You're right, averages are nice, just like the ones you gave me. All I was doing was giving you a different set that I was able to dig up pretty quickly. Anywa

You're right, averages are nice, just like the ones you gave me. All I was doing was giving you a different set that I was able to dig up pretty quickly. Anyways, if you can perform above average in your sleep, that's great. If you really think you'll benefit from being pushed to your level and reaching your full intellectual potential as quickly as possible, I'm sure there are still several schools that allow you to do that in Finland too, just like there are all over the rest of the world. But if you don't think that, you can also benefit by learning to connect with your peers and build social capital in the process. Furthermore, normalizing out the rest of the room allows teachers to introduce more advanced topics much faster to the class on a continuous basis. And on top of that, by "helping teacher out", you'll free her up to take a closer look at each student on an individual level too. And here's the selection bias part to the whole thing: if you're groomed in a society that values collective over individual advancement, you're much more likely to choose the latter than the former, which would help explain why you don't see as many high ranked math Olympiad contestants as you in a country like Singapore, where children are likely to be raised much more competitively. I'm not saying that its stupid to have gifted classes in general. But you guys all seem to have a very strong resent towards your OWN education systems and your OWN experiences in elementary/middle/high school. I can't be certain, as I didn't care enough about that crap in my own educational career, I was always able to satisfy my interests on my own, but you probably wouldn't have nearly as much of that if things were set up differently. It's not simple, but there's a huge array of factors that go into making the system in Finland what it is. Its a complex webbing of a lot of social and cultural factors, and to many researchers on the topic (its currently the subject of a lot of active study), it actually DOES seem a bit like magic (or at least when the article came out, that's what it painted the picture like). It's a system that benefits the norm. And though the highly gifted still need their own solution, which this process isn't meant to address in the first place, I'm sure you'll find that it produces results that are FAR better than what you see in middle america, where there's a far greater NEED for highly gifted schools because the normal ones are such crap. But wtf do I know. I'm not a scientist.