If only. The school system is actually terrible at helping the most disadvantaged and marginalized students. These students would benefit the most from highly structured and directed instructional approaches that often have the pupils memorizing their "lesson" essentially word-for-word and getting prompt, immediate feedback on every question they answer[0] - but teachers who have come out from a proper Education department hate these approaches simply because they're regarded as "demeaning" for the job and unbecoming of a "professional" educator.
Mind you, these approaches are still quite valued in "Special" education, which is sort of regarded as a universe of its own. But obviously we would rather not have to label every student who happens to be merely disadvantaged or marginalized as "Special" as a requirement for them to get an education that fully engages them, especially when addressing their weakest points!
Modern "Progressive" education hurts both gifted and disadvantaged students for very similar reasons - but it actually hurts the latter a lot more.
[0] As an important point, the merit of this kind of education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students! In fact, even Abraham Lincoln was famously educated at a "blab school" (called that because the pupils would loudly "blab" their lesson back at the teacher) that was based on exactly that approach.
I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to the general student population, when studies have found that students entered into charter lotteries who are not selected do about as well as those who get to go to the charter school).
I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for situations where it's clear that there's less need for deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value in having a broad body of knowledge and much more usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span and cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal punishment to make them work.
I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster in the classroom to encourage students to value performance.
These things come after one has the basics down pat. Modern "Progressive" education rejects this point altogether. It's whole approach is entirely founded on putting the cart before the horse.
> Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span
Attention span is a function of engagement. As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students for whom other drivers of high effort mighy be not nearly as effective, as you hint at.
There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers, no critical thought or deeper understanding of the concepts was expected. That was not engaging. That style of "education" had me failing classes and hating every waking moment of school. It was only the last year of HS that I started to shine after hitting AP classes with more interesting topics that required some deeper understanding and mastery. If I hadn't experienced non-rote classes my last year I might be a janitor now.
Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it to just get the rote learning part done with in the easiest, quickest and most effective way, by employing the structured approaches that are ignored by most teachers today?
I also have a very poor working memory that hinders my ability to solve certain problems that most would find to be trivial. I think I would have done quite badly in the environment you're describing.
I apologize but I don't believe these things to be literally true. You can clearly speak at least one natural language with native-speaker fluency, and that inherently involves committing a large amount of raw data to memory that may never be "fully understood" in a complete sense. More generally, memorizing stuff effectively that one does not clearly understand happens all the time in all sorts of education, and my view is that genuinely effective methods can indeed make this roughly as easy as memorizing the lexicon of one's native language.
(The success of spaced-repetition software is at least an existence proof that such methods are in fact possible, though the context is not exactly the same as classroom instruction.)
Of course whenever "sufficient understanding" happens to be feasible it should be included; I have never said otherwise. What "Progressive" education means when it pushes "open inquiry" and "students learning by themselves" is something radically different, that in practice amounts to letting the students 'sink or swim' with no effective support whatsoever.
I disagree. I like rote and rigor, but I think it's a mistake to ignore developing problem solving and intuition early. A lot of programs overshoot, but figuring out how to make decent guesses and test them is important (as is getting lots of practice on well-defined problems).
edit: it looks like you're editing your comment. You added:
> As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity
I disagree here, too. ;) I mean, yes, it can be, but we have other tools in our toolbox. The hammer is useful but has diminishing returns as we try and apply it more and more.
There's no reason why these things couldn't be developed in a more "structured" approach than the default (avoiding the overshooting you mention). The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most critical point.
Again, citations for the efficacy of scripting and recitation would be appreciated.
> The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most critical point.
I agree that quick feedback improves performance and morale. We close that loop pretty quickly in my classroom most of the time.
There's a reason why I'm particularly skeptical to what you're saying, btw: we know from pretty high quality research lasting decades that the combination of tutorial instruction plus mastery methods are supremely effective. The big problem is, these approaches don't scale.
Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the opposite of this approach.
On the other hand: Direct Instruction could be a way to hit a minimum quality level in schools which have suffered from instructional quality problems. It's also worth noting that modern Direct Instruction is much, much less recitation-based than you imply.
Just one piece of anecdata: the private school I'm at was much more scripted and regimented around this type of philosophy 15 years ago. The private school down the road is still there. We've really pulled away in performance since broadening methods and doing a lot more of the open-ended inquiry that you look down your nose at. Indeed, the engineering programs that I teach share very few features with DI, and have gotten nationally recognized results.
