2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do.
3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.
Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.
The parent's argument is exactly the same if we change "giving people food" to "giving people who have food that isn't suitable for them food that's more suitable for them".
Maybe you think that the parent's argument is flawed because you think that all people have the same basic educational needs. That's what TFA is arguing is not true, but maybe it's wrong; you could make that case. But quibbling over the exact formulation of an analogy is not the kind of concrete thinking that you're asking for.
Determining the value in integrating "gifted" kids with "non-gifted" kids is in effect the same argument that is held with regard to determining the affect that charter schools have on our school system, simply change the modifier from gifted/non-gifted to interested/uninterested in school and we are having the same debate.
There are pros and cons to both models and people have to admit to both sides of it, otherwise they are being disingenuous with their analysis.
Presumably even in my analogy the people not given food had some food, since they were merely weak and not starved to death.
But that ignores my argument anyway! My point is that you should do what you can do, even if it's imperfect. The food analogy was to show that the argument 'don't help some people because it's unfair to the people you don't help' is extremely stupid.
That's a moral argument, and my reply was a moral argument.
Frankly the tone of your comment troubles me. None of these students are more or less "deserving"; the goal is to help every student reach their potential.
As for me, programming since the age of about 10, when I went into secondary school (age 13), the level of IT (in)competency amazed me. I was reprimanded for finishing assigned work quickly and studying independently. I was kicked off the network for writing code because it wasn't understood. Nothing got better, yet I was forced to waste 5 years of my ~81.5 years on Earth (~6.13%) of my ALE, getting a pointless state education that from that day on has not once helped me.
Further education wasn't any better. I joined a course at a local vocational college, one with certificates of excellency, with the prospectus stating it would teach the fundamentals of computing; data structures, networking, algorithms, through to applied computing including ASM, C, C++, et al. In my three weeks there, they taught (very poorly) VB.NET and had students design flyers in Publisher. I was refused entry to the one-year pre-university course as I didn't have the correct number of education goody points. The response I got to quitting was that you can't always have everything you want in life.
This is why education in the UK sucks.
I think if you see a child who has potential, let them explore that potential. There are hundreds of other children who will go through the standard educational system, get their GCSEs and A Levels and useless degrees, before getting ordinary jobs. Let the ones with potential do something different.
Reminds me of the kid recently whose school refused to let them take the time out to work on an acting opportunity, due to the loss of education that a week would present. I'm sure the child would have learnt a lot more about their most likely future career in that week than they did in the classroom.
Anyway, rant over. Standardised education sucks.
Also, you absolutely can't 'let' kids move at different speeds in the same school. You can let kids move at speeds where you enough kids at that speed. For a 90th percentile kid that is fine, there are roughly 10% of the students that share their speed (or nearly do) so you can form a class of them. For the top 1% or top .1% you just can't, and the 99.9th percentile kid can learn much, much, much faster than the 90th percentile kid, and can immediately understand concepts that the 90th percentile kid won't be able to grasp until they are years older (if ever). Putting those kids in the same class means one will be impossibly behind or the other will be incredibly bored.
Classes were tiered into ability, even at this age (I do not remember what the rubric was for deciding your tier) and for math classes I was pulled in to a self-study course along with 2 or 3 other students. There was no 'formal' class and instead the teacher would spend varying amounts of time with each student as they worked through the material on their own. Each student would work at his or her own pace.
I think this sort of system would do wonders for those both at the very top and at the very bottom. In college, I found office hours were somewhat similar in that students both behind and in front could get focused time with a professor to either catch up or advance even further ahead.
This is ignoring any budget and teacher constraints, but this seems like a real issue for both the 'top' and 'bottom' students.
This is quite an anecdote you've got there ... cause in my experience (gifted, and in gifted classes with many much brighter than me), all of us kept a pretty diverse (academically) social group.
But that's _my_ anecdote ... surely people will exist on the entire spectrum between self-seclusion to social butterfly.
> Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. Let's not use the words dumb but lets say, "less smart". If this were the case, why would parents fight to get their kids into magnet and charter schools? Also special needs kids benefit from mainstreaming. Evidence > Unsubstantiated opinion.
> The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can [cite needed]
> They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. [cite needed] - in fact, as a "gifted" kid, I often felt ostracized because of being selected (nerd).
> I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering [cite needed]
How can I find a citation for a my own statement that I believe something?
