 people is impressive.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

That's also why you practically never hear about anyone being left behind a grade. From the start of kindergarten to the end of high school, the everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it. I can't remember a single exception. In what other areas do the fastest and slowest do 13 years of work at nearly the exact same pace? The only difference allowed seems to be in AP classes, which are pretty limited in availability. If you imagine AP classes and stuff like that making maybe 2 years of difference in what you're actually taught, that's still putting everyone within 15% of each other.

black_puppydog 6y ago
> everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it Couldn't be further from the truth in Germany at least. While in my school days (primary, middle, high) this carried a huge stigma, nowadays there are some regions (think "states") that have a system where primary school "takes as long as it takes" for every child. Basically, for i in range(3): school_year(kid) if kid.is_ready(): break
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianN 6y ago
  I went to school in Germany met exactly one person who had to repeat a year. School in Germany is different in every state, you can't really generalize, but I don't think many children have to repeat a year
  - ido 6y ago
    I know several kids of friends of mine in Berlin and Vienna who repeat or have repeated classes. And these were not dumb kids, if anything I'd have guessed they are at or above average intelligence.
qppo 6y ago
It's sort of a "least bad" option. As in harms the least number of people. Schools are already struggling to handle incoming class sizes, they don't have the bandwidth to increase any throughput by holding older students back. To do so would be to the detriment of those incoming students and the teachers. (There's a good short scene in the Wire that sums it up but I can't find it). The problem isn't really that students don't get held back, it's that there is no capacity in the system to handle cases where someone should be held back. Almost across the board. I went to an affluent public school in the suburbs of a major city, and their solution wasn't to hold kids back. It was to differentiate enough between accelerated and decelerated programs to where they could essentially shovel the poor performing kids into a bucket where they wouldn't bother too many teachers or other students. I don't know the ethics of that. A lot of those kids I knew wound up dead from opiates, in jail, or still at home.
Larrikin 6y ago
Never hearing of a single person being let back sounds more like you grew up in a school district where the parents were wealthy or powerful enough to cause a big enough fuss that their kids were never left back. The practice seems less common but even if you're isolated in a gifted track of a school you'll still come across the kids who aren't in most programs.
Xelbair 6y ago
I remember a single exception. My friend was left behind because he literally skipped 400-ish hours in half year... for a 3 semesters in row.

enchiridion 6y ago

I agree. How do we change it?

taneq 6y ago
Fund education sufficiently that "No Child Left Behind" doesn't turn into "No Child Allowed Ahead".
- DuskStar 6y ago
  And why do you assume that this is the sort of problem that can be solved with funding? Maybe we'd be better off with average classes of 60 plus putting students with others matching their skill levels, or some other orthogonal move. If I'm remembering correctly, school performance by state is basically uncorrelated with spending.
  - taneq 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure outcomes are inversely correlated with class size. That's why people pay for individual tuition. Smaller class sizes necessarily cost more per student. It's not a huge leap to conclude that more money per student spent on reducing class sizes will improve outcomes across the board. What happens, though, is that money is spent on small group or individual lessons for the special ed kids while any kid who's capable of doing so is left to fend for themselves.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  In the US spending per student on K-12 education has tripled since 1970. Achievement has been flat[1]. There’s no shortage of money. Practically unlimited education funding has limited effects on results[2]. It’s structural change that’s needed, like acceleration for all. [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/school-funding-system-not-broken-it-just-doesnt-work https://www.cato.org/blog/school-funding-system-not-broken-i... [2] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-costly-educational-failure https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-c...
  - 6y ago

HenryKissinger 6y ago

Counterpoint: the general level of maturity of an individual, and in particular their emotional maturity and their social maturity, do not strongly correlate with their intellectual maturity. Someone may be advanced enough to graduate at 18 with a bachelor's degree in a technically challenging field, but lack enough self-discipline, sense of responsibilities, or basic social graces and knowledge of social codes to realize their full potential. They might also feel alienated from their older peers. By moving through the education system at the same speed as their normal peers, they have more time to construct their personalities and learn what they really want to do later in life.