Reference for this statement? From a rather abstract POV, it seems to be the closest thing to "mastery methods and tutorial instruction" that can actually scale to a large class size and engage all students by default.
Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match) has very little bearing on what's most effective for marginalized and disadvantaged students who may have significant challenges with basic skills.
Part of what got my attention and asking you for citations:
> > > As an important point, the merit of this kind of education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students!
For more anecdata: I coach a MS competitive math team as an elective. Anyone can join. It's not selective. Our school is roughly 3% of the middle school students in our chapter, but we routinely take >50% of the top 12 spots. We don't do rote but just explore ideas and compare approaches. Also, students in the program on average pick up about .7 years of math skills beyond what similar control students at our school do during that time.
I came into this job thinking I was going to be all teaching and demonstrating methods, and doing a bunch of drill-and-kill, etc. In practice that's where I've been least effective personally and where the classroom has been a sad place to be.
During COVID, I was a substitute teacher in an 8th grade science classroom and I was teaching physics. We recited definitions and drilled and killed. The students did well in the material, but developed no great love for me or physics, and didn't do better in their next year of science classes than students who had been taught in a more informal, exploratory way. The students that I taught physics still actively avoid my programs.
> Reference for this statement?
In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class." It's about engaging with concepts actively.
On the flip side, Direct Instruction is more structured and teacher-led, focusing on clear, step-by-step teaching with a ton of overlap between sessions and very clear structured measurement of basic tasks.
This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach. You're right that this is not directly "teacher led" in a material sense, but only inasmuch as the equivalent effort happens outside the classroom. The "debate, critique, and defend" approach shares both the "immediately applicable practice" and the "quick feedback" features of DI - there's clearly "a ton of overlap" between studying a lesson on one's own and later debating, critiquing or practically applying the same content in class. Just because it might not be literal "blabbing back" doesn't mean that much of the same underlying dynamics is not involved.
A flipped classroom falls short of tutorial instruction. Often, it's just recorded lessons presented outside school time to leave more time for using the classroom in other ways.
Homework in conventional primary classrooms is not helpful and may be harmful, and as best as I can tell, this includes flipped lessons and textbook readings. We've got a pretty big mountain of data accumulating on this topic.
I'm trying to flip some topics in AP Microeconomics and it's really hard to do in an effective way.
Actually: I find in AP Micro I am doing things much closer to how you describe, because I'm micro-optimizing for (students doing well on the AP Micro exam) instead of (producing students that I feel understand economics in a generally useful way).
> "quick feedback" features of DI
I think pretty much everyone agrees quick feedback and measurement is valuable. Having one clean expected answer that the class says together is one way to get this, and I guess it's perhaps the one that requires the lowest instructor skill and thus is most repeatable.
But I would say, for example, that Khan Academy does it much better-- pacing things to each student, providing individualized feedback, supporting spacing effects through mastery challenges, and allowing questions whose responses would not be said the same by all students. It's trickier, though: you need to stand in the back of class to tamp down on device misuse. And in the end students do work in exchange for recognition from their instructor in a well-functioning classroom, which is hard to get if they're spending most of their time trying to please a computer.
In our case, schools purchase and bring their own devices past elementary school. But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
> they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
They don't, though. In my experience, there's 3 reasons why a student will devote effort to improvement in a classroom. In order of their efficacy and difficulty to instill:
1. Pressure from grades/the gradebook. In my experience, this is only weakly effective. Even in my environment where families are really achievement focused. There is too much of a delay; even if things are updated in Khan or the gradebook nigh-immediately, the measure doesn't become consequential for a long time.
2. Social pressures in the classroom: desire to not look foolish; relationship with an adviser; desire to please the teacher; effects of appropriate praise; desire to do fun things that other students are doing.
3. True interest and independent engagement in the subject.
You could alternatively view this also as a scale of how quick and effective feedback is. By #3, the student starts to measure themselves.
Khan or DI will have a hard time taking a student to #3. Khan's a super-strong, super immediate version of #1; DI is a very weak version of #2 (but possibly the easiest to implement).
