131–140 of 553 posts
The mentality there is that it is better to raise the average, than to focus resources on a small % of the population. Seems to have worked pretty well for them, all things considered.
> There’s little doubt that racism played a role in identifying children as gifted even though the label was based on supposedly objective criteria. Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only reason for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists? I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback…
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> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing. Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own. This is perha…
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. What does this even mean? To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the…
The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.
Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
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While I may have sympathy for your more substantive points, anytime I hear someone mention virtue signalling, it makes it sound like they're virtue signalling. Better to just not bring up that dog whistle.
it's a perfectly good phrase to describe what it says. if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
That's even vaguer and less compelling rhetoric than "virtue signaling".
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The factory model of education made sense in the industrial era, but it's increasingly anachronistic in an age of personalized technology. We have the tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty and pacing based on each student's capabilities - similar to how modern video games seamlessly adapt to player skill levels. Instead, we're still forcing students into rigid cohorts based mainly on age, effectively opti…
We have tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty for students who value education , whether because they're self-motivated or because their parents make them. The challenge is what to do about the large number of students - at many schools the majority - who don't. When you where dynamically adjust to a student who doesn't particularly care to study, or doesn't have the support to do it properly, you end up…
The solution isn't just to keep throwing money at the problem, because empirically that's been completely ineffective. If a large segment of the population are effectively learning nothing in e.g. the last 4 years of high school, they shouldn't be forced to attend, wasting resources that could be spent educating people who actually want to be educated. Instead there should be stronger support for people who come back to complete a high school diploma at a later age, as many of those students will come back with real motivation for study once they find their career opportunities without it are limited.
I think we should stop focusing on the cognitive elite at the expense of everyone else, actually. Why should people that think folks like me are failures deserve the bulk of our attention?
Seriously, we need all the bright people we can get, working on the tough problems and solving them. And we need even more basically competent people educated to keep what we have got figured out running smoothly. Life isn't some role playing game where everyone who wants to should get a turn being a surgeon or flying the jumbo jet. Competence actually matters.
Some countries, like the Nordics, have few (to no) options for gifted students. The mentality there is that it is better to raise the average, than to focus resources on a small % of the population. Seems to have worked pretty well for them, all things considered.
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In what way are you certain that she's gifted?
IMO any student that is 1-2 years ahead can be considered gifted for the purposes of parents who are thinking about how to optimize public or private education for their kids. Based on how a lot of education systems work in the US (recognizing only discrete progress in a student), if your child is 1-2 years ahead then that's worth recognizing and start nurturing. That's about when public schools also recognize the gi…
As a father with a son with IQ over 160, I can tell you unequivocally that California thinks gifted kids are the enemy. Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we w…
The real victims are the kids whose parents can’t afford to do this. It tends to be disproportionately the kids in the very demographics that the left professes to care about. So it’s weird to me that they would choose to do things that make it harder for these groups to have economic mobility.
As a father with a son with IQ over 160, I can tell you unequivocally that California thinks gifted kids are the enemy. Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we w…
Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th.
I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.