You are on the right track, chrischen. Many of us seem to have made the hidden assumption that we are first supposed to have a two-decade-long "education" phase

You are on the right track, chrischen. Many of us seem to have made the hidden assumption that we are first supposed to have a two-decade-long "education" phase, and only then a "real world" phase. I'll bet even the not-so-bright kids can tell that the tasks they're ordered to complete while in the child processing system[1] are artificial, arbitrary, inefficient, and often useless. Quite a few people have admitted that bright kids would probably be better off outside the system, but I believe this applies even to the less intelligent kids. You're more likely to encourage yourself to learn if you enjoy what you're learning and/or you see that it really matters in some way; i.e., it has some real-world effect beyond some grade on a test. Things work out better in many, many ways when people of all levels of intelligence are allowed to learn and work as they wish. [1] Credit for this term goes to HN poster gruseom; I believe he coined it.