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Should gifted students go to a separate school?

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Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#111

Post by lutusp »

For political reasons, in the U.S. this idea is a non-starter -- many people won't accept the idea of paying taxes to support special programs for the gifted, but are willing to do it for those below average. So in the U.S., the expression "special needs children" is a euphemism for handicapped, not gifted, children.

There are noteworthy exceptions, usually in large cities with well-educated taxpayers, but for the majority of locales, earmarks for the gifted are just too controversial.

An interesting side effect of this anti-intellectual bias is today sitting in the White House.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#112

Post by justin_vanw »

_m8fo wrote: post #84

I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular s…

1. Who cares? This is not an argument for or against this. It's totally inappropriate to decide the best way to educate a child based on your personal theories about how wealth should be distributed, and your untested wild ass guess about what effect some educational policy would have on that theory.

2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging.

- Small classes: maybe, it's not necessary at all.

- better curriculum: well, yes, smarter kids can cover a topic more quickly and in more depth. The less smart kids can't keep up, so they have to skim less deeply and/or cover less material.

- more practical: ??? did you feel like you needed 3 bullets or something?

You should have separate schools because there aren't enough gifted kids in one regular school to even fill one class. This comes directly from the definition of gifted, if gifted is say the top 1% of students, a large high-school with 1500 kids would only have 15 of them across 4 grades. You have to do something like a magnet school to have enough kids at the same level in the same room for it to work at all.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#113

Post by bleepbloop22 »

justin_vanw wrote: post #95
habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they w…

1. You didn't respond to his point. How do you decide who is "gifted?" How do you untangle that from race and economic class?

2. How do you untangle race and economic class from the sort of segregation you are proposing is okay here?

3. I don't think that this is really a response to the point. You're just saying it's unfair to the families who would rather their kids go to a good school instead of needing to fight for their kids to go to a good school. Which ... something something "government handouts." Also: private school vouchers to take "smart kids" to "good schools" aren't social engineering either? This isn't a coherent point.

You sound very frustrated. I'd be interested in reading attempts to debate the points themselves instead of appeals to emotion.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#114

Post by TeMPOraL »

justin_vanw wrote: post #95
habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they w…

RE 1., your analogy to food is both misapplied and unhelpful. The choice here is between "better education" and "standard education", not between "better education" and "no education at all". You can't test the logic of that argument by applying it to the food case and expect a sensible result.

Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#115

Post by jahewson »

Aqueous wrote: post #93
habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots. We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from t…

Funny, because as I remember it the dumb kids just devoted their efforts to beating the shit out of everyone else, and disrupting the class as much as possible. No amount of punishment would change their behaviour.

20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#116

Post by _m8fo »

justin_vanw wrote: post #112
_m8fo wrote: post #84

I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular s…

1. Who cares? This is not an argument for or against this. It's totally inappropriate to decide the best way to educate a child based on your personal theories about how wealth should be distributed, and your untested wild ass guess about what effect some educational policy would have on that theory. 2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging. - Small classes: maybe, it's not necessa…

I won't respond to the first point. If you're seriously asking "who cares" about income inequality then I don't think discourse will be productive.

In any case, you didn't seem to refute my main point that gifted schools would also benefit regular students.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#117

Post by lutusp »

JDazzle wrote: post #97

As a most definitely non-gifted student, I wonder what the impact of removing gifted students from the school? I've seen gifted students help others succeed through tutoring or even by providing a role model for others to look up to. I believe having a gifted student in a regular school benefits the entire school and may help them in learning other, more social skills.

One problem with mixing gifted with average students is that the gifted start coasting, not trying, not developing their abilities, because it's too easy to stay ahead of the rest of the students. Then, when that person gets to college, he/she is totally unprepared for real intellectual competition.

There are many positive points to mixing the gifted with the average, but their personal scholarly advancement tends to suffer.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#118

Post by soundwave106 »

brightball wrote: post #71
dijit wrote: post #2

Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the…

You just described why so many people support school choice and voucher policies. It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model. EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.

Personally, the biggest concern I would have with school choice / voucher policies is maintaining accountability and quality standards.

The recent fraud investigations in the USA for-profit college market (eg where several scam-ish type outfits churned out expensive but useless degrees to people lured in by slick marketing) absolutely shows that, sometimes, more options can be worse.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#119

Post by ehsankia »

_m8fo wrote: post #84

I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular s…

I don't think complete segregation is the answer, but within a given school, I believe there can be more malleability. In general, the idea of which class you end up in being more skill based than age based. And not everyone is better at every subject. Having it per subject allows someone to go further in math even if they struggle with some other subject.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#120

Post by lol214365 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #100
Aqueous wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots. We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from t…

Have you ever been inside a school? The stupid kids don't gather around to bask in the glow of the gifted kids. They DO gather around them and call them 'faggot' and trip them in the hallway, especially if they are smart but not athletic.

Only if you confound "dumb kid" and "problem kid". Certainly, get problem kids out of the equation, but that doesn't mean there isn't some benefit to different cognitive classes coming into contact with one another.

If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.

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