5 ms·

"Gifted programs" are not objectively perfect tests of gifted-ness. They select for some fairly specific mix of traits/skills that a school district has chosen

"Gifted programs" are not objectively perfect tests of gifted-ness. They select for some fairly specific mix of traits/skills that a school district has chosen to call "gifted"; then, if you don't pass this arbitrary test, well then you are considered "not gifted." But this is wrong wrong wrong, so wrong that it's almost a trivial logical fallacy: just because most dogs have 4 legs, doesn't mean that all 4-legged animals are dogs, nor that a dog with 3 legs stops being a dog. Testing for "dog-ness" by counting 4 legs, is wrong. Likewise, just because a school district designs an arbitrary test of "gifted-ness", doesn't mean that all children who pass it are gifted, nor that children who don't pass it have no gifts. These tests cannot possibly capture the full range of human gifts. You are arguing a strawman that the person you replied to never stated. Yes exceptional people exist, this was never under debate and that poster did not claim otherwise. But "gifted" programs do not perfectly identify all exceptional people across all dimensions of exceptionality with universal perfect accuracy. Replacing "gifted" programs with accelerated learning programs could achieve the same goal of offering advanced learning for SOME exceptional students, without going through the fundamentally flawed and oversimplified binary sorting process that inaccurately labels all students as either "gifted" or "not gifted".

fighterpilot 5y ago
You're arguing that tests for intellectual ability aren't perfect, and they're therefore useless. This is a bad argument.
- politician 5y ago
  It's the same argument as for eliminating TAG programs: that no one should be accelerated because not everyone is accelerated. This seems like a distressingly common construction. Is it a logical fallacy? Does it have a name?
  - EEBio 5y ago
    False dillema or false dichotomy.[0] These arguments are built on the apparent either-or black-and-white setup, while in the reality, a range of possibilities exists. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    > Does it have a name? The word "jealousy" comes to my mind Maybe sometimes feelings, not logic underlies the arguments? And any logics was made up afterwards
thegrimmest 5y ago
I'm just not sure why we have to get so bent-out-of-shape about the naming of things. Whether someone is an "accelerated learning student" or "gifted" is a difference of the utmost minute semantics. Just because a gifted program doesn't perfectly identify students doesn't mean it's not a gifted program. Why have we become so terrified of assigning adjectives to people? Why can't a person be "smart" or "dumb" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "strong" or "weak" or "disabled" or "retarded"? Just because some of these things are subjective doesn't mean that they are useless. Why have we started to pay such close attention to the feelings of some people assigned to categories they don't care for? "gifted" is just a word to denote such a category. If people don't like being "not gifted" they will learn to dislike "non-accelerated learning student" just as well.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  What we name something is not semantics, it's a foundational component of how we view and shape the world around us. In a very real sense we are incapable of thinking of things without naming them and the name we give them informs how we think of them. Also, we are not 'terrified' of adjectives - we are 'terrified' of a world that is unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival. If our monkeybrains were unable to evolve social constructs allowing the cooperation and common action of more than 7 people we'd still be stone age apes barely capable of using tools. The key social "technology" that enables that is empathy with a monkey whose experience doesn't match the small tribe of individuals we're personally capable of caring about. It's an abstraction that enables everything else and it's important.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    > unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival I'm having a hard time parsing this, but I think you're arguing that the world is getting less empathetic, and therefore less cooperative? I disagree, and think the reverse is true. The more we can disregard emotions and work as cogs in a machine, the more productive we ultimately are. It's exactly this capability that allows us to cooperate in groups of many hundreds of thousands: the ability to interface with each other not as emotionally complex primates, but as executors of a function.

fighterpilot 5y ago

You're arguing that tests for intellectual ability aren't perfect, and they're therefore useless. This is a bad argument.

politician 5y ago
It's the same argument as for eliminating TAG programs: that no one should be accelerated because not everyone is accelerated. This seems like a distressingly common construction. Is it a logical fallacy? Does it have a name?
- EEBio 5y ago
  False dillema or false dichotomy.[0] These arguments are built on the apparent either-or black-and-white setup, while in the reality, a range of possibilities exists. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > Does it have a name? The word "jealousy" comes to my mind Maybe sometimes feelings, not logic underlies the arguments? And any logics was made up afterwards

thegrimmest 5y ago

I'm just not sure why we have to get so bent-out-of-shape about the naming of things. Whether someone is an "accelerated learning student" or "gifted" is a difference of the utmost minute semantics. Just because a gifted program doesn't perfectly identify students doesn't mean it's not a gifted program. Why have we become so terrified of assigning adjectives to people? Why can't a person be "smart" or "dumb" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "strong" or "weak" or "disabled" or "retarded"? Just because some of these things are subjective doesn't mean that they are useless. Why have we started to pay such close attention to the feelings of some people assigned to categories they don't care for? "gifted" is just a word to denote such a category. If people don't like being "not gifted" they will learn to dislike "non-accelerated learning student" just as well.

idiotsecant 5y ago
What we name something is not semantics, it's a foundational component of how we view and shape the world around us. In a very real sense we are incapable of thinking of things without naming them and the name we give them informs how we think of them. Also, we are not 'terrified' of adjectives - we are 'terrified' of a world that is unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival. If our monkeybrains were unable to evolve social constructs allowing the cooperation and common action of more than 7 people we'd still be stone age apes barely capable of using tools. The key social "technology" that enables that is empathy with a monkey whose experience doesn't match the small tribe of individuals we're personally capable of caring about. It's an abstraction that enables everything else and it's important.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  > unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival I'm having a hard time parsing this, but I think you're arguing that the world is getting less empathetic, and therefore less cooperative? I disagree, and think the reverse is true. The more we can disregard emotions and work as cogs in a machine, the more productive we ultimately are. It's exactly this capability that allows us to cooperate in groups of many hundreds of thousands: the ability to interface with each other not as emotionally complex primates, but as executors of a function.