apsec112 6y ago
When I was a teenager, I felt much less alienated from adults than I did from high school students, who lived in a weird, artificial, often hostile social bubble with rules unlike anywhere else: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
georgeburdell 6y ago
Does any of that matter if they move through the system faster if they ultimately, as the abstract suggests, don't suffer psychologically by age 50? Whether they're "socialized" seems unrelated to whether they find personal happiness.
njovin 6y ago
One could also argue that emotionally mature(er) students have their emotional growth stunted by being forced to study and socialize with the less mature students.
pariahHN 6y ago
It doesn't have to be done with accelerated individuals not experiencing that school environment - just expand existing dual-credit systems and make it possible to spend your four high school years doing dual credit for the entire common core curriculum in your normal high school environment. That alone would probably make a huge difference. Not sure what the equivalent for trades would look like, I don't know enough about the academic process for those. But my high school had an auto shop, so it would be doable in at least one place for at least one trade. Academic progression does not necessarily have to be tied in lockstep with social development.

austinl 6y ago

I wholeheartedly agree, and came out so disillusioned with the public education system that I'm struggling to decide what the right answer will be for my children. I understand that many kids are not this way, but I was the type that read physics textbooks while in elementary school. We had a mentorship program that paired kids with someone from two grades above (e.g. 1st graders with 3rd graders). My reading level was always higher than my mentors' and it made me furious (and probably insufferable). I feel like my entire time in school was spent getting it out of the way so I could study things that genuinely interested me. I would love for my children to not feel that same constraint, but instead feel free to go deeper at their own pace. I'd recommend this talk by Sir Ken Robinson on this topic generally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

bamboozled 6y ago
Have you considered this is a problem that's pretty specific to you and what while your experience might suck. It also sucks for kids who can't read well, period. I think while schooling is far from ideal, most kids aren't reading physics books in elementary school. Many kids are struggling to cope on several different fronts.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  Have you considered that the psychological effects on said children are not ignorable even if there is only a small minority of them?
  - bamboozled 6y ago
    Sure, I'm saying that it goes both ways.
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      I think everyone in this discussion recognizes that and in no way has tried to suggest anything different. Here we are talking about the unusual children and their (different from most others AND each other) needs.

avs733 6y ago

another perspective would be the education is about more than just cognitive development...

colechristensen 6y ago

I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing. From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do things which were to me trivially easy. There was this constant social distance and having to put on a sort of mask in order to interact with my "peers". At the same time everyone around me was always telling me how smart I was. Everything was easy until it wasn't and my subconscious was simply unprepared to cope with not everything being trivial and socially making it very hard to actually be myself around people because of this very strongly built in assumption that nobody cares about what I think in conversation (amongst other things) so that I simply couldn't think of anything to say. The struggle is real and never really has gone away.

MaximumYComb 6y ago
I was identified in middle primary school and had to change school to attend another school that had a class for gifted children. I proceeded to take the top grades at that class. I finished primary school close to my 12th birthday, years ahead in basically every category. There was no option to continue in any program for high school so I was sent to the local high school, an impoverished school where the majority of the effort goes to controlling poor behaviour as opposed to education. The solution of the school was to just let me stay in a normal class doing not a great deal of learning for a few years. I spent some very unhappy years between ~15 and 24. I wish I'd had the chance for a different youth. EDIT: unhappy, not happy
- dhshahsndeisjwn 6y ago
  > n impoverished school where the majority of the effort goes to controlling poor behaviour I think this is the real issue, irrespective of 'gifted' status. I failed the 11+ in the UK but spent my entire teenage years bored out of my mind and in fear for my physical safety. At 16 I switched to a school where classes were less chaotic and thrived. I graduated with a high 2:1 from Cambridge, so although I'm not 'gifted' in any precocious sense, and probably wouldn't have been picked up by these programmes, I was capable of some kind of academic achievement. The focus on one end of the bell curve who visibly suffer more than others in the middle obscures the real problem: public schools are underfunded and understaffed. There's a reason why private education provides class sizes of 10-15: At that level teachers are _able_ to respond to the individual needs of all children. Hiving off <5% into special classes for gifted might be good for those children, but it is socially regressive and ignores the problem for those who remain in sink schools.

