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Comment by stinky613 | Hacker News Reader

But, on the flip side, faster-learning kids need to learn how to live/work/deal with slower-learning kids and vice versa. The purpose of schooling goes beyond the accumulation of facts.

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This argument always comes up but I'm not convinced. In society people tend to congregate in professions and social where people have similar intellectual capabilities. How many people here were interested in a career in Software Engineering because the people in it had similar interests and values to you? I know I was.

Sure you need to be able to talk to other groups of people but not to the extent that you require 35 hours a week of education along side them for years. Additionally I'm not sure being educated alongside them actually helps. There are a a hell of a lot of intelligent people who become resentful of that situation and that attitude can take years to mature out of, if they ever do.

Why? Everyone always trots this out as though it's unequivocally true.

I ended up teaching my AP Statistics course. It was ludicrous: as a junior I somehow understood the material better than the teacher and was expected to teach a class full of seniors.

Yes, it was more educational than the alternative (sitting in a corner reading a book while totally phoning it in) but I also have no doubt that I would've learned far more in a course which actually challenged me.

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Also, this notion that our real world experiences are anywhere near as heterogeneous as public schools is downright ludicrous. It's not like we hire random people off the street to be software engineers. The average IQ of everyone I interact with is well the national average.

The problem is the entire class is geared to the slower kids. Since the faster kids learn the entire year's work in the first month or prior to the beginning of the year, the only thing they learn is how to deal with slower kids or amuse themselves quietly. My son read most of the fiction in his elementary school before I took him out to go to a private school.

I programmed games on my calculator, wrote stories and poems, printed out stories to read in tiny 4pt font so the teacher wouldn't notice, and constantly doodled drawings to keep my mind occupied. I sometimes think I learned more doing that than I did in school (at least until college, which was like a brutal wake-up call I wasn't prepared for).

Honestly I think the worst part is when teachers would get annoyed that you weren't 'paying attention' and force you to stop doing the crap that's keeping your mind busy and 'focus on school', even though you already get pretty much straight A's.

They learn to deal with slow-learning kids at the cost of not learning from a slower paced class at all. The negatives outweigh the positives for the gifted kids.

Nice in theory, doesn't work in practice. At least growing up where I did, a lot of the "slow" kids weren't slow. They just didn't give a fuck and would disrupt the class. No one needs to "learn" to deal with that bullshit. I don't have to deal with disruptive assholes in the real world.

I was one of those "disruptive assholes" in school. It was simply too easy for me to take seriously. A big part of it was also seeing through a lot of the teachers. I realized if there was a way to be successful in the world none of these people have a clue how to do it.

Weirdly the smart kid that started this thread claims that he decided to disrupt the class and "seek fulfillment in acting out" because he was bored, so even if you segregate by ability you'll find the same if they're not stimulated. Maybe the same solution applies for the kids you are talking about.

Then separate out the problem kids, not the slow kids.

For some, the problem is the class is too slow. The slow classes are CREATING the problem kids.

But they do. I went to a Dutch gymnasium at age 12. The smartest 5% of the population is admitted there. Did the concept of faster-learning kids and slower-learning kids disappear there? Hardly! There were huge differences in aptitude.

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