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Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as a former "gifted" kid, acceleration is a horrible idea.

I skipped a bunch of grades, got into MIT but went to a local college at 13 (who lets their 13-year-old live in a college dorm?), ended up working for a bit then going back to school with my peers.

If I could do it again I'd have taken _breadth_ instead of depth. Finished high school math? Good for me, now grab a third language. Bored in school? Off to a foreign country to learn by immersion. No courses left undone? Take six months and see if I can realize my dream of making the national team in my sport, etc.

Going deep is very risky. Eventually you end up at the end of the easy path of coursework and classes and are in the same place as everyone else (just a year or two earlier). Unless you're absolutely, positively sure that that specific area is where you want to spend the rest of your life, that head start wins nothing enduring.

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You've given an argument for more gifted education, not less.

The fundamental issue is that some kids learn faster than others, so that if you want gifted kids to be around other kids their own age while still being challenged, you need to draw from a large region and cluster them together in one place. The most gifted children will have to be the most clustered. If you needed to go to MIT to be challenged, that is because of a lack of gifted education.

Separately, I think we should be very skeptical of the idea that a good default path for kids is to spend most days surrounded by kids within 12 months of their age. This sort of schooling has only been widespread for roughly a century; for the vast majority of history kids grew up with a much broader range of ages around them. I agree that getting thrown into a college dorm at 13 might be very bad, but I find spending all day with other 13 year olds to also be very bad.

There are lots of stories of kids failing socially when they are not with kids with similar emotional intelligence. I know people who have skipped only two grades who are brilliant, but socially off.

It is likely to depend on the child and what they would do well in.

There are also uncountable stories of people hating school and finding relief upon graduating, and this is plausibly because it's a bizarre environment composed almost exclusively of kids. Personally, if I was gifted enough to go to MIT at age 13, I'd much rather do that than go to a typical middle school, the OP's experience notwithstanding.

I strongly believe for some kids, acceleration to Universities is the best thing. For some, it ends up poorly. It really is kid dependent.

Can you elaborate on your experience? What's MIT like as a 13 year old? Did you ever live in the dorms?

I agree of course that its kid dependent.

I did not have this experience; a commenter upthread did. I was very lucky and had the opportunity to go to a good middle school and highly accelerated high school (Thomas Jefferson HSST in Virginia). But, knowing what I know about normal middle/high schools and MIT dorms, I would have rather gone to the latter than the former if those were my options.

As a fairly clever and socially off person who wasn't allowed to do any kind of accelrated program, I want to ask how sure you the acceleration is the casual factor, rather than say some underlying biological thing?

There’s also a lot more to life than studying. But the argument is that you and other kids on that path will maybe someday be exceptionally productive to society in some field.

I only skipped one grade and still felt isolated from other kids sometimes. I can’t imagine how you’d feel! As a parent I’d personally rather let my kid have a somewhat normal childhood than maximize their intellectual potential if that meant sending a 13yr old to college.

Just out of curiosity, did you live in the Philadelphia area?

I knew a 13 year old going to a local college in Bryn Mawr/Haverford, but I don't think he was attending either of those prestigious colleges.

I don't recall his name (this was nearly 30 years ago) and I wondered what happened to him.

Reading these comments it sounds like a lot of people feel like you do about acceleration being an issue.

For me, I was both Gifted and Learning Disabled, and both programs were unprepared for the issues of someone who was both very smart but also had significant learning issues.

It was very difficult. :(

I was also both Gifted and Learning Disabled (although I prefer to list them in the opposite order). I think it's likely that there's a lot more neurodiversity than acknowledged generally, but we're just sort of stuck with the very human condition of balancing the needs of the group with the needs of the individual.

Honestly I don't think any "program" is truly prepared to meet the needs of anybody at all. It was difficult for me, too, but I think striving, suffering, etc are all human conditions that we all experience regardless of how we get there. "Gifted" and "Learning Disabled" programs exist for the benefit of normalizing behavior and capabilities that are farther outside the curve. That they existed when we were young is merely a testament to a collective desire for general cohesiveness.

Yes, I would normally write it as LD/Gifted, or "Twice Exceptional" but I changed the order to fit with the conversation.

I was extremely lucky and privileged to go to school that catered to LD and LD/Gifted students. Sadly while the school is still there, they've changed focus to other types of students, namely Autistic students.

While Autistic students are certainly important, seeing the niche I was in having one less resource makes me sad.

There are a handful of studies I am aware of. Acceleration of 1-2 years among gifted students is correlated with a lack of negative outcome, i.e., not accelerating them is correlated with depression, drug abuse, and mental health crises. But acceleration beyond that sees no marked improvement or detriment. Child prodigies tend to become very normal career scientists or engineers.

It is really strange to me that we can't figure this out.

I almost think it is because our entire view of education is conflated with a type of sporting event. You were one of the grand champions of this sporting event even though obviously it would have just made sense to learn more. Instead it is this weird sporting event race and the concept of learning more just isn't part of objective of the game.