Indeed there are! I was in high school around 20 years ago, and our computers were “locked down”. You couldn’t install anything (or really run any unapproved binary), access to system tools was disabled, and every time a computer rebooted, it would wipe a clean image to the HD so no changes would be saved to disk.
My friend and I figured out how to bypass the lockdown before boot, and made a floppy that did so. Removing evidence of tampering was as simple as shutting down the PC. From there, we added a menu to the bootloader, put it on a CD, wrote a simple Visual Basic app launcher on the CD, and included Quake 2/3, GTA, Worms, and a handful of other games that could all install or run from the launcher, and then sold the CDs for idk $10 a pop?
We also learned that every computer in our district (that we had access to test on) used the same admin password for all the remote VNC access, which was fun. And the same password (different from the VNC password at least?) for all of the networked printers in the district - on football game day, we printed hundreds of our school’s logo on a rival school’s printers, with the logo being just barely off-white.
I once had someone draw a very elaborate stick figure fight in CAD for an entire 74 minute period instead of the high priority project his teammates were waiting on.
It's tricky for me in the engineering project classes, because I'll often be very deeply involved with one group teaching a new task or skill. 90% of the time the other groups will make good progress, but the other 10% yields interesting surprises. I definitely am more careful to show up unexpectedly more and to carefully look at screens, not just to shrug when they look OK-ish from 15' away.
Singapore/Hong Kong/Japan/Taiwan/Macau dominating the PISA
Indeed, it's very much pictorial and intuition-building in ways that fans of DI tend to look down on. It's concept and problem solving before rote.
I don't know so much about these countries in primary education, but I do have a few Japanese textbooks from secondary school translated into English and published by the AMS. This material also seems less rote-heavy than I am used to.
E.g. I'm looking at an on-level grade 7 mathematics textbook, and it's spending a lot of pages justifying the idea of negative numbers in addition and subtraction and with pictorial representation and has comparably few problems to do.
In a US math textbook, this material would have been done before grade 7, but in less depth. There would be a whole lot of rules, algorithms, and rote practice.
However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math.
I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a lot of the busywork that school presents to you - because I saw little point in it, I knew the material, I'd read the book, I could write about it and often passed tests on it with flying colors.
If I'd been given an opportunity to do more engaging learning, and less information regurgitation style learning, I wonder where I would be. Like an introduction to computer programming class, would have completely changed the trajectory of my life - yes I'm a working engineer today, but it took me a long time to work my way up from a low wage service job.
What does this even mean?
To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the 1900s US particularly healthy. Yet that was probably the peak of the US keeping resources in the hands of "those who move society forward" the robber barons and monopolists. We didn't think anything of working to death unwanted 5 year olds that were unlikely to make a positive impact on society.
As for "dying culture" that to me is a very different thing from society. Societies can have multiple cultures present and healthy societies tolerate multiple cultures.
> Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.
> This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.
I'm really interested in the foundation of these beliefs. What are the specific historical examples you are thinking of when you make these statements? Or is it mostly current events that you consider?
The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.
Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class.
The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room.
Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
They did indeed kill off most of their intelligentsia in the last century. This is clearly what the OP is referencing and is a historical fact. I'm not sure why you decided to take it in a different direction.
In a discussion about the collapse of societies, it doesn't apply. In a discussion about education reform, it does not apply. It is also not an example of the original commentors statement that conquerors have used social spending to collapse their targets.
I would further point out in both the case of the USSR and China's purge of the intelligentsia; it was FAR more about consolidating power in a dictator and far less about trying to set good national policy. In Mao's case in particular, he was frankly just a bit insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance
The June 1941 (and later) deportations in the Baltics (involving inevitably a very high mortality rate) seem to have at least partially targeted the intelligentsia as such in those Republics (in addition to the other usual suspects).
"persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.
Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.
China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.
USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.
I'm not sure if they get to where they are today - without going through the Maoist stage.
Because they gave up on the command economy idea and embraced markets and education. When they persecuted the geniuses everything went to shit and when they stopped things quickly improved. Really makes you think.
The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior?
As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?
A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.
Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner: given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to expect the top 100 wealthiest individuals (outliers) to also be 100 most intelligent people on earth?
Then read up on the ancient Greeks. Even after 12 years of education most modern people wouldn't be able to measure the circumference of the Earth like Eratosthenes did hundreds of years before Christ. The ancient Greeks were pretty darn smart.
