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That has nothing to do with the question of whether there's such a thing as natural ability.
by csee 5y ago
That has nothing to do with the question of whether there's such a thing as natural ability.
- BeetleB 5y agoThe wider discussion is about how to structure public math education. If we're not going to connect it to the details of said education, then it is a moot point to discuss. Of all the things to evaluate the policy on, this is a real poor proxy as whether there are gifted people or not usually has little bearing on the overall health of math education across a very highly populated state. I never disagreed with whether they exist or not. I just don't see why this is such a sore point for people. I can virtually guarantee that the existing education system in CA didn't really benefit the gifted folks either. If I were setting up the program for a whole state, whether it will be good for a Jacobi/Euler/Gauss is totally irrelevant. We're not going to make people who show up once every 50-100 years be a major factor in educating millions of people.
- crackercrews 5y agoThis is a straw man. My original point (root level comment) was that the authors of this plan do not believe there are any innate differences in math ability, full stop. A reply to my comment supported my position by showing that obviously there are examples of people who are extreme outliers in terms of math ability. This proves the point that there are differences in innate math ability. Your reply is that we shouldn't design a state-wide math program for extreme outliers. But no one said we should! We only said that we should design a math program that acknowledges a diversity in innate math ability (as proven by the existence of extreme outliers, and the many, many less extreme outliers).