Are you under the impression that the comments section of HN is a scholarly journal where all claims are documented? I notice that you don't ask for citations for any of the claims in this thread that you agree with, so your demands for citations are really just an obnoxious lack of argument.
RE 2. The previous post does not say "every kind of diversity is automatically good". But I certainly agree that social and intellectual diversity has benefits for all parties.
RE 3. "Smart people do well and often have smart children", well it is not genetic though. While often "smart" parents have "smart" kids because they value education and know what to push. It is an oversimplification to say that education is equal to "smart". And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet. Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good. I believe that the whole intellectual spectrum of kids can learn from each other and together. I believe that smarter kids should be able to learn more if they want to, but I strongly believe in the benefits of having all kids together in the same school, from kindergarten to university. Some kids might need more time, some could learn more and/or go faster, but they will still benefit from each other.
Have you been around children? While there are few exceptions that shine no matter the environment, there are far more who excel with a better peer group. This idea that "smart kids are always going to be intrinsically motivated" is just as bogus as "smart people do well and have smart children". What happens in those situations is that the smarter children usually wind up coasting through, simply because they find it so easy to stay ahead of the mean.
> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.
And yet people do every minute, "smart" or not. Being a free country does allow people the freedom to search for the best possible opportunity given their resources, and not be forced into regressing into the mean.
For the early part of my life, that was me.
Working 10 years of jobs that I hated were my big motivator to resume my education with a renewed vigor. It has worked out well for me since but I would have been much better off if I had not been in that sea of mediocrity during my formative years.
Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that I can ignore your theory about what is 'collective good' because it is stupid and will do me and my family irreparable harm, and I can substitute my own theory of what is actually going to move us towards more 'collective good' and act according to that. That is what being free means.
Yes. That's precisely what it means.
Serving the collective good is a fine ideal but for me to pursue my own interests before yours (and for you to pursue yours before mine) is a mandate.
Once you mandate the good of the state over the good of your own children, you are no longer a free society.
It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track.
> What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
> "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.
Being advanced(PhD) or gifted usually means pursuing more open-ended type interests and research. The foundational skills, which form the majority of K-12 curriculum, won't be out of reach for someone keeping pace in non advanced tracks.
Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'.
_edited for clarity_
...which doesn't apply when the "track" is a set program at a different school.
Jumping in and out of the "gifted" track should be possible if such a thing exists; however to your point, how would the track be defined and what should it contain? Would there be a list of items that need to be mastered? What evaluations determine if you can jump in... or when you need to "jump out"? Would the "gifted" track be age based the way it is currently or could the contents be tailored to fit the needs of the individual students?
Following that line of thinking, at what point do you qualify for a job? Also, what social stigmas would we attach to "jumping out"?
I don't have answers, but your point led me to some very interesting questions. Thank you!
Because we have working models for high performing specialty schools.
We already have endless infighting about improving every school.
And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?
I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school.
I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason.
So just because?
>"And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?"
There is no "better" for everyone. Rather than just segregating students (and requiring more teachers resources etc.), work to made education better for your students. Have different classes at different speeds.
>"I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school. I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason."
That's fine, and that's your prerogative as a parent. However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
Because we know it can be done and how to do it.
Have different classes at different speeds.
We already have that. Education is more than a series of classes. It's the social interactions too.
However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
I find it dangerous, reckless and disingenuous for you to use a loaded term like "segregation".
Sure, we all know the historical connotations, but we also all know the actual definition of the word. Though I will say, given the correlation between educational resources and race, the historical connotation may be appropriate in some of these gifted vs non gifted situations.
Who said anything about segregation? I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely. The only way to get forced out of "advanced school" should be failing out.
Saying that student A must attend school B because of trait C and student X must attend school Y because of trait Z, is segregation. It just so happens to be based upon you deemed "educational qualities" rather than what we normally think about, race. Or more economic status.
> I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely.
We already have free choice. There are a myriad of private schools you can choose to send your children to. Pay the fees and send them.
Resources don't cut it, the best students learn more from reading a text book than the average students learn from the best classes. There are a lot of fads in education, but elite schools mostly maintain their status by having elite students not elite instructors.
The right thing for an average student is not the same as what is right for either the gifted, or the "retarded" (I forget what the correct term is.
