"gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future"
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think.
One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are:
1. Success in business, science and technology are all strongly associated with intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
2. Intelligence tends to be relatively stable. https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726
Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology.
The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement.
And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road.
Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?"
And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you.
On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?
But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both.
[1] https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...
However I think that simply dumping money into education as it is is more likely to produce bad results than good ones. That's because the current education system is driven more by ideology than pseudoscience than by anything resembling an effective methodology. Given the "citation needed" atmosphere, I'll offer https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm as an argument. We have lots of changes being made educationally which are promised to produce better results over time. And, time and again, they don't. As Feynman said, the planes aren't landing.
But if we can invest, I also question the promised savings in the article. It does not distinguish between increase in income due to having the characteristics that help one get a degree, versus increase in income due to what is taught in a degree. This can be a very large difference. If you have a subscription to The Economist, read https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... for how much college rankings and benefits change when you try to measure universities by estimates of value added.
That isn't to say that there is a better figure available for education. But it does not speak well to their intellectual integrity that they failed to point out this major shortcoming in their own data.
That's also a problem with "citation needed" argument - people who are in position to publish papers are often motivated politically or just bad at thinking and logic.
That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.
If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...
- (signed)Tired
of watching "inspired dummies" waste their time, other persons' time and their inherited fortunes.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university.
Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers.
The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.
> "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future"
didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling".
It read "contribute significantly to our future".
Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.
The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in.
On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?
If some kid is all juiced up and excited about something, its tragic for the school to stamp that out through neglect and busywork.
IDK how we could build an education system that supports kids in excelling while not degenerating in to a caste system
Some are great at maths and shit at other classes and vice-versa.
I agree that publicly funded schools should cater to as wide a range of needs as possible. And at a certain point it becomes the parents' responsibility. If your child is highly gifted you may need to invest your own time and money beyond the basic education provided by the state. Another preferable option is to invest far more money in public education. That is difficult to get widespread support for.
You know damn well these metrics don't exist today. You yourself do not include any measurements in your logic. But still require it of others. I don't think you are participating in this discussion in good faith at all.
Or rather the core of the argument: Why is a single dollar better spend on a non-gifted kid rather then a gifted kid in terms of societal outcomes.
Non-gifted meaning in this case someone who get's a lot of support through government intervention like for example no child left behind.
My claim is that we all depend on each other and that if you dropped a gifted person in the woods and isolated them they wouldn't achieve much useful. They might not even survive. It's this interdependencey that gets ignored when we idolize one of the societal roles too much. People smart at math are important. But so are the people who give them the free time to do that by building highways, serving them food, or making the computer they use. In a market economy those folks are valued less and I'm not here to debate economic systems and the morality of that. Just that if we do not make an initial investment in those folks, the gifted folks won't have as much time to make their contributions to society. So there is actually an important balance to seek when trying to optimize for the greatest benefit to society. Also keep in mind that societies have executed the elite when things get too unbalanced.
I already mentioned in another comment that the ideal would be that everyone gets the education investment that challenges them to learn as much as they can. Since we aren't there yet I don't think it's unfair to give an average and basic education and to let parents of gifted children take on some of the educational responsibilities. The state can only do so much.
As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?
As far as metrics or sources, no I don't have any. My argument is mostly persuasive, but I hope based on basic things we can all observe or repeated chapters from human history. However that doesn't exclude me from curiously asking for sources for claims from others. Sources are an opportunity for me to learn more than fits in an HN comment.
This is precisely the problem: making it seem like everything is "fair" because all kids get the same lowest-common-denominator/no-child-left-behind education system. Every child deserves to have the opportunity to learn, which is why the special education system (which receives enormous resources, far beyond the proportion of students who receive SPED services) exists. According to your logic, we could just get rid of SPED and say "it's all fine because all children have access to the same public education". But that misses the point, which is that different children need different resources to learn. Some need remedial support, and some need more advanced learning.
And as mentioned upthread, since CA got rid of the requirement for GATE education, schools (including those in incredibly well-heeled districts) have gotten rid of advanced learning options for students. The result is that kids with involved parents procure outside resources, while their peers whose parents are not involved/as well-off are robbed of the chance to learn.
Looking back on the thread the more important point I wanted to make was in reaction to the claim that gifted children are far more valuable to society than let's say a nurse. Since my claim is that we all play an important role then I do agree now that resources should be spent in a way that allows each student to learn the most.
> My claim is that we all depend on each other and that if you dropped a gifted person in the woods and isolated them they wouldn't achieve much useful. They might not even survive.
No one is arguing against this, no one. You seemingly joined this discussion out of nowhere. Made this point which is completely unrelated to what we are talking about and are arguing with multiple people.
> As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?
No child left behind is exactly this. The non-gifted children get disproportionate amounts of attention.
> As far as metrics or sources, no I don't have any.
Which is exactly what I said....
Yes you did say that I don't have sources or metrics. However unlike you I didn't call your question unfair or hypocritical. It's always a fair question and one that anyone can ask out of curiosity so they can learn more if there are indeed sources that the commenter previously learned from and can easily share. In fact I demonstrated how one can respond to such a question with honesty and without getting defensive and making accusations of arguing in bad faith, like you did.
You should review HN guidelines. Twice now you've responded in a way that is not welcome here.
In particular: Be kind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Based on the kind words of another commenter I can now better see how gifted children could be better served within current budgets. I don't think gifted children are being left behind but they possibly could learn more in an improved system. However that shouldn't be done with the false motivation that was initially claimed: that they are more important to society.
Equally important is more accurate and enough.
However the ideal that I already mentioned - and that you seemingly missed in your enthusiasm for attacking me and my motivations - is that we should simply invest far more in education so everyone gets the best possible education catered to their needs. Do you disagree with that suggestion I made very early on? Would it solve the problem you are complaining about?
In our very well-heeled district, the administration resists calls for offering options for advanced learners. It has nothing to do with resources, so adding more resources would not result in more learning for advanced students. The constraint is ideological, not financial.
I would support you in administrative changes if I were in your area. The area I'm in at the moment barely invests in a sub-standard education because anyone with even a little money uses private schooling.
The people who create tomorrow's society are the gifted and motivated here now.
I disagree. I highly value a society of people with basic