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You're right: low performing kids get the attention and resources. The kids doing well "don't need help." Which is just wrong. The gifted kids are far more lik
by bradley13 3y ago
You're right: low performing kids get the attention and resources. The kids doing well "don't need help."
Which is just wrong. The gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future. Boring them, stunting their potential, ruining their education is the worst thing schools can do.
Kids need to be in different tracks. You need at least three tracks. Obviously, it should be possible to move between them as appropriate.
- lexandstuff 3y ago"gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future" Citation needed.
- LargeTomato 3y agoI disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.
- spicebox 3y agoCommon sense is frequently wrong and is usually invoked by people who want their beliefs to be taken as fact without needing to provide support
- bluepod4 3y agoCorrect.
- georgeashworth 3y agoCitation needed
- spicebox 3y agoTouché - “Science has widely come to be understood as a systematic assault on common sense. Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false. Common sense said matter was solid; science has shown this to be false” https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c6009k3&chunk.id=d0e1167&toc.id=&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...
- HideousKojima 3y agoCitation needed that those things were, in fact, common sense. The earth being the center of the universe comes from ancient philosophers, not commoners (there's a reason the geocentric model is also called the Ptolemaic model). Those same philosophers also usually said the earth was round, not flat.
- btilly 3y agoThe problem here is that the specific statement in question is hard to come up with a citation for, but rests on a chain of reasoning for well-known statements that do have a lot of evidence. And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think. One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are: 1. Success in business, science and technology are all strongly associated with intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-psychologist-weighs-in.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-... 2. Intelligence tends to be relatively stable. https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726 https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726 Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology. The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-critical-period-for-brain-development/ https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement. And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road. Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?" And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you. On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?
- spicebox 3y agoThere’s also plenty of evidence that improving educational outcomes for low performing students has an outsized impact. “Decreasing the number of high school dropouts by half would nationally produce $45 billion per year in net economic benefit to society … Improved education and more stable employment greatly increase tax revenue, such as a return of at least 7 dollars for every dollar invested in pre-kindergarten education … National savings in public health costs would exceed $40 billion if every high school dropout in just a single year would graduate”. [1] These show pretty clear economic benefits to improving outcomes for the average student. But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both. [1] https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvestment_Full_Report_6.27.11.pdf https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...
- Aeolun 3y agoYou can take a look at the average intelligence of current research and business leaders and conclude that on average, they contribute more visibly. That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.
- tchaffee 3y agoYour observation that they contribute more visibly is maybe the most important part. If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.
- icedchai 3y agoYour intuition may be wrong. I know plenty of 80's gifted kids who are burnt out, unemployed, or just coasting through life.
- fsckboy 3y agothat doesn't refute that the progress that we've made has come from gifted kids. Not all the gifted salmon make it to swim all the way back up the stream.
- woleium 3y agobeing gifted is just the start. next you need to get inspired.
- hgomersall 3y agoI'm minded to think that most education should be focused on the inspiration part. Give the kids intrinsic motivation and the tools to learn.
- giardini 3y agoI'd rather be a member of a group of uninspired smart people than of a group of inspired dummies. - (signed)Tired of watching "inspired dummies" waste their time, other persons' time and their inherited fortunes.
- woleium 3y agoindeed, you need to be gifted first
- lelanthran 3y agoIsn't that then wasted talent? AIUI, upthread comments were about putting more resources into the gifted children precisely because we don't want to waste their talent.
- injb 3y ago+1 in fact it's hard to think of a statement that's less in need of a citation.
- jjav 3y ago> I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here. I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university. Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers. The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.
- pedrosorio 3y agoThe original statement: > "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future" didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling". It read "contribute significantly to our future".
- throw9away6 3y agoWe live in a winner takes all society in the USA. So if only the cream of the crop is allowed to contribute it’s where you want to put your resources.
- uoaei 3y ago"We should institutionalize and normalize the inequities that are already present rather than working to reduce them" is a bad idea.
- bt4u 3y ago[dead]
- lexandstuff 3y agoI disagree with you. The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in. On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?
- zinodaur 3y agoI get what you are saying - but school is such a wonderful opportunity to expand your mind and find things to care about. If some kid is all juiced up and excited about something, its tragic for the school to stamp that out through neglect and busywork. IDK how we could build an education system that supports kids in excelling while not degenerating in to a caste system
- prmoustache 3y agoyou are talking like kids are excelling or not. Some are great at maths and shit at other classes and vice-versa.