It’s also worth pointing out that people who e.g. study algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school aren’t actually outliers; they’re maybe the top 1/3 or so of the class in terms of mathematics ability.
You can read about it here:
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/2018-kell.pdf
This one is somewhat tangental, but I find, "The Munich Model of Giftedness Designed to Identify and Promote Gifted Students" to be an interesting read too.
I will say that math and hard sciences are unnecessarily difficult for outsiders to approach due to overly confusing terminology and not enough thought toward pedagogy. Great contemporaries like Sean Carroll and Leonard Susskind are demonstrating how to make the sciences much more accessible to people like me. But no matter how much more accessible you make it it’s inconceivable that average IQ people will ever contribute to the frontiers of it.
We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.
Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.
Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.
Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.
Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.
We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry.
Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model.
State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price.
This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.
There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost.
They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt.
It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population.
Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.
You are correct but I think it has mostly to do with the way academia is organized. Scientific study is only really funded or respected if it quotes enough other works. However this is a dead-end way of working, bad research that quotes bad research will become the norm. Real talent feels this, leaves academia, the problem gets worse.
However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.
The equality of outcome can take many forms.
China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.
I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are born with lower potential than others. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life.
What is just then?
To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are particularly likely to bring benefits to society?
We know that the vast majority of significant advances in engineering and science are brought to life by people that are significantly above average capability in their fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even before they entered school.
We know that significant advances are unlikely to be contributed by people for whom day to day life is a significant cognitive challenge.
This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the effort into one person.
The best likely case scenario for the bright student is that they go on to create something remarkable and useful. Advancements in technology and science are responsible for millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of benefit.
The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better quality of life. The best argument is probably that it might make a difference in how he approaches parental responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of slightly better character.
I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your resources on the least productive in society, unless the reason for their lower potentiality is something that is inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in their education.
OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast track them to a level of education that they can produce benefits to their society. To let them languish in a classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the often know more than, only creates habits and preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting activities and away from the paths that might lead them to greatly benefit society at large.
Either way it’s kind of a shit sandwich though, so who knows.
Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual development, and probably moved me farther away from a life of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a worthwhile goal when I was 9.
Showing me that other people understood and valued my intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do something admirable with my life.
It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate was not great.
So you would rather have the cleaning lady, the garbage collector, the truck driver,... not got proper read/write/calculate/economics... education and increase their chances of ending on the side where they fall for addiction instead?
Anacostia High School in Washington DC has zero percent of students meeting expectations in Math, yet its funding per student is twice that of nearby districts that perform much better. Lebron James' I Promise Academy is similarly very well-funded both for in-classroom and wraparound services, and it's one of the worst schools in the state of Ohio. It is increasingly evident that we cannot improve student outcomes in failing schools simply by funneling more resources to those schools. Students who come from households who do not value education not only will not learn, but will also likely sabotage the education of the others in their schools. It is probably more effective to give direct cash payments to struggling families than to struggling schools.
What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone. If someone is not academically gifted, why make them waste years of their life struggling through an academic education. What's the point?
The relationship between education and achievement for a given person probably follows an S curve. More education has an impact in the steep part of the slope, but eventually the limiting factor is natural ability, and achievement flatlines. The problem with education today is that people looked at that curve when it was in the steep part, thought "more education means better outcomes" and just kept blindly throwing education at people.
Most people would be far better served by vocational learning after a certain point. Effectively every career is a form of vocational learning, we've just delayed it further and further in the name of academic education which has limited benefit.
For a democratic society, I think there's a pretty big benefit in making the general population fairly well educated beyond just what it takes to make them proficient at a job.
The point would be to make sure they could reasonably reason about the policies and politicians they are voting for or against.
Now, maybe that can all be covered in high school classes. However, I think a lot of humanity and philosophy classes just don't come in until college level classes.
Reactive thinking is often pretty accurate, and people used to reactive thought think that their conclusions are “obvious”, so the idea that they need to also stand up to a first principles analysis undermines a fundamental aspect of their worldview.
If they haven’t been taught to see themselves and their environment in the third person by the time they are in kindergarten, it’s basically too late. It can be fixed, but it won’t likely be in school.
> Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.
I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.
Sure, but don't try to get people who can't hack college into college at the expense of those who can.
