I don't know what your gifted education programs were like, but I never recall feeling like I missed out on my childhood. Occasionally I would take different classes to some of my friends (but with others), and that was about it.

Far from keeping people from being free to develop and think for themselves, most of the gifted classes I took actively encouraged that, with open-ended problem solving and free-form classes often led by student interest.

But children need to be reined in, they don't have the reasoning skills or understanding of adults; the one time I was allowed to fully control my own syllabus it led almost directly to me losing the ability to speak Cantonese, which I'd been fluent in up to that point. As a kid who'd spoken it all his life, I simply didn't believe all of the people who told me I'd forget it without practice. Because I was a child.

I don't know exactly how free-form Sudbury Schools are, but I'd have extreme reservations about sending my children to one.

Did you instead learn these things?:

• exercising that power could lead to you losing a skill

• doing so is bad

• you don't have the power to choose your own course corrections when you notice a skill waning

Based on your suggestion that children need to be controlled, I think your experience was limited and too short.

I don't even know if you're arguing in good faith, because your second dot point isn't really a thing that even a child needs to learn.

I'll also thank you not to suggest that our differences of opinion are due to your superior understanding of my upbringing.

And I don't assume to have an understanding of your upbringing. That's why I was posing it all as questions. The points I made are things I think can potentially hinder learning and are commonplace in society.

Teach them to tap into intuition, ask (not demand) for help when support is needed, and learn how to learn.

I do agree that "gifted" programs are mostly a waste, given that schoolteachers are unlikely to have any useful advice for any given students' area of interest.

In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless when you "just want to be a programmer", they all give the possibility of finding new ways of thinking or improve some parts of the brain. In the context of cursive for example, I think acquiring better motor skills means that a programmer could type faster thus making that faster-typing programmer a bit better than other programmers.

If I were given the choice to do what I wanted to do I would suck at what I would want to do. For example I don't like math much, but if I weren't forced to "just" do it I wouldn't understand way too many basic concepts in for example programming.

Though I do agree with the idea of mentors guiding students, I remember reading a paper about it being super effective compared to regular classroom teaching, I really wish I would have had that chance back when I was younger.

My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.

And capitalism? You aren’t going to enroll them in capitalism? How’s that work? You’re not going to let them buy things or work for money?

Before you try to “facilitate” education for your future children, it might be a good idea to facilitate your own education first.

I'm going to explain to them there are other ways of meeting human needs, like developing a supportive community among people who all help each other. I'll also minimize the things we use money for, as well as the ways we bring money in. There are already groups online geared toward this goal, such as Buy Nothing groups. This is how capitalism will start to be phased out and how I intend on doing my part.

I'll also teach them to realize sometimes forgetting to proofread is not an indication of being uneducated.

Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity:

• goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically

• is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do.

• changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system

• is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves

• is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life

• periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from

• old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages

• can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level

• can learn through our example

• can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary

• is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal

The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...).

I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world.

If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way.

Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.

(note: if you have a trust fund set up or something, then I guess it balances out. Just get ready for them to rebel in their teens by becoming neoliberals and putting up posters of Henry Kissinger on their walls.)

Ultimately, for the time being, we can only seek to minimize how we interact with money until the law catches up with human understanding. It's really hard to dump capitalism altogether and/or overnight, so it's about progressively stepping down/back.

There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college.

For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization.

By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work.

The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip.

Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.

But also, I would push my kid both to go outside/to sport and to socialize if they seemed to spend too much time inside or in isolated all the time. You cant learn social skills without practice and your body need physical movement to be healthy. And many kids act badly if they don't have it (they might not be fully aware of causes and consequences, but they do behave better when they had movement). It is great when kid knows what it wants, but that does not mean that it is reasonable to limit education to that single one thing.

As a child who experienced both "regular" and gifted education, I can say with some certainty that: My "childhood" began when I entered gifted school.

Before that I was bullied, I didn't fit in, I wasn't challenged, and I was unhappy.

It was my personal experience and the experience of many of the students around me at gifted school that this was what we wanted. We were happy and grateful to be around "our kind". Precisely because we could be the kids we wanted to be.

That feeling certainly wasn't universal. It wasn't for everyone. And I will readily grant that schools -- even gifted schools -- are prison-like and could be improved.

But I reject the notion you seem to be arguing that these programs are prima facie harmful (or at best not helpful), as compared to the standard-education alternative.

No doubt about that. They'll obsess over whatever they enjoy. And the following line that "all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents" implies that your average person's creative ouput is important or even worthwhile to society.

I'm in the process of winding up my commitments now so I can commit all my resources to the journey.

Were you able to include Sudbury data in your research?