- rowanG077 3y ago
- klabb3 3y agoIn a way, yes, citation is needed for the claim. But citation is not needed for policy. Predicting individual's "value" to society and granting/restricting opportunity based on that is not only hell of a slippery slope, but absolutely anti-thetical to democratic civilization. It's quite literally what both the fascists and the nazis did deliberately. Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.
- giardini 3y agoTry this: Google "IQ AS A PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS"
- hirvi74 3y agoDepends on how one defines success. It seems to me that the correlations for IQ are not too high for many of what people might call "success." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_correlations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...
- em-bee 3y agoright or wrong, resources are often limited. when you have to choose between helping the strugglers catch up or preventing the gifted onces from getting bored then the strugglers are more important.
- spicebox 3y agoThe idea that we have to choose between helping struggler or gifted students is a false dilemma. Instead we should be asking why we aren’t allocating enough resources to education.
- em-bee 3y agowell, yes, obviously, but that is not in the power of those who have to make due with the resources currently available. of course we should put more resources into education. worldwide, education is the primary tool to improve everyones life. and with that i don't mean just science and general knowledge, but also moral education that teaches us how to care for each other and for the world. we need to learn not only how to make the world a better place, but also why. and we need to understand that it takes the contribution of everyone to achieve that. not just the gifted ones, which is why i believe that helping strugglers is more important right now, in order to reach a critical mass of people that understand this and sway public opinion towards more resouces in education, at which point we will be able to help everyone, gifted or not, to develop their full potential
- bugglebeetle 3y agoBecause, like almost everything else in the US, we treat students according to their class position.
- lelanthran 3y agoIt doesn't matter how much you put into education, the lions share is always going to go the the strugglers. Note that I'm making no comment on whether I think this is fair or not.
- balderdash 3y agoWhat makes them more important? I agree that in the short term it’s an allocation of resources problem, but the framework and criteria for the resource allocation model doesn’t seem clear to me, and I suspect is far from optimal.
- XorNot 3y agoThis is an interesting example of reaching the right answer for atrociously bad reasons. i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high. Of course kids who are struggling might really just be stuck on one issue, and once they get past it they'll be fine - i.e. when I was in around Year 2, for whatever reason my reading-level reports for somewhat low. Post that of course, I shot ahead (I have no idea why or how, in that case the metric probably just was mis-measuring whatever my interest was at the time). Which is an example of exactly the issue with the idea of "gifted kids" - they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults. After all: plenty of gifted mathematicians, certainly people smarter then me. If they're working as mathematicians though, the lifetime earning potential of my average career in IT is going to be higher though.
- injb 3y ago>>> they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults That's a shocking claim to make. Feynman, Von Neumann, Turing, Einstein, Gauss...I think I could go on all day naming people whose contribution to society was outrageously disproportionate and who were all stereotypical "gifted children". Of course they exist. You wouldn't be having this conversation on a computer on the Internet if they didn't.
- roflc0ptic 3y agoIdk man my public elementary school gifted peers all went on to be pretty successful - head dramaturge at a Broadway playhouse, doctors, poker champion, etc. I manage software developers at a dev shop with a bunch of ivy and prestigious euro university grads. Some people are smarter than other people, and being smart gives you myriad advantages in navigating the world. This seems pretty uncontroversial.
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- jedberg 3y agoThe assumption is that the smart kids will find the resources they need to be successful, and will be successful regardless. It's the ones that are behind that need the help.
- BeFlatXIII 3y agoIt's a blatantly false assumption, but one that persists in popularity among policy makers. The skills needed to be a zero-effort straight-A student are not necessarily the skills needed to make positive impacts on the world.
- icecream_so_gud 3y agoThere are social pressures why a kid wouldn't want to move between tracks. All their friends are there. They may also want to avoid moving to a higher track to avoid teasing from colleagues for being a "smarty-pants" or perceived as too good for the friend group.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoanecdata of one, but I was pretty far ahead of my class early on and as a result, I learned to behave like an idiot as a way to gain social acceptance. This culminated in resentment and general failure to socialize properly. It wasn't until 11th/12th grade that it clicked with me that I really ought to stop expending so much energy trying to maintain early childhood relationships and should instead try to make better friendships with my peers in advanced classes. "too good" is elitist language, but I was clearly differently minded from my peers in early grade school and I think it harmed a lot more than it helped.
- zpeti 3y agoWhat you are talking about is a political decision, therefore there is no rational way to discuss it. In most western government leadership now supporting smart people is basically elitism which is evil. Despite the fact that practically it’s what needs to be done and what leads to a better society for everyone not. Not to mention most of Asia IS doing this and seem to be doing much better.