When I was growing up decades ago, we had a gifted program and a special education program. The gifted program was an attempt to expose gifted students to more complex thinking, while the special education program was an attempt to give student who struggle with normal education special attention to allow them to learn as best they can. It worked well.
In the 80's, the education system was the product of 200+ years of figuring out how to do it. For some reason, we decided it was wrong and introduce new methods of education that don't seem to be doing as well.
>The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.
This seems like hyperbole. I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
It's not, there are multiple historical examples of societies, including the US, that place a low value on human life.
Heck, you'll even find comments in this thread talking about how important it is to cut funding to the useless eaters... errr undeserving masses.
Current US society isn't that bad, however, there is a significant population of people that see no problems with things like child labor and completely privatizing education (and everything else for that matter).
> I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
I never said the current US policies treat kids that way. I do, however, see some disturbing rhetoric throughout this thread about how we spend to much time/money/effort on individuals the commenters deem as worthless.
And those people do not even have to be geniuses or top students. Our society moves forward on the back of millions of ordinary people, yet those ordinary people, me included, would benefit most from a rigorous education system.
This can mean a jump from working class to middle class and nothing more. That is absolutely driving society forward.
Not offering a means out of "the shit" for these kids is a way to hold them down into the circumstances they were born into and nothing more.
Zero kids I'm thinking of who went through these programs went to Yale or any other ivy. Most have great lives 20 years later, off the backs of that early opportunity for achievement.
> As many countries demonstrated, wealth does not buy good genes. Talented kids stand out, as long as we have a decent public school system, which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable. That's how East-European countries and Asian countries produce high-quality students.
What implications does this have for all students getting trained rigorously in the public school system? People that also speak of genes like Charles Murray say this is a fool's errand and that we should effectively just throw them off the ship.
Yes, and how we define "bad genes". I'm someone that you definitely wouldn't consider "talented" (since I've never worked at Google etc) and probably have "bad genes", what should be done with people like me?
* giving you a no-shame route up and down so that you can choose your own level of challenge, which entails
* giving you opportunities to try the more gifted programs to see if you'd do well and enjoy them
and also
* giving you the opportunity to choose a less demanding program in which you can find and adequate level of challenge (if you need to)
BUT
* treating disruptive behaviour as a choice to go to a less demanding program
Rather than trying to focus on the less-achieving third (half, tenth, etc) with the goal of bootstrapping entire groups (for your definition) via equality of outcome, it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.
It would also make sense to put aside some extra resources for those we know can achieve but are held back by specifically addressable hurdles like money or parents or etc.
If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.
There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of opportunity.
Quite obviously. That's what's being strip-mined at the moment.
I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.
These programs have been removed since. It's holding those that need the most help back, while in no way hurting the people intended. The kids who have the ultra-parents with unlimited resources are going to private schools to begin with.
> If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.
Short of extremely well-off suburbs (and neighborhoods in a handful of cities I suppose) this was never a thing in the public school system. Those generational wealth students don't touch the public school system at all. They are not relevant to the discussion and never have been.
> equality of opportunity
Correct. Equality of opportunity is what matters. The folks removing any gifted and talented programs, advocating for killing off magnet schools, etc. are the ones removing said opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. It's dragging everyone down to an extremely low bar and pretending they did something good.
Without inner city public school programs oriented towards the G&T crowd I would not be where I am today because my parents were working class at best. They were good parents, but they simply did not have resources to keep up with the "legacy" crowd. All they could do was try to get me into the "right" public schools and hope I'd be given a chance. This worked. Those programs are now gone - and anyone who grew up where I did in the same circumstances is more or less shit out of luck.
This is outright evil. Strong language and emotion be damned. It's deserved in this case.
The part where I disagree is the 'why' and the 'who'. There are a number of very strong forces (aka lobbying groups, aka decisions like 'no child left behind') doing their best to destroy the public school system. By making this conversation about gifted vs not gifted, we are again distracted and pitted against ourselves.
Public schools should be well funded and funded in an egalitarian manner that doesn't replicate residential aggregation of race or money. It should be funded for kids who need remedial help, help appropriate for their age, and help because they're advanced. It should be funded so that people who move from one group to the next, and you can and do move from one group to another, are supported
IMO the goal of the lobbying and shit policy is to make private school the default option for those who can afford it and those who can barely afford it. Public school will be left to the masses, and will be defunded leaving a populous more easily controlled, with less social mobility.