lordnacho 6y ago

I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resources. When I was a kid, you wouldn't even know that physics was a thing until quite late in your education, and you'd need quite the motivator to go to a library to see what exactly it was. Why not make it so that every kid who wanted to learn something could start crawling that ladder at their own pace? Kids who want to learn math can spend more time on that and advance, kids who want to write poetry can learn about that, and so on. What is the rationale for keeping everyone together, other than timetabling issues? I'm sure you can develop soft skills without having to do it with people who happen to be in the same ability level. Everyone knew a kid who was extraordinary at sports, but that didn't seem to stop them being friends with everyone. Likewise any other skill. I was quite fortunate to have a math teacher who gave me extra classes, out me on the math team, and pushed me up a year. Without that I might have gotten bored.

dgellow 6y ago
> I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. Just a guess: as far as I understood US parents are very good at lobbying schools administration, and a lot of them would hate to see that some kids are smarter or more advanced than theirs. Now regarding your ladder idea, in some cantons in Switzerland and some Bundesländer in Germany the school system is split in 3 lanes: - a "gymnasium" lane that prepares you for university, mostly focused on theory and go further into technical topics - a "general" lane that prepares you for white collar apprenticeships, more general knowledge courses - a "labour" lane that prepares you for blue collar apprenticeships, provide more practical courses and learning support Lane names don't really matter as they are different from place to place, but that's the general idea. Also apprenticeships opportunities are not locked based on the lane you went to, that's just the general idea. And you have multiple ways to move from one lane to another at any point during your school life if you don't fit for some reasons, with some conditions (for example you need quite good grades to move from "general" to "gymnasium"). The difference I've seen between the Swiss and German approach is how early kids are split. In my swiss canton that was after our 6th grade, so roughly at around 13 year old. In Germany that's around 10 year old. PS: keep in mind that both Switzerland and Germany have high level of autonomy for cantons/Bundesländers, so things can be drastically different from place to place.

zozbot234 6y ago

> There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality "It's harder to manage" is an argument against it. The gold standard is mastery learning (everyone learning at their own pace, separately for every subject; and true mastery is expected before you move on to something that builds on previous learning), which includes acceleration as a special case but also allows proper "deceleration" for those who need some thorough catch up.

jstewartmobile 6y ago

be careful what you wish for. per GBS: "all professions are conspiracies against the laity"

mathattack 6y ago

It’s an economics and policy issue. K-12 schools are measured on bringing kids up to grade level. They aren’t measured on getting kids ahead once they’ve met minimum standards. Based on how we measure and invent them, it’s more efficient to invest in pulling kids up from the bottom. (This isn’t an unworthy social goal, just adds work to parents of gifted kids)

currymj 6y ago

consider it from an alternative perspective — sending a 14 year old to grad school to get their PhD by 20 is putting them in a 60-hour-a-week high pressure job that causes mental breakdowns in many adults. i don’t doubt that academic acceleration has many advantages for smart kids but i do not think “getting” to give up your teenage years for a few extra years of high pressure work is one of them.

_archon_ 6y ago
I propose that a 20 year old phd will have many options open to them, including taking an easy job and spending their own time on an interesting hobby. If a person can be educated with the information and methods to succeed, they should be better able to interact with the world. Slowing down a person with the potential to finish formal education so that they can spend more time being spoonfed isn't going to improve their chances. Also, if one chooses a grinding slog of a job, it's better to be a 20-year-old phd. Presumably, they're getting paid well, and they can start on their early retirement fund from better positions vis a vis a generic 20 year old. I am unconvinced by your argument.

brightball 6y ago

I’ve always felt like the answer to this is many smaller schools that are more peer oriented, rather than large community schools. Combined with large community wide after school / sports programs. This is actually similar to the home school model now where home school students can participate in sports. Home school groups are figuring this out too. I always assumed home schooling was just being taught by your parents but seeing how some of these groups work to form small schools of about 20 people is impressive.