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Comment by employee8000 | Hacker News Reader

This is unadulterated bullshit. The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction that you just made up.

We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve.

This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.

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> The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction

In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject.

> We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids

This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.

When I was a kid, I would happily teach another kid something if that kid was generally smart. It was an investment of time. There was the possibility that they could teach me things.

For a given pair of students X and Y, it may be a poor investment for X to teach Y anything, if X will almost surely dominate Y within the problem domain. It would be stupid to force X to teach Y in this setting.

I think the general argument is that attempting to teach something, forces you to work with the material in your own head in a way that improves your own understanding. This is similar to "rubber duck debugging" where explaining a problem to an inanimate object leads you to the solution. But interacting with an actual human being often helps too.

Smart kids are not more important than other kids. And where did you get the idea that default-smart kids will benefit the society more than dumber kids given a chance to become smarter? Lots of examples of smart kids becoming dangerous a-holes, especially when they grow up in environments that completely exclude mid and low level kids.

You believe that the brightest children helping their more unenlightened peers will result in society losing out?

No, it's unrealistic and doesn't happen so let's stop pretending it does.

Who's pretending it happens?

I do think that educating other people is important, because we don't live forever.

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