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Comment by cpkpad | Hacker News Reader

It depends on where the pressure is places. If the pressure is placed on kids, sure. If it's placed on schools, that's not toxic. The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast.

The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart. There were plenty of smart kids I knew -- some smarter than me -- who got horrible grades going through one of these school. Many of them did not, in any real sense, succeed.

Imagine being placed in a room, today, and forced to listen to lectures on what you already know, and be given menial make-work tasks, like adding big numbers and copying letters, and doing that for hours each day. Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.

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> Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.

And the third kind (full disclosure: I was of this kind) get very rebellious and were multiple times in strong danger of being expelled from school (not because of bad marks). I still hated school and love to ask the inconvenient question: Who is the more evil person: The kid who does a school rampage or the politician whose decision not to drop lawcompulsory school attendance (in Germany for example home schooling is disallowed) leads to suicides of schoolchildren. Both people clearly leave traces of dead people.

Reminds me of the dialogue is Yes, Prime Minister:

  - Education in this country is a disaster. We're supposed to prepare children for work.
    Most of the time they're bored stiff.
  - I should've thought that being bored stiff was an excellent preparation for work.
  - The school leaving age was raised to 16, but they're learning less.
  - We didn't raise it so they'd learn more! We raised it to keep teenagers off the job market
    and hold down unemployment figures.

OTOH, would allowing home schooling really solve suicides by schoolchildren? Seems like if a parent is worried enough about their kid's mental health to home school them, they'd do so even if they have to move country (especially nowadays, when you can live and work in different EU countries easily). Isn't it more a matter of the adults around not perceiving the problem?

The dialogue is the unspoken truth. The age limit was actually instated to prevent kids from working damaging factory or repetitive jobs. There are much fewer of those nowadays.

>The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart.

Nah, they're toxic, abusive torture to pretty much everyone.

Curious to how a school wold work on not wasting talent without putting pressure the talented kid.

"Oh, we have prepared a special curriculum for you because you are gifted and hired these teacher to give you room to fulfill your potential and not waste it. No pressure though, if you want to waste your potential and become medioker, just say the word and we will throw away the investment we have made in you!"

I don't think you have to go so far as big investments in extra teachers and curriculum to serve gifted children. Just get out of the way and let them work ahead, or get their busy-work done fast and read on their own. Don't waste their time, and turn school into a prison that they have to shuffle through for eight hours a day, bored to tears.

The original comment was

"The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast."

If they need something extra, like programs for talented and gifted children, that's an investment. A child that is assigned to a "Program for Talented and Gifted Children" will feel pressure to not let that talent/gift go to waste.

Your solution is to do nothing extra for them, just let them idle away in the library reading random books. Not a guarantee that they wont waste their time/talent by their own doing. While cheap, I don't think it would be very effective.

My argument is that most of the school systems work hard to retard and beat down students that are smarter than the average bear, or cripple their growth by forcing them to do unpaid labor as defacto teacher's aides. It would be nice to provide resources at a higher level, but that higher level material is beyond the capability of most of the people that are employed as teachers anyway, so the best, most economical result is to stop actively getting in the way of students that need to go faster than what the lowest-common-denominator can handle, and just let them.

> Just get out of the way and let them work ahead, or get their busy-work done fast and read on their own.

I would have loved that as a child. The problem was: All the interesting papers/books in the internet were behind paywalls (today we have SciHub and Library Genesis, which are nevertheless still illegal).

The idea is to put the right amount of pressure. A sensitive teacher knows when their pupil is not keeping up, wants more, less or is bored.

It is the essence of individualised teaching.

Sadly, teachers are very overworked these days, don't see how the student approaches homework and have no insight into family or emotional issues.

Make the work meaningful, impactful, and rewarding, so the kid will want to do it.

> Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast.

What's the evidence that G&T programmes achieve better academic or life outcomes?

Isn't that the premise of the study?

Sidenote: I read the SciAm article last week, not this one yet.

Even if life outcomes are the same, if G&T programs make those kids happier while in school, the programs are worth keeping.

Where's your study proving the opposite? Or is your proposal to do absolutely nothing without a study first telling you to? G&T programs try to utilize the diversity of students, rather than just ignoring it or trying to will it away. In a world where things actually have to function prior to the conducting of infinite studies, that makes a lot of intuitive sense.

I don't have any evidence about this, but the most compelling argument I've heard is optionality.

The programs can be good or a complete waste depending on how they are ran. The study referred to in the article pointed out that children do better in the short and long run if they are given extra opportunities to learn more on their own. That's the entire purpose of these programs to begin with, really. The same way as other Special Education programs which may or may not be well ran, but often do more for the students in them than letting them try and teach themselves.

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