[bonoboTP]

A curious kid can pace themselves along with a the rest just fine. Are the topics taught too long for your talent? Then dig deeper in each. Say, you're learning about magnetism in physics class but you learn the requirements in half the time allocated. Then textbooks usually contain small print optional advanced topics or references, you can read additional stuff online maybe ask the teacher for further direction. Any topic has almost vast depth with specialists spending their career studying just a tiny section of it. You can never exhaust a topic. Don't just skip ahead to the next lesson as that will make things boring but engage each more deeply.

The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.

It has even been observed that people can bond over a shared meal better than if everyone eats their own different food.

Overall a huge huge part of school is about socializing, with fellow students or against fellow students, obeying and rebelling against teachers, being honest or cheating to copy your homework, the dynamics of bullying and protecting from bullies, snitching on others or lying to protect minor wrongdoers, feeling guilt when you made the wrong decision, feeling proud for the right decision, discovering the difference of rules and morals, of friendship and togetherness and betrayal and loyalty, of acting tough or showing compassion, of romance and heartbreak, etc. So many lessons that aren't taught by teachers explicitly or asked on a test. But these add up to a stable individual later on who can draw from a rich well of experiences for later reference, even in adulthood. You can do a lot of low risk experimentation at that age. If people become atomized, dropped into a class full of almost strangers in each subject, there is no way to develop group dynamics of the above sort. Maybe you can do some of it with your sports team but you spend much less time with them than with a shared class.

[whatshisface]

>A curious kid can pace themselves along with a the rest just fine. Are the topics taught too long for your talent? Then dig deeper in each.

This is not as practical as one would hope, because all of the assigned work and hours of lecturing would still be repetitive and boring. Can a smart kid stop doing times tables on problem 5 and do calculus for the rest of the worksheet? Can a smart kid decline to show up to class if they already know what will be covered? No, and that's why smart kids think school is too slow.

[bonoboTP]

Admitted that I wasn't an outlier-level smart kid (so often top of class but not top of school), when I was done understanding the requirements, I could always find a way to study things from different angles, think about the why's, how to derive the formula we had to memorize, why the on-paper division method works where we just had to memorize the steps, etc.

Now if someone is a real outlier in IQ, then maybe these things are still too easy, but you can't design the system for the 1% smartest. They have to go to special schools really.

But anyways, schools are already tiered somewhat at least in Hungary. You get admitted based on centralized test scores, so your peers are roughly similar.

[netjiro]

> The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization.

Also not going so well for the top 5%. They develop much better if they are not stuffed in the same prison every day as the rest of the population. I'd guess the same would be true for the the corresponding slower slice, but I have seen no studies to that effect.

I think there was a study on this highlighted here on hn recently, but my google-fu is too weak.

[bonoboTP]

Well I don't know how it is in the US but in Hungary, secondary schools (some of which start at age 10, some at 12, some at 14 - before that is primary school) use centralized admission exam scores and compete for smart kids or artsy ones, some are geared for trades or tourism and gastronomy etc.

You only have to endure 4, 6 or 8 years among the general population of your neighborhood, but at least that exposes people to some socialization with the different "classes". I'm doing a PhD now, but made good friends with people who now do blue collar jobs which makes the working class less of an "other" in my eye, compared if I had been to elite high brow schools the whole time.

[netjiro]

https://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10489

The first few paragraphs are fun / scary.

[candu]

There are also practical reasons to stuff everyone in one box.

With class sizes steadily growing, teachers are often stretched thin - from speaking with a few friends who happen to be teachers, they also often get lots of well-intentioned advice on pedagogy. Very little of it is actionable, especially when you're already overburdened and have little time to rigorously investigate further, some of it comes with thinly-veiled edtech pitches ("this shiny new tool will solve all your problems for every kid!"), and yet other parts are utter nonsense from helicopter parents who will insist that you're teaching their kid incorrectly no matter what you do.

As a result, it's a lot easier if you can simply teach everyone to the same template - if that works for 90% of kids, that's arguably better than catering to the other 10%, especially if half of that 10% is comfortable with self-directed learning. Plus you can point to standards to argue that you're just doing your job, which is much more straightforward than defending your profession / methods and their value to every last person who believes something random they found off the internet or a vague feeling about how best to educate over those with actual practical and theoretical expertise in the field.

[InfiniteRand]

I remember observing a 2nd grade classroom (when I was considering being a teacher) and seeing the teacher yell at a kid for going to fast in a practice test, same thing happened to me in 2nd grade. In middle school if I finished in-class work early, I would pull out a book or two, which might be tough to put down when the teacher moved to the next topic. So I think it's pretty common for students going too fast to butt heads with teachers (fortunately most of my teachers liked me for other reasons, which meant the butt-ing head moments did not build and tensions got dispersed)

That being said, the recommendation I heard when I was studying education was to offer enrichment activities. Which allows smart kids to do their own thing without going in front of the rest of the class in the normal material (so that you do not need full-on tracking and class separation). I generally like that recommendation, although it is not a cure-all. I may be biased since this fit my learning style well well since my academic behavior was chronically inconsistent at times (on-set of mental illness), and the enrichment activities often counted for extra credit which helped me make up for times when I was underperforming.

More generally I think letting smart kids build up a cushion of extra credit takes the edge off of the "always-need-to-be-perfect" pressure smart kids often feel.

[_630w]

> The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.

Curious to see what the retention rate for school friends are.

[bonoboTP]

Not sure how that's relevant to my point. You still learned to act in a group and soaked up experiences of various emotions, dilemmas, love, hate, embarrassment, courage etc. Enduring the pointless, the mundane and boring stuff and complaining about it or occasionally rebelling against it is how you bond with others. At least that's how we do it in Eastern Europe.