[ido]

It’s not about the cognitive elite. The mass-education public school system is designed for an average with very little deviation that doesn’t actually fit that many pupils - it’s not a single int stat like in d&d, kids have different capabilities & interests and aiming for some sort of generalized lowest common denominator is going to be a bad experience for pretty much everyone.

The only solution IMO is the expensive one - more individualized curricula, smaller classes, more personal attention from the teacher to the pupil and less focus on standardized tests and grades.

[koonsolo]

There is another way, and I know they sometimes use it in Belgium: let the smarter kids help out the ones that still struggle with the material. That way they learn how to properly explain things, teach others. Maybe they don't see more material than the other kids, but they sure learn other usefull skills.

[chongli]

That’s not great. The smartest kids could be learning calculus in elementary school. Having them teach arithmetic to their struggling peers is just going to add frustration onto boredom.

It also turns out that the smartest kids don’t even need that much attention. They just need access to resources and challenging material and a supervisor to help them set and achieve goals. It really doesn’t cost much to society to provide gifted kids with what they need and at the same time free teachers up to spend more time with those who need it.

I think we all know the main reason we as a society don’t fund gifted and talented education: spite. Parents of average kids hold a special animosity toward gifted kids for no other reason than envy. They would be far better off finding ways to get the most problematic and disruptive kids out of their children’s classrooms but that doesn’t satisfy people the way seeing a gifted program close does.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

I'm guessing there's a big ick factor to separating kids into "smarter" and "not that smart" groups. It feels inequitable, undemocratic, it goes against the commonly accepted blank slate hypothesis. People will say that if kids show different outcomes, the teachers just haven't tried hard enough, or that the state hasn't spent enough on them.

[koonsolo]

I'm willing to bet most gifted kids are born in the first half of the year, and most not so smart ones in the second half.

Same in sports by the way: most "gifted" players are born at the start of the year: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh...

Conclusion: at young ages, you should be very careful what you call "gifted" when you place kids with almost 1 year difference in the same group.

[MerelyMortal]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-...

Link with google removed.

(whenever you copy and paste it, you can just delete the "www.google.com/amp/s/" part and the URL will now point to the real website.)

[wooque]

Pure bullshit, I was top 1% in school and I was born in December

[koonsolo]

A single case doesn't invalidate the statistics of a larger group. You being top 1% should know that.

[dekleinewolf]

My n=1 is that I was always both the youngest and the smartest.

[igorkraw]

This "envy" story is complete BS. Why should we, as a society, especially help the most privileged and gifted people even more? It's not envy, it's regression to the mean (everything except societal rules is already going in your favour, how dare it).

I also don't think you appreciate the value of instruction as a learning tool and the skills required to truly teach people - empathy, paying attention to cues to keep an up to date model of the student, language skills, clarity of thought to adapt your explanation on the fly. All of these are real skills, which it is absolutely worth teaching the gifted math prodigy instead of rushing them into research ASAP - they are humans, not theorem-factories.

[chongli]

There are plenty of gifted students who are not from economically privileged backgrounds. These are kids who can easily drop out, not just from school but from society as a whole, if they’re not nurtured.

I have first hand experience with this, as a former high school dropout, now close to completing a math degree just before the age of 40. The cost to the school system to keep me engaged rather than bored and ignored would’ve been minuscule compared to all of the lost tax revenue from me staying out of the workforce for over a decade and a half.

None of that has anything to do with forcing gifted kids into math research. And there are a hell of a lot more gifted kids than just the Olympiad gold medallist prodigies. I could’ve learned calculus in elementary school but I am far, far away from someone like Terence Tao.

[igorkraw]

That still doesn't hold any water for the envy/spite argument I was replying to.

I'm all about making school a valuable, engaging experience for everyone, including gifted children. But it needs to scale and be progressive, not just pile more inequalities and gate keeping into the system.

And if we are talking about the lost tax revenue and the "worth" of education, having the gifted kids teach their peers for better socialisation and so increasing the floor of math and other education will have a much larger impact. Progress doesn't come from great men, it comes from the world changing.

[scarmig]

It's weird that we don't think it's reasonable to expect teachers with years of postgraduate study and experience in education to get kids up to grade level algebra and at the same time think having a gifted kid tutor them will be able to improve things.

Also, if we're expecting gifted kids to work as teachers' aides at the expense of their own education, shouldn't we be compensating them for it?

Or should the gifted kids just be grateful for the opportunity? If it's actually good for them, are parents just being irrational by focusing on challenging them academically instead of enrolling them in a teacher's college for tots?

[dekleinewolf]

My kids (Montessori) school has horizontal classes (3 age groups in one class) for exactly this reason. From ages 3-12 they go through the cycle of being youngest, middle and oldest 3 times, teaching them valuable 'soft skills' such as you described.

[koonsolo]

One of my daughters is 8, and she scores very high in school. Relative to my other kids way better at that age, and relative to the other kids in school too.

You might call that gifted.

Surprisingly she is also taller than most kids in her class.

Minor detail that you can totally ignore: she was born 2nd of January.

[dekleinewolf]

I assume that wherever you are has the cut off that determines in which school year a kid is sorted is on January 1st (which is not a universal truth), and your point is that she's also older than her class mates?

[boh]

This is essentially the cult of the individual in a nutshell. A well functioning society with a higher overall competence is more capable than one whose education system caters to a small minority of people who did calculus in elementary school.

[froh]

the solution actually is an inexpensive one: provide age appropriate self learning materials and make the teachers coaches in navigating those. Montessori schools work like that and we have a public school using that to accommodate both very quick and very slow learners and all those in between. the trick is that most students spend two years in that class, slow learners stay for three and the quick kids move on after just one year. individualized learning and mixed age groups. cheap and works like a charm.

[jay_kyburz]

I've said it before, but I think software could do a lot to customize curriculum for students without disrupting the the traditional classroom too much.

The kids could be tested with games, then presented new stuff or roll back to some older stuff based on how well they are progressing.

[dekleinewolf]

In my country many many schools switch to tablet based math lessons that adjust based on the students level.