We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'
So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
Being a geek is a reason to find yourself at the bottom of the hierarchy, but so is being overweight, wearing glasses, being shy, being in a religious minority, etc. The particular reason doesn't matter to the bullying process, it's a free variable. I'm pretty sure that a school full of geek kids will find their own reasons to bully some of its students.
First, note that the standard the school has to meet isn't "no bullying", but rather "significantly less bullying". I presume this is what you mean.
Anyway: What is your evidence for this claim? Have you ever spent time in such a school and compared it to a regular school?
Data point of N=1. I went to a special "school for smart people only". There was dramatically less bullying than the regular-people school I came from.
But anyway the researchers are providing actual scientific evidence of this effect, and you appear to be arguing against it using, apparently, intuition based on no evidence whatsoever. "Yes, these experts say X, but that sounds unbelievable to me; therefore they must be wrong."
Surely you do not endorse this sort of reasoning.
As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
Imagine you are a great principle/counselor/teacher. You can work anywhere, because you are great at your job. Do you choose to go to the school with the superintendent that is nearly illiterate and completely incompetent at the district where the kids regularly assault each other and the staff? Or do you choose to go to the school where the kids love to learn, love to read, love to study, and respect their teachers and their school?
If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.
Indeed, even in TFA:
> Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, developing behavioural problems both at school and at home, leading to disengagement and dropping out of school.
> When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance by their peers and minimise the risk of bullying and social isolation.
We can disagree about these conclusions, but I hope we agree that if they're right, it's not morally right to send a gifted kid to a regular school on the theory that they'll set an example for those around them if the above is the cost to the kid.
My point is that rather than assuming things we think are probably are true, we should try to argue from data. Especially since people have studied this, both professionally and experimentally.
I can think of plenty of ways that your argument might not be true. For example, per TFA, if gifted kids act up or intentionally tank themselves in "regular school", then maybe it's worse for everyone for the gifted kids to be in "regular school".
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But rather than making guesses based on nothing but our gut, why don't we consider the experts' studies and opinions?
We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve.
This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.
In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject.
> We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids
This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.
For a given pair of students X and Y, it may be a poor investment for X to teach Y anything, if X will almost surely dominate Y within the problem domain. It would be stupid to force X to teach Y in this setting.
20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row...
" But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.
16:09 I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive.
16:36 And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you."
16:57 And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." "
The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other.
To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments.
Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success):
* Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels.
* Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc.
* Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item.
* Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do.
* Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be.
* Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching.
* Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.
What you're advocating is a deeply lonely (and I'd argue psychologically damaging) experience and it really bothers me to see so many people in this thread want more people to experience it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
Have you heard the phrase, "Du bist nichts, das volk ist alles!" It's the tl;dr version of what you said.
* On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education.
* On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split the class into two for that section. Once I slipped into this lesser "higher" class, I felt I could never move up to the higher/higher class because I never learned ahead enough to meet the needs of the next pre-test. (It never occurred to younger me to read ahead in the book. So much for being gifted.)
So I think the arguments you list ALL have validity and should absolutely be taken seriously. OTOH, I think current schools do a poor job of keeping talented or more educated students engaged, which can drag down things for everyone. I don't know what the answer is - you've done a good job of talking about why separate schooling is a bad solution - but I think the status quo is also a bad solution.
(that said, I'm in favor of raising educational opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged first, because I'd rather have talented-but-only-adequately-taught people in a world of adequately taught people than I would have a world of poorly taught people save for a few bright stars)
What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
I'm wondering how you feel about "smart" kids like Terence Tao.[1][2]
At age 14, he was in enrolled in college instead of attending high school with his "less smart" peers. At age 17, he was a graduate student at Princeton instead of being a senior at high school with other kids his age. (And working backwards from those 2 points in his timeline, he was in highschool when he should have been in middle school, etc.)
Should the young Terence Tao regardless of intelligence be denied the ability to "remove" himself from the school he is "supposed" to go so that other kids can benefit from his intellect? If at age 8, he's pulled from regular school to attend high school instead, are his parents selfish?
Is there a political movement to force all geniuses to stay with their age group and normally assigned school to fulfill a societal goal?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao
[2] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.h...
It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism.
We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom.
It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.
Segregating gifted children in with the regular population
No, it is not sufficient to make a policy decision, for instance. But if I have to go and vote on this issue, it is at least something I could base my judgment on.
1. There are standard tests and evaluations for giftedness, these can be given at any time past age 4. They are about thinking and behavior, not achievement. Years of study shows that these traits don't generally change much with age. So called "late bloomers", if they are gifted, would almost certainly have been gifted much earlier in life but maybe not identified.
2. I think this is a valid point, but I'd propose that this be addressed more by making sure that kids are interacting with peers outside the academic context. Putting kids in the same classroom where they are underserved on either extreme simply because it's good to socialize seems like the wrong priority to me.
3. This is an artifact of how we identify giftedness today. Giftedness exists in all cultures and socioeconomic groups. Today, only the most motivated parents get their gifted kids identified. We could fix that with a national initiative to identify gifted students. Additionally. Not that this is necessarily your argument, but motivated parents do not make children gifted. No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically. Likewise,profoundly gifted kids given very few opportunities can be and are still gifted.
Proper early nutrition will. There's no bottom for parents' motivations, nor to their capacity, unfortunately.
Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people.
I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.
I can relate to the IQ wall in communication, I can relate to fail education, I can relate to stupid people with great education, I am lucky to have a good paying job considering my lack of formal education.
If not properly handled, above than average IQ is actually more a problem than a great asset in western system (I won't talk about Asian countries, as I don't have first hand experience but the competition mindset should help)
You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention.
You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else.
If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Feel free to browse my comment history if you suspect I am trolling.
> You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people.
No, I think we should prepare them just like we prepare everyone else. And I think many of them will make valuable contributions. I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
> Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
I didn't say anything like that. I think you assumed that because I disagree with your premise (only the education of the elites matters) that I must therefore believe in the opposite conclusion (we should only educate non-elites). But I believe in universal education.
I don't mind correcting you, but this conversation would go a lot faster if you responded to my actual words rather than what you assume I must think because I am disagreeing with you.
> Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Neither of us. I was saying teenagers who are already destined to be given hard power, because their parents have it, will tend to get into good schools, and will also tend to reinforce hegemony, which I consider a negative thing.
Wrong. I did not assert this. I asserted that resources should be focused on improving the abilities of the group most likely to be in key positions in the future.
One good seed can really foster a lot of inspiration.
If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.
As someone who was classified as "gifted" and went to one of these special programs, your third point is a common occurrence.
All that aside though, I think the very notion of gifted-ness is harmful (in a labelling sense) to both the are's and the are-not's. Your first two points are relevant on this. For that reason, I'm not sure we should even discuss/judge gifted-ness, regardless of whether it even exists.
Not to mention organizing people by intelligence is a shaky proposition at best, given our current best assessment, the IQ rating, is already proving to be inadequate as an objective measurement.
She was wrong. Almost everyone I work with is of above average intelligent. That's the nature of a professional career: you're not randomly paired up with some doofus who just happens to share your zip code.
Even in the cases where I do interact with people of below average intelligence, it's perfectly fine and pleasant because adults are generally speaking not assholes to each other. Part of growing up is learning some social graces.
In retrospect, I have no idea where this idea comes from. Do people think that the idiot bully is going to magically get into Harvard and get a professional job?
This goes doubly for high end sales, BTB work, dozens of other professional environments. Maybe you work in a place where the only other people you see every day are coworkers that you like, but in my experience that isn't very commonplace.
Sure. I'm not claiming that everyone I interact with is as educated or intelligent as me.
But it's not like an alternative education would have zero diversity. When I went to boarding school, the average IQ went way up—but there was still plenty of variation. Plus, I had the whole new challenge of learning to interact with people from different cultures—some of whom had very limited English.
I'm not claiming everyone I work with is tech-savvy or even equally intelligent. What I'm disputing is the claim that being forced to undergo years of bullying and unchallenging instruction is somehow educational.
Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.
And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
You might also have failed to see all the bright kids who dumbed themselves down and achieved a lot less than they could have in order to attain popularity and avoid bullying. I'll take "well rounded" to mean "not really excelling in anything".
This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head:
1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? This will be highly correlated with race and socioeconomic status since we know that poor / minority communities don't have the best resources / results for early childhood development.
2. What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? "Smart" kids who never have to interact with anyone "below" them or "dumb" kids who never have to interact with anyone "above" them will have trouble navigating many social and professional situations.
3. "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. These parents are often the best advocates for positive change in their community. The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.