[loewenskind]

>Everyone who's tried to teach has noticed that some people pick things up better than others.

Obviously. Is this a problem with the students themselves, the teachers, the teaching strategy/material or some combination of those things? I think it's rather short sighted (not to mention far too convenient) to just assume it's the student and move on.

[philwelch]

We've spent decades if not centuries looking for better teaching strategies and materials, and we haven't leveled the playing field. Sure, we've made improvements--but after those improvements, even if the slower kids catch up with the quicker kids, the quicker kids get even farther ahead.

How do you even expect to find teaching methods that disproportionately benefit the slower kids over the quicker kids anyway?

[loewenskind]

>We've spent decades if not centuries looking for better teaching strategies and materials

Have we? Then why is the system so incredibly awful today? Why is it for a wide variety of subjects we are using methods that are known to be inferior?

>How do you even expect to find teaching methods that disproportionately benefit the slower kids over the quicker kids anyway?

We know so little about how the brain works, it could be that the method we have today promotes one kind of brain "layout" (if you will) but some other method might promote a different kind.

We just don't know yet. And deciding something based on this lack of knowledge is premature to say the least.

[philwelch]

We're considering the thesis that all human beings (with the possible exception of people with those with certain medical problems) have the same intellectual potential.

We observe that intellectual performance, as far as has ever been measured, varies tremendously by individual. Basically we have a curve of observed intellectual performance.

We also know that we can improve teaching methods. Of this there is no dispute. We can also surmise that the optimal set of teaching methods, applied and distributed in the optimal manner, will influence observed intellectual performance. We can make another curve of how far it's theoretically possible to improve someone's intellectual performance.

We have no idea what the shape of this second curve is. Of the infinite possible shapes it could have, how bloody likely is it that it's exactly the complement of the first curve?

[loewenskind]

>We observe that intellectual performance, as far as has ever been measured, varies tremendously by individual.

In the ways we have measured, yes. The issue here, I think, is that person A who excels to extreme levels in e.g. math doesn't excel at everything. In fact, the better he is at math the worse he might be in different subjects (Einstein example). So when we measure how well people do aren't we just measuring how good they are at passing our tests?

There does seem to be correlation for people who manage to do well at our system and people who end up successful. I'm just not convinced this is the whole story.