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Mixed feelings about moves like this. Am a product of a related system in another city some decades ago. The pressure to "de-stream" students in education in ge

Mixed feelings about moves like this. Am a product of a related system in another city some decades ago. The pressure to "de-stream" students in education in general has been an ongoing controversy for decades. What bothers me about gifted programs is that they isolate the smartest kids from everyone else, and one can't help but think it's more to protect the system and everyone else from bored intelligent kids than to enrich their individual educations. IQ isn't a great proxy for much, but two or three standard deviations from the mean in populations of millions, you are likely dealing with different kinds of thinkers. The skills the programs emphasized are focused on abstraction and complex problem solving - and not leadership where they could scale to benefit everyone. This turns kids into talent who will ultimately work for and be managed by more average peers, which makes it a remedial program for socializing exceptional kids into functioning cogs. It's like inventing fusion reactor to plow fields, or an F1 car to sit in traffic. I get that enrichment in education is something they might not be able to get at home and the schools are providing it, but they're providing what the average of the education bureaucracy can be persuaded is right for smart people to do based on cliches about scientists and professions. There are good reasons to change how gifted programs operate, even putting phasing them out on the table, though the reasons in the article are ideological, which is practically the definition of what you have when you don't have experience - just the logic of an idea. NYC may do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and the benefits will be an unintentional side effect.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
How many of those leadership exercises would realistically carry over into IRL benefit after the students graduate? For that matter, how many G&T students would check out because they're focused on leadership rather than abstract problem solving?
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Leadership and management are like riding a bike in that you can teach children to do it, but if you never learned, it's likely you never will. Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill. I think giving that to exceptional 8-12yr olds is more valuable than exploring their creativity in an isolated class away from their peers. Few people ever get bored of leadership. The net return on teaching advanced individual problem solving compared to teaching smart kids to scale their skills with leadership has a massive delta. This is probably something you couldn't do in the public system, and you would need separate schools, and arguably this is what private schools already do. Policy wise, this is equivalent to vouchers, which are immensely controversial for the same reasons gifted education is, because they stream people into opportunity - or lack thereof, when they are still just kids. You're never going to teach kids enough to overthrow you, but if you don't, what are you really educating them to become?
  - kharak 5y ago
    This is quite interesting to me. How would you train children for leadership? And are there any successful training methods for adults? In the military, perhaps?
    - motohagiography 5y ago
      A two or three standard deviation intelligence kid can likely understand and benefit from the leadership training that someone 5-8 years older than they are gets. Camp counsellor training, mcdonalds restaurant management training, sports coach and instructor training, military cadet officer training, all programs designed for mean level intelligence people. You just need to give younger smarter kids access to them, and much earlier. Even just instead of merely teaching kids how to do something, teach them how to teach it while they are learning it. Like, "To do this interesting thing, we need to solve these problems to get there. Here's how to ski, or divide large numbers, we're going to space out the repetitions so your brain will become hungry for it, and when you are showing other people, you can use this method to help them understand faster. Smooth is fast, lazy is clever, etc."
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    > Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill This may be different depending on where you grew up, but in my memory, the top students were too busy with sports and band to get McLeadership training as a high schooler. At least the marching band nominally had section leader positions, but the reality was more so that the adults in the room made all the decisions and section leadership roles were purely titular for purposes of helping the scholarship applications in the college search.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

How many of those leadership exercises would realistically carry over into IRL benefit after the students graduate? For that matter, how many G&T students would check out because they're focused on leadership rather than abstract problem solving?

motohagiography 5y ago
Leadership and management are like riding a bike in that you can teach children to do it, but if you never learned, it's likely you never will. Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill. I think giving that to exceptional 8-12yr olds is more valuable than exploring their creativity in an isolated class away from their peers. Few people ever get bored of leadership. The net return on teaching advanced individual problem solving compared to teaching smart kids to scale their skills with leadership has a massive delta. This is probably something you couldn't do in the public system, and you would need separate schools, and arguably this is what private schools already do. Policy wise, this is equivalent to vouchers, which are immensely controversial for the same reasons gifted education is, because they stream people into opportunity - or lack thereof, when they are still just kids. You're never going to teach kids enough to overthrow you, but if you don't, what are you really educating them to become?
- kharak 5y ago
  This is quite interesting to me. How would you train children for leadership? And are there any successful training methods for adults? In the military, perhaps?
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    A two or three standard deviation intelligence kid can likely understand and benefit from the leadership training that someone 5-8 years older than they are gets. Camp counsellor training, mcdonalds restaurant management training, sports coach and instructor training, military cadet officer training, all programs designed for mean level intelligence people. You just need to give younger smarter kids access to them, and much earlier. Even just instead of merely teaching kids how to do something, teach them how to teach it while they are learning it. Like, "To do this interesting thing, we need to solve these problems to get there. Here's how to ski, or divide large numbers, we're going to space out the repetitions so your brain will become hungry for it, and when you are showing other people, you can use this method to help them understand faster. Smooth is fast, lazy is clever, etc."
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  > Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill This may be different depending on where you grew up, but in my memory, the top students were too busy with sports and band to get McLeadership training as a high schooler. At least the marching band nominally had section leader positions, but the reality was more so that the adults in the room made all the decisions and section leadership roles were purely titular for purposes of helping the scholarship applications in the college search.