[CPUstring]

Coming from the middle class, I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program at a good school. Maybe your school system just wasn't competent at filtering people?

Those that I know who have made bad life decisions (kids too early, dropping out of college, leaving extremely supportive parents) could totally have been expected to based off looking at GPA/SAT signals.

[thiago_fm]

In most poor countries, there isn't even such a thing as "gifted" programs.

And those that do, there's so much competition that people in deep poverty can never join it, you'd see mostly lower-middle class people.

Perhaps leave the US, travel for a while and you'll see that the average US life experience is very different in comparison to the rest of the world.

And to wrap up, a lot of gifted kids end up never having the opportunity to study in a school or environment that catapults them into any kind of gifted program.

Just be glad you were born American and start comprehending that you are lucky, but most of the world isn't. The best you can do.

[ska]

> I've never met

Quite.

[corobo]

> I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program

I'm not sure I understand this one.. how would you know the gifted program missed them if they're now spending their life dealing with poverty? I'm guessing you don't mingle with the poors?

I've never met anyone that lives their entire life in the middle of a rainforest. So weird!

Also what the fuck is a gifted program lmao. That must be some London thing, aye? We were lucky to have teachers of the subject teaching the class up north haha

[laurencerowe]

Gifted programs are American things. Talking to my California born partner it seems to be a kind of streaming thing. They don’t seem to have as much ability setting here as I was used to in UK (where for certain subjects classes are split by ability.)

[corobo]

Ahhh, gotcha. The focus on UK in the article and many comments put me in a UK-centric mindset. My bad there.

Aye we had splits in some subjects like that. Weirdly all the rich kids (for my town, mostly middle class really) were in the top classes and the poor kids in the bottom haha

[VBprogrammer]

Even if such programs exist and exceptionally talented people get filtered into them, it completely ignores the fact that there is still a huge disparity in outcome for people who are merely modestly above average.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

many schools in the US will take the most gifted students and put them in advanced classes. They typically move faster.