Fast-forward a few years to college, and it turns out that I have no idea how to study, how to push myself to do the work required for classes. I had a very hard time turning that around.

Personally, I got humbled early on when I realized that I wouldn't be able to read all the interesting books in the world. I wouldn't even be able to keep up with just the new interesting books being published. A very sad day, that was.

It was a simple matter of reading (and not quite understanding) a few real books aimed at researchers to see that some people were far brighter than me. Just like some were far better at drawing or playing football or high jumping. I count on someone (or many someones) being better than me at absolutely every single thing that I might be good at. Hopefully, the talent profile I have will be good enough anyway, especially if I work hard and avoid winner-takes-all areas.

(It did take a long time to learn how to apply myself, though, after so many years of enforced boredom.)

I challenged myself with the simple notion, "If I'm so smart, I should be able to ace any of these classes" and I simply worked my tail off until I did.

I over worked for a while until I was satisfied that I understood the "how" of studying and then learned how to do it more efficiently and slowly ramped up the course load.

I didn't finish my undergrad with a 4.0, but darn near it, and I fairly coasted through my grad program and still nailed above a 3.5.

It all boiled down to those boring couple years where I really challenged myself to learn how to learn, because up until that point school had come so easy I hadn't bothered.

Fortunately (for me) I had a not so good HS Counselor who I never met and who never explained to me that it was possible to go to college without having rich parents.

So I joined the Army straight out of high school, and that's where I learned how to work my ass off. Not mentally so much, but in general how to have an expectation of myself that I should always keep pushing myself to do better.

That was 25 years ago mind you. Your mileage will definitely vary.

Yet, before one enters an university, teachers almost universally refuse to answer this question.

The lack of this intended benefit of education is what allows talking heads to polarize society by shouting past each other.

One thing that certainly helped me was to take a slight detour from my graduation path for a semester to take classes that genuinely interested me. I found that taking a few courses where I was more willing to put time in out of sheer interest helped hone those same habits for classes which maybe were less interesting / more tedious.

Hope this helps, and best of luck!

1. Choose your peer group carefully. Your values will shift to those of your peers. In high school my friends were the smart kids. At first we were highly motivated and competitive and earned high marks, but that didn't sit well with the rest of the class. We got excluded for being try-hards. Therefore the new game was to pass the class with the least amount of effort. When I went to college I associated with similar people. It was cool to pass with the least amount of effort. Make friends who have values that you want to have: people who value effort, not talent.

2. Don't fall for the incentives trap. Your success gets measured by passing classes and getting good grades. It's natural for humans to game the incentives. Your motivation shifts to doing well on the incentives. Instead view passing the class as a bare minimum. The goal is learning, the test should be an easy byproduct.

3. Learn how to handle failure in a healthy way, otherwise you'll find yourself avoiding things that may lead to failure. When failure does come, try to stay positive. Don't try to keep up appearance of success. Be open about your failures. Find somebody you can talk to 100% openly; a friend, your parents, your gf/bf, a sibling. Make sure that your self worth isn't reliant on your success.

4. Don't rely on willpower. Using willpower is a losing battle. Design your life so that you don't need to rely on it. Set up meetings to do your homework with friends. Build good habits. Beware of slippery slopes. Now you're skipping class once, in a year you're skipping class entirely.

I coasted through community college as well (including classes considered difficult) still bored and getting As and Bs. I probably needed to have cared more in high school and gone to a harder college for me to get the wake up call to learn to study.

As it is, I learn on my own time and program. It's not the worst, but I always wonder what I'd been capable of with more motivation.

I can imagine that having to learn how to study (and developing the character to actually do it) is something that takes time and commitment, but if everything else is so easy for you, surely it can't be impossible?

Studying is more of a practice/habit, than an area of knowledge; someone that has avoided needing it because they pick up knowledge well without it and hasn't had their ability to pick up knowledge challenged isn't necessarily going to pick it up easily, especially, if they have many years of strongly ingrained contrary habits when, suddenly, for the first time their ability to gain knowledge is stressed and they need studying to keep up.

Sure, its not an impossible skill to develop. OTOH, when you've missed out on many years of before-college skill development in it and try to catch that all up in time to make a difference once you get to college, its not all that likely to succeed as well as you'd like.

The weighting of college admissions exams (which are heavily weighted toward measuring ability rather than study skills) and high school grades (which measure a combination of study skills and ability, such that you can't pull the two apart distinctly) in admissions means its easier for someone with high intelligence and weak study skills to get themselves in over their head in the college program they are admitted to than for someone with less intelligence and stronger study skills to do.