Leaning on the sporting event analogy, the goal is cohesiveness. You value your star players, but you also need to be a part of the team. We're not sure what the game is, but we're a social species.

I was in a very similar situation. At 11 I started attending to local state college during the summers. At the end of the second summer they offered us all the chance to attend full time. My parents opted to let me continue in regular high school, some of the other kids started full time at state school (I kept going during summers).

One of the kids who attended full time tried to transfer to CalTech after two years, and they rejected him, told him he wasn't well rounded enough. So he joined every club on campus and ran for President of every single one. Most did not let him because he was only 15, a few did. CalTech still rejected him. He ended up graduating from state school and going to grad school a few years later at an Ivy League school, having basically missed out on the entire undergrad experience.

I on the other hand got to do all the normal "high school" stuff while I was mostly bored in my high school classes, but then I got into Berkeley and went there with my peers. I feel like I had the better experience.

that head start wins nothing enduring

This has been a big change in thinking for me as well. You might be able to impress some folks with your graduation year, but otherwise you are just another graduate.

"went to a local college at 13 (who lets their 13-year-old live in a college dorm?),"

Sounds like the premise for an American Pie movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius

Though it looks like he's 15, not 13.

You might enjoy the movie "Real Genius", where one of the main characters is a early high school graduate, accepted into "Pacific Tech", and struggling to adapt to the different social expectations. Amid the standard shenanigans, there are several conversations on how being smart isn't everything, and how there is a social responsibility to use your intelligence responsibly.

I see two issues with "gifted students" in modern education:

1) some school systems see them as critical to "raising up" other students around them, but I never see any analyses as to if this "holds down" the gifted student's development.

2) I've read that students learn a huge proportion of things from their peers. That implies that true gifted education involves comingling a sufficient population of gifted students of the same rough age range among each other.

3) gifted students really benefit from "gifted" teachers. They don't necessarily need deep PhDs in academic subjects, more they just need to be "broadly smart".

#1 sounds like it sucks for the gifted, especially with the substantial undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American education and the specter of bullying. Maybe in a day of 7-8 classes you do gifted + nongifted intermixing for 1-2 classes at once.

#2 needs a sufficient population of gifted students

#3 is really hit or miss in schools

All three of those are why class conscious parents pay a lot of attention to the school district of a school, and are defensive of other students coming into "good" school districts. Also, per "The Bell Curve", smart people tend to be well-off, and so the specter of NIMBYism and housing exclusion rears its head over education.

Deep learning in traditional subjects is the default of gifted, but I agree that what is needed (as hinted at in breadth-smart teachers) is breadth-first learning. Because unfortunately gifted students have their passions decided for them: You're going to get good grades!

If my kid is gifted, and based on the inheritability of IQ, he probably will be, I'm not subjecting him to acceleration. It'll probably take some degree of home schooling instead.

The only acceleration I'd be in favor of is skipping Junior/Senior high school years and going part time to local colleges. Accelerate maybe 1-2 grades tops in specific things.

I think there is some evidence for the benefits of acceleration that comes from an Australian study of gifted students that you may be interested in investigating. (By no means am I gifted, and it's entirely possible that I'm mischaracterizing or misunderstanding the results.) The book is Exceptionally Gifted Children", 2nd edition, by Miraca Gross. An excerpt can be found at [1].

There are some previous HN comments that discuss this including [2], which names Terrence Tao, UCLA math prof, as one of the participants in the study.

Two passages that I think highlight the extremes both in acceleration and outcome are:

“… 17 of the 60 young people were radically accelerated. None has regrets. Indeed, several say they would probably have preferred to accelerate still further or to have started earlier…. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universi- ties in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achieve- ment. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.”

“The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling,… Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficul- ties at university,…”

[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510032

We had a 15 year old who lived in the dorms with us when I was at undergrad. He had already finished his BS and was in grad school. Looking back, so many things we all did together were probably not great for a 15 year old.

I can believe it. We let our kid skip 4th grade. It was absolutely the right thing for him at the time. He's now a college freshman and first term was a mess. Being under 18, he needed his parents to sign off on a bunch of things no other student had to even think about. Thankfully, he's turned 18 now.

He took a band trip to Vegas this week but got left behind last night because he was the only under 21 on this trip. Part of me is annoyed that no one was willing to skip the clubs and tables to not leave him hanging alone. But I remember back to that age and there's no way I would have done that at 21 with a per diem. He made the best of it and had a really good meal and explored the Strip but the age difference matters a lot in the college years.

You could also argue that your jurisdiction is the problem. In several European countries there'd only be a problem if someone is under 16, or if the people actually NEED to go to a night club or casino straight away (and not just late rin the evening), but every bar and retaurant would be open at 18 and 16-18 should be ok until 10pm or midnight.

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