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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?

#221

Post by SlySherZ »

No, let me explain why:

- Being "gifted" isn't a black and white trait, it's much more diverse;

- Different people are gifted in different topics. I've always learned maths faster than my peers, but they all dance better than I do;

- How do you even decide who is gifted and who isn't? Just give everyone the same oportunities;

But I do believe that school should be tailored to fit the student. What I propose is to allow the student to progress at his own pace:

- Classes should be open for every student that has passed all the prerequisites to join;

- The student can choose when he he's ready to take the test about the topics he already learned;

- Some teachers should keep track of the progress of the students;

- There should be always teachers with free time ready to help students who request it;

EDIT: Fixed broken formatting.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#222

Post by cema »

willholloway wrote: post #215
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…

Segregating gifted children in with the regular population will one day soon be seen as child abuse. It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism. We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by pe…

  Segregating gifted children in with the regular population
Do you mean desegredating, that is, keeping them in? If so, I agree, it may be bordering on abuse. I have only anecdotal evidence to support it, but I suspect there may have been studies.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#223

Post by Zigurd »

My daughter transferred out of a great school in our home community to go to a math and science oriented selective school. She was bored and her grades slipped. In the school she transferred to, she got her ass kicked for two years and learned to be self-sufficient and learned she would not always be the smartest person in the building. Now she's a CMU SCS alum. I don't know if she could have made it through SCS without that preparation.

My son, on the other hand, thrived in our town's public school. He would have resented going to the school my daughter went through. He would have seen it as unnecessary, even punitive. He is at a very large university and is thriving there, too.

Different kids have different kinds of intelligence and maturity levels at different ages. Some never "fit in" and some kids are the kids everyone likes and have the high school social thing totally under control while pulling straight As.

If you undermine public schools by segregating the smart kids, my son would not have had time to play football, lacrosse, and baseball and teach skiing as his after school job. He would have felt getting good grades was a curse.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#224

Post by CaptSpify »

mholmes680 wrote: post #203

>>students who are gifted have specific learning needs that require: >> tailored learning strategies >> education supported by a challenging curriculum >> teachers trained in gifted education >> more exposure to students of similar ability >> opportunities for acceleration I find this interesting, coming from the "gifted" track in HS and being married to a special education teacher at a public school. The same list a…

I would have loved to have gone to a class with only 25 students. Mine usually had ~32. I think this is the real issue: To effectively help any student, gifted, slow or average, they all need more focused attention and curriculum.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#225

Post by BigJeffeRonaldo »

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…

I think resentment of this kind of social engineering is a major key in recent US political shifts. Let's talk about the basics. If a kid can learn more difficult material and the kid wants to, most reasonable people would agree that the kid should go where that is an option. This basic sense of the world is blocked by social engineers obsessed with n-th order effects who ignore the fundamental issue. Let's do the basics, folks.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#226

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#228

Post by run4yourlives2 »

> students who are gifted have specific learning needs that require: tailored learning strategies, education supported by a challenging curriculum, teachers trained in gifted education, more exposure to students of similar ability, opportunities for acceleration

So, gifted students are like every other student and excel with educational approaches tailored to their style of learning. Okay. You could say this exact same thing about kids with ADD, kids with Autism, boys, girls, kids with brown hair, etc, etc.

The arguments for this type of segregation and any other type of segregation are exactly the same. Do boys excel when removed from girls? Some of them do, others to a negligible degree.

The issue is that the government isn't trying to educate "your kid", it's trying to educate "every kid". Why? Because having a baseline education in your society - particularly in a democracy - is a very beneficial thing, for far too many reasons to get into here.

So the purpose of public schooling is not to bring you up to your full potential, it's to provide you with a base level starting point. Equality not of outcome, but of opportunity in life.

There is a fine balance between the good of the individual and the good of the overall society. The latter often supporting the former. It does us no good to further isolate ourselves from each other in ways that simply aren't compatible with maintaining a sustainable and just society overall. Western democracy has historically been able to walk the line between self-determination and individual freedom and collective control and deference to the state, but I fear we're starting to see shifts away from the centre into more extremes. Clamoring for segregation is just another form of destructive identity politics at the end of the day.

All that being said, I'll have to just come out and say that of course individual kids will be better off in tailored environments than they would be in the general populace. That isn't the question. The question really should be, are they better off growing up in an environment so removed from the reality of the world they are going to help run in the future? I'm not so sure.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#229

Post by thereisnospork »

_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…

How can you argue pt.1 when the kids of high income parents already receive, at great expense but to great personal benefit, the kind of academically segregated education you are arguing against? How is a smart kid from Detroit or Camden supposed to catch up to his intellectual peer who is learning calculus while he/she is stuck in a school right out of Stand and Deliver? Without help one of them is going to Harvard and the other Community College, maybe, and quite frankly that is a waste of potential.

Sometimes the problem with education isn't the building, or the teachers, or the administration: it's the students (and by extension their parents) and if we can't fix them at least we can teach everyone according to their ability.

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