Plus, the difference between not having study skills and needing to learn them from scratch and having study skills but needing to study more is one of kind, not merely of degree.

(But, sure, lots of people have transition problems with college, even though those problems can have different sources, natures, and manifestations.)

Or, even worse, these 8 year olds are incapable of sitting in a chair without any stimulation for 6 hours a day. So they're labeled as troublemakers, spend a lot of time with the principal (or these days, the police), and end up getting put on drugs that turn them into compliant zombies.

I took the entire 7th grade off (officially I was homeschooled, but my parents didn't teach me anything) and played on the computer every day. I taught myself how to be a better Javascript and PHP programmer and explored math concepts that interested me on my own.

I came back ahead of the class.

I'm not convinced there's much value in the gifted program I was enrolled in. (I'm also not convinced that I'm exceptionally intelligent by any meaningful measure.)

The programs also try to cultivate those gifted areas instead of trying to bring the non-gifted parts up to speed as well. So the gifted student gets disservice from both ends.

Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible. My best teacher was in 3rd grade, and he was made to quit because some parents thought he graded too hard. Dude was chill, read us Beowulf, Watership Down, made us write poetry every night.

My point was that, despite being lazy for a year and only advancing at the rate that my curiosity dictated, I ended up ahead of my peers who spent 7 hours a day in class learning school stuff, and countless hours doing homework.

This led to a very boring 8th grade year.

This is not done in high-achieving Asian schools, nor in Germany. Schools in those settings also do not allow children to define the culture in the schools (popularity contests based on fashion, media, or cliquishness).

It took me a while to figure out how to consistently apply real effort to hard projects. There was always this nagging sense that things should be easier since they were in the past.

Alternatively, my best friend and chief competitor in 8th grade made me a better problem solver. A checklist on the wall listed the various math modules to be worked through in a self-paced course, and he and I were out in the lead as measured by checkmarks. I'd probably have coasted otherwise. Too bad we moved the next year.

But once there, I got a major kick in the ass. Classes were hard all of a sudden. They would fail you and leave you behind if you didn't catch up.

I also tend to flail when doing a thing, it goes well for a bit and then all of a sudden it gets hard. My formative years in school didn't really prep me for handling a challenge.

TL;DR for the below brain dump: when your peer group values low achievement as its own form of achievement, it takes a lot of lucky breaks and facepalm worthy epiphanies to right the ship.

PS: having now written the below, I realize the entire thing sort of hinges on whether I am actually smart and a reader has no reason to assume that is the case. I'm leery of looking like a narcissistic humblebragger but at the same time need to justify including myself in the group "smart people." My "I'm pretty smart" creds: pre-personal dark age, I won my middle school geography bee and did decently at the state-level competition; post-personal dark age I scored a 1600 on the GRE. I'm loathe to mention either and never do IRL because they were both kinda gimmes I was born into vs achievements earned via hard work but I think here they provide useful context.

The anecdote proper:

Growing up, I was in gifted classes through 7th grade. Life got hard in the way it does for kids that age though and, with my grades slipping, I was moved into normal classes.

As a smart kid taking standard difficulty classes, one is very much exposed to the anti-intellectualism that is so popular in America currently. If getting picked on for being a dweeb in the half of the day i wasn't in the advanced classes wasn't optimal, moving out of them completely was markedly less so. Some people adapt and overcome. Personally, I internalized the bullying and negative feedback, adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy and proceeded to waste years trying to impress the wrong people with how normal and cool I could be. I graduated in the bottom quartile of my class, one F shy of spending a fifth year in high school.

On the strength of an oddly incongruent SAT score and a letter of recommendation that I would give my right hand to read, I still managed a very good scholarship to an out of state public school. Even with this opportunity dropped into my lap, I had to be talked/coerced(!) into taking the scholarship. I just did. not. get. it. AT ALL.

I went to college because my parents were going to start charging me rent and I more or less thought I'd party for a while and then drop out and "join the Marines or something." My first semester I found a new group of bros just like the ones from high school and earned a 1.7 GPA.

Something else happened that semester though. When I did manage to make it to my lectures, I really enjoyed them. I'd skip tests and not do classwork but I'd read and listen to lectures diligently. There was one specific class called "Primates, People and Prehistory" that particularly blew my mind. If curiosity is a pilot light, that course was the spark that reignited it.

I came back that Spring ready to work, just missed a 4.0 (damn you, B+ in Português!) and managed to bring my grades up above a 3.0 to keep my scholarship. I spent several more years gradually learning to be okay with the fact that I enjoyed learning. I still hid it behind an "aww shucks, I'm just here to party" veneer but every semester I drifted further from my friends, had more excuses to bail on them and read until we were entirely different people. I still care about them and keep in touch, but I'm definitely the "weird one" now.

Were it not for a ridiculous letter of recommendation, or that long shot scholarship, or the awakening to the broader world of learning that first semester, my life would be entirely different. I had a huge "working hard and caring is for suckers" chip on my shoulder in high school and I think wherever I'd ended up, I'd still be sneering at the try hards and glorying in how I could have done just the same if I'd wanted to. It's taken years to recover from that detour and get my head right about who I am.

I'd like to think that if I'd stayed on the track most of my middle school peers were on, if I'd stayed surrounded by people who gave a damn, my detour into doubt and self-loathing might have been curtailed. As a 29 year old, I feel like it has only been in the past 2-3 years that I've shifted out of neutral and really earnestly started engaging with the world.

I'm wholeheartedly in favor of anything we as a society can do to save other "dumb smart kids" similar heartburn.

Your point about government subsidy is on the mark, but why are the kids at the bottom subsidised while those at the top are left to languish? It illustrates a double standard that has somehow become embedded in the culture of the country. If Americans truly believed in giving each child their fair share, then politics would force the resources to be spread more evenly.

What has bothered me the most, time and again, is the assumption that smart kids will 'turn out fine' without additional challenges and, by contrast, there's any reasonable ROI expectation with the a large portion of developmentally challenged / mentally deficient kids. It's a sensitive issue for sure. Somehow just postulating this kind of thinking draws up feelings of insensitivity, but I'm trying to focus on some empirical observations. Difficult tight rope!

Keeping all the smart kids locked in an ivory tower where they don't have to deal with humanity or ever get any context into how society actually works is how you get Ayn Rand afficionados well past the age-appropriate teenage years, and nobody wants that.

If there's a sensible read of someone's comment it's preferable to use that interpretation. "Economically gifted" makes no sense in the context of the discussion.

The OP was saying your tax dollars are likely to get a good return by fostering the progress of gifted students.

  Economically speaking, gifted students ...

If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?

Of course, people complain about negative effects on the remaining schools [0] on the basis that removing gifted students hurts the remaining ones. This seems like a strange concern to me -- why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers?

[0] http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/magnet-schools-m...

The author's thesis is that the real benefit, to average and gifted kids alike, is not having to be in the same class as the bottom rung of kids.

I find that thesis at least plausible. I went to regular public school for K-8, then a magnet school for 9-12. It's really the bottom 10%, usually kids with behavioral or social problems, that makes the experience worse for everyone.

At the same time, I'm not sure my magnet school experience would've been appreciably worse with a bunch of average kids in the class. Maybe the teachers would have had to teach the material more slowly and we would've covered less of it, but the fact is that very little you learn in K-12 matters anyway.

And herein lies the problem with K-12 for gifted students. Why should kids be learning things that don't matter when they are capable of more?

(Note: I disagree with the claim that little in K12 matters; every bit of knowledge lays the foundation for the next layer of abstraction. E.g. counting->arithmetic->algebra->calculus/statistics, or alphabet->spelling->vocabulary->grammar->reading->writing->essay writing/research.)

I disagree. Most of what is learned in K-12 is foundational for things learned later (literacy, numeracy, and basic social skills at the earlier grades, more developed hard and soft analytical and communications skills in later grades.) Even to the extent that the nominal subject matter may not be particularly generally useful later, it tends to serve as a focus for more generally applicable skills.

Some variant of academic socialism?

Could it be packaged with social socialism for the gifted kids who lack in other social areas?

Also, the argument isn't that gifted students are responsible for pulling up peers. The argument is that by being around people like that, it benefits others. Much like integrating schools and having different income levels in the same school helps others.

Unless you have a special gifted program, that's generally only true in high school and maybe middle school, and (even then), is subject to the availability of distinct "upper level" classes, which even in high schools may be limited in districts where the effort is focused on maintaining the middle and bringing up the bottom.

But, yes, there's a lot of government policy at all levels that favors focussing on the low end and ignoring the high end of the ability scale -- that's exactly the thing that seems to be the focus of the complaint. So saying that the thing being complained about makes sense because of the exact thing being complained about is, somewhat circular logic.

"How many students will use a gifted program?" Approximately 6 to 10% are gifted

"They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum." Not necessarily. They may (depending on levels of giftedness); however, differentiation and what not are also acceptable approaches in some cases.