Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this. I skipped a few grades and started university at 15. It took years to catch up socially and in many ways I never did. I wouldn't recommend it.

In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a sort that wasn't available back then.

There's a grass-is-greener effect though. It's easy to imagine that one would have done better if one had been / had not been accelerated. As a philosophy prof told me back in those early university years, "Life does not bear counterfactuals." She also said "I bet you tell that to all the girls" when I dropped her Hegel class.

View on HN

Anecdotal counterpoint: I too skipped three grades (early ones) and ended up in college at 15 (and then on to grad school at 19); and based on how I reacted to boredom even then I am deeply certain that if I hadn't been accelerated, and just given "enrichment" or whatever, I would have checked out and washed out. Meanwhile, I certainly had a different social trajectory than your typical teen-20s-30s person, but that was probably a foregone conclusion.

But, anecdotes.

> I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this.

The rest of your post implies that you wonder that because you had a bad social experience; but the study is not claiming that people who are accelerated have good outcomes. It's saying that acceleration-or-not doesn't covary with psychological outcomes (which is basically what's going on in your "grass-is-greener" comment)—your life could suck, or not, but either way it's not because you did or didn't get accelerated.

I was forced to not skip grades, and it took me years to catch up socially afterwards, because everyone was so hostile and school was such an oppressive, totalitarian environment that it made me unable to trust anyone.

I hear you. That's why I added the grass-is-greener skepticism. It may just be that it sucks either way—or that we simply needed different things. It's important not to overgeneralize from personal experiences with this stuff.

When I look back on it, I think what I needed most was for some teacher, mentor, or older/wiser person to spend time with me. That's what would have made the biggest difference. But I was completely isolated.

Then maybe instead of accelerating children down the same horrible route.. we could create separate tracks?

I know that 'negative' (special needs) tracks are basically a disaster, but maybe positive (group gifted children together) one would work?

Looking back at my regular American public high school, I'm really impressed how they handled students who didn't fit the standard pace. One thing, they were very flexible about credit replacements, so if you didn't want to take an English class, you could work on the literary magazine, or you could replace social studies with working on the newspaper. Furthermore, the librarian "taught" a few periods a day where small groups of students could just quietly independently study a subject of their own choosing. Now that I think about it, there was also an option for students to take half their classes at the local community college, which a couple dozen people did. This way, even though we had a wide range of academic abilities amongst the students, we all got to move through school as a cohort, and no one had to truncate their adolescence just to avoid going insane with boredom.

> In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at.

I'd give the opposite advice: when a kid is genuinely in love with learning something, try to never say "be more well rounded" or other things that the kid could construe as being against that starry-eyed love.

What about a student who excels in some areas but is bad at writing, or has trouble making friends, or doesn't understand much about politics and stuff that goes on in the world (you can probably tell I didn't spend much time in high school, but you get the idea)

Chemistry is something which one can get by not knowing. A lot of other stuff learned at school, not so much.

>In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a sort that wasn't available back then.

Yes and no. On the one hand, there is a lot to be said for ensuring a balance in learning, making sure that everyone has basic competence in a number of things, and exposing children to things they might not otherwise encounter and might really like.

On the other hand, if you look at achievement among adults along basically any kind of axis you find that success generally comes from extreme interest in and specialisation in a small number of things. There has to be an age and a level of basic general competence where we recognise that it is sensible for child to follow the things they are most interested in.

Yeah, after about 40 sounds right ;)

I'd change the phrasing to: "...work on A thing they're not good at, but that they'd like to be good at."

It's an important lesson - struggling with something that you're bad at, that you don't particularly enjoy (yet), until you get good at it, then (usually) finding that you've begun to actually enjoy the thing. For someone who has only does things which come easy to them, the experience is both humbling and empowering. It also teaches that our interests are a bit malleable, and that they're often based on nothing more than our current ability, which can be improved.

> I wouldn't recommend it.

Similar story here, and one often-ignored downside of starting college early is that, in the end, how old you were when you started doesn't matter, but the grades you made do (to the extent that any of it matters). I graduated with a 3.5 GPA - not bad, but I'll always wonder if I had started when I was the same age as everybody else, would I have managed to pull a 4.0?

I'm advising my own son to take his time, but try to get the best grades he can - you don't get bonus points for starting before everybody else.

i chose not to skip grades and not to go to college early, and looking back, that was probably the right decision for me. i needed the time with peers to mature socially and emotionally before venturing out into the world (i wasn’t a social outcast, so i wasn’t desperate to leave other than out of boredom).

that’s not to say that i couldn’t have benefitted intellectually from acceleration. if i could have stayed with peers but had accelerated education, i would have chosen that instead, but it wasn’t an option in my case.

I think you're right. I did skip a grade and it was by far the worst mistake of my life. Going from a very well liked 1st grader to an outcast overnight was a crushing blow to my confidence. And it led to about 10 years of being constantly bullied and frequently friendless. While I adjusted fairly quickly to social life in college, it definitely had long term effects on my mental health.

“Took years to catch up” seems a loaded sentence. So yes maybe someone wouldn’t act like a 20 year old until they actually turn 20. But that is’t a great argument for keeping back their education for 5 years. If academic acceleration was more widely accepted you would just have been starting at 15 with other 15 year olds and there would have been no social context pressuring you to act 5 years older just because you did well in school.

I was good at acting older. The problem was that I forfeited peer relationships. In fact, I forfeited adolescence. That was a high price to pay. And in hindsight, what did it matter that I worked through undergraduate math at 16 instead of 19.

By the way: my experience does not negate your experience. It's hard to talk about these things in general. If you'd share how it worked for you, I think that would be interesting.

My point is that having to act older and missing out on adolescence has nothing to do with academic acceleration. If you are 15, spending your schools time going to an educational Institution, it doesn’t matter what the level of the material is. The only reason you where in a situation where you felt the need to act older and felt you missed you adolescence was because academic acceleration isn’t accepted, so kids who do well end up being put into the social context of much older students in order to get education at an appropriate level.

Think of it this way, when adults go and take primary Spanish because they want to learn the language late in life, we don’t put them together with Spanish preschoolers, and why would we?

Yet it seems kids being a bit brighter is perceived as such an extreme oddity in our society that the only way to get access to college level education is to literally go to college. Doesn’t that just seem odd to you, even having gone through it?

I wonder if this could be solved by grouping you with other academically advanced children of the same age. I agree it doesn’t seem right to put children in social environments with adults and expect them to succeed socially.

In retrospect I weirdly wish I was actually held back a grade or two. I feel like I would've benefited socially by being the oldest kid in a classroom.

Simultaneously I would've wanted some enrichment or flexibility on learning pace..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com