So leftist are producing inclusivity and equity by forcing everyone stay at the lowest common denominator. Instead of trying to help disadvantaged people climb the stair, they are breaking the stair to be sure everyone remains down.
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The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
801–810 of 922 posts
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#802Still bending over backwards to accommodate a racial equity narrative. How about you don’t look at a child’s skin color before you decide how they are educated and instead focus on doing the best you can for each instead of trying to make everything about achieving social justice goals. Anything else is racism.
So simple! We just need to stop looking at color and all inequality will go away! I wonder why nobody's thought of that before.
We were doing that for most of the 90s and early 2000s and it was working. It's only because of grifters and agitators and "thought leaders" who try to make a buck off of divisions and needless debates that we see this resurgence in these types of politics. And underneath the veneer of race concern-trolling there's a resurgence in communist ideas trying to use the wedge of race as the basis for justifying both the redistribution of wealth and the dissolution of merit-based systems.
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#803Gifted programs are extremely important and the width of American gifted programs is a virtue. Canada has a much higher standard for gifted, and in Ontario we generally admit roughly the top 1% of students (many American programs cater to the top 10%). There a number of large benefits to gifted, not the least of which is it changes the character of a program/school. If you are surrounded by bright students with nerdy…
I was in a gifted program but it was poorly executed and I deem it to have been detrimental to my growth.
I was randomly pulled from normal classes in order to hang out with a few other gifted students and do weird puzzles or whatever. Then later I’d have to figure out from classmates what I missed, including what homework to do etc. My social skills already sucked, and being labeled as special to the classmates whom I’d have to spend most of the day with certainly didn’t help.
I’m sure there a ways to do it better, but having no gifted program is better than a bad gifted program.
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#804Gifted programs, depending on where in the country they are located, are deeply related to equity. Things have gotten better over the past decade even without their total elimination, but for the majority of people who are of age to be posting here, if they were in a gifted program, it likely is because they had parents who helped them study for the tests to get in by spending money. Once in said program, fundraising…
> "but for the majority of people who are of age to be posting here, if they were in a gifted program, it likely is because they had parents who helped them study for the tests to get in by spending money."
Source? It's certainly not the case for me individually, having been an immigrant child who got through on my own since my parents didn't know enough English to help me on homework and we were too poor to afford tutoring.
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting, and their lack of interest / trouble focusing reflects a societal (and school) failure to make school engaging and give them the appropriate challenges and direct feedback to keep their attention. Many of the greatest human breakthroughs were made by people who were squirmy and distr…
School was never meant to be "engaging". It's not recreation, it's work. The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting, in order to attain a greater goal. Instead we expect everything to be engaging, stimulating and entertaining. Real world success is not like that - it's work - so better get into the habit early on.
So, you're saying that school is an unpaid bullshit job and ought to remain that way? Why do you think that's acceptable? It's almost as if you want today's kids to suffer the same way that we had to when we were their age.
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#806[deleted]
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
If school is work then we need to recognize the children's own agency in school, otherwise it it literally slavery. Forcing children to spend the majority of their lives working against their will leads to problems, especially among non-conformists.
I don't disagree with your characterization, but given children are not agents, and are subject to the whims of their parents, I think it's appropriate. Locking a child in their room is imprisonment, yet is widely used punitively at the whim of parents. Beating children is assault, yet operant conditioning is effective and also widely practiced towards children. It's also permitted in most jurisdictions if undue harm…
> Why do we need these, exactly? What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#808What's sad is that the US used to be the vanguard of modern civilization: science, technology, policies (making federalism work in a vast country like the US is an amazing achievement), and human wellbeing in general. And now we are debating common sense. Shame on the progressives.
It still is the vanguard of all those things, fortunately. The good news is that it seems the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. For example, last night San Franciso booted the progressive soft-on-crime DA. This mirrors a trend in other progressive bases too. The mid-term elections will at this rate represent a chastising of the progressive left. Good riddance!
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#809Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s disingenuous to try to call it well prepared vs poorly prepared. Some people are just naturally more academically gifted
Take almost any “academically gifted” student and start looking into their biography, and you’ll find a shitload of preparation. As a general rule (to which, sure, you can find rare exceptions if you really hunt) the more “gifted” the student, the more hands-on help and attention from experts they had. Even for those without significant expert help, the “gifted” students are the ones who spent a ton more time thinkin…
Passion for a subject can indeed propel you far ahead of your peers in that subject, but intelligence is what allows passion to continue and grow. No matter how much time you spend preparing the dumb kids they will struggle with difficult(or often easy) subjects and get frustrated - because of this passion will never develop, and it’s entirely reasonable to not become passionate about something you’re not capable of doing well at. I was a very smart kid, although very far from a genius. My parents were young earth creationists who knew nothing about science or computers and shielded me from science because of themes like evolution. The town I grew up in was in poor rural TX, so my teachers barely knew more. I certainly wasn’t well prepared to understand science, but yet I developed a passion for that and computer programming and became a voracious reader of everything I could find on it in the school library, acquiring knowledge far beyond my grade level. The less smart but wealthier and better prepared kids I knew growing up never caught up to me.
Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
#810A lot of my friends in the city I went to college in would have been on the "equity" side of this debate as well, until they had kids themselves. It dawned on them that their kids in public schools may not be able to get algebra in eighth grade anymore. And good luck with long division. So after they realized their kids will get a worse math education than they had, they changed their tune.
Most progressives end up changing their tune on all their major ideas when they collide with reality. For example, San Francisco last night booted the progressive soft-on-crime DA because of the increasing crime rate. Seattle recently saw increases in crime and had to walk back their tune on getting rid of law enforcement. Progressive ideas simply do not work in reality. Be it on law enforcement, dissolution of borders, dissolution of merit-based systems, equity as pertains to gifted programs...I've not seen a single progressive idea produce any good results when implemented.
I'm hoping the SF DA recall election is a sign that we're going to see the pendulum swing in the other direction as more people realize that the progressive platform is toxic trash.