You know by the way people (Gary Tan, etc) talk about it the only students that matter are the first generation Asian kids who didn’t grow up rich. As another first generation Asian kid that didn’t grow up rich but had the privilege of educated parents but didn’t achieve anything that you’d consider “moving society forward” what should happen to everyone else?
If those are the kids in a specific school/school system that happen to be the most academically gifted, then they should be the ones attending the gifted and talented programs. I don't see how them attending precludes anyone else from also qualifying though? That the demographics happen to skew this way in some number of school districts is interesting at best. Rewarding strong parenting sounds like a win for society to me. Second generation immigrant children doing better than their first generation parents sounds like the American Dream working as-intended to me!
> you’d consider “moving society forward”
I likely have a much looser definition than you do, perhaps. This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community. Making the jump from poor to middle class is a huge generational achievement on it's own. If I was tossed into the "general classes" in middle school I likely would have simply been working in a factory or retail like most of my peers who stayed within that track ended up doing. The folks in the accelerated programs statistically have gone into more lucrative careers - even those who did not attend college.
It all comes down to helping those who want to help themselves, and recognizing you can't help those that don't want it. Spend the resources on the former, and give the latter the opportunity to change their ways - but don't tear down those trying to better themselves in the name of equity.
If your definition of the American dream is the tiny fraction of poor Asian kids that get into Stanford you have a screwed up definition of the American dream, which is built on people that go to Cal State LA and never had G&T programs.
> This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community.
People that work in factories and retail are also functional members of society and your sentence does not seem to imply that when you drew a contrast there.
Teaching high-aptitude kids at their level also does not require taking away from the other kids assuming you have enough of them to fill a classroom.
Indeed. Wealth creates opportunities. When we have large disparities in wealth, we don't have equality of opportunity. A depressing amount of talk about "equality of opportunity" seems to focus on things like "when you reach age 18, you have the 'opportunity' to get into the same college as someone else" rather than "when you are born, your family's material resources are comparable to everyone else's". The thing is that that essentially requires some measure of equality of outcomes for the previous generation.
I didn't have history in school, could you expand on this part? This sounds very interesting.
Can you list which conquerers? I'm curious as to what you're referring to here
What do you think should happen to people like me?
I'm exceedingly skeptical that there's a low bar for "moving society forward" if the bar is "being in a gifted and talented program or equivalent". But if society is made up of a small set of overmen burdened by pulling the undermen across the finish line I absolutely would be an underman.
Do gifted students move society forward ?
Where is society moving to ?
Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.
The Guinea Worm is on the verge if eradication, mostly on the back of the multi-decade efforts of Jimmy Carter. I don't what his IQ is, but I'll assume it's below 140 and above whatever is the ballpark minimum required to enroll as a Navy Nuke.
I posit that you don't need to be a genius to eradicate a disease, just drive, a platform and the right resources and/or connections
Jimmy Carter: 145.
Not sure how credible that is but it sure did make me chuckle.
I am not assuming that: any range that has studying nuclear engineering as its floor is above average intelligence. I thought it was self-evident, but apparently not - perhaps not many people know what a "Navy Nuke officer" is. To be more explicit the range is between above average intelligence and "genius". Regardless, I will never be convinced that people with relatively average intelligence are precluded from greatness; so excuse my scepticism when fellow nerds pat themselves on the back for being the engine of the world without pointing at any research that bears this idea out.
You haven't made your point explicit. So what? What are you basing your argument on here? The existence of Navy Nuke officers may well have no bearing at all on Carter's intelligence. If Mr Carter was trying for jobs which required genius that suggests he was one.
> I will never be convinced that people with relatively average intelligence are precluded from greatness
Greatness is one thing, competition for US presidency is something else. I'm sure it is possible and happens on rare occasions, but an ordinary person cannot be reasonably expected make it through the scrum to become a US president. They usually have to have quite a few somethings to set them apart from the crowd - including great intelligence.
Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your opinion
The less rich people are allowed to buy success for their mediocre offspring, the better off society is.
Of course you cannot really teach them together in the same environment, it is not the task of gifted students to drag everyone with them, it is on teachers to provide necessities. But as long as school doesn't hold them back, they will be fine.
It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing.
Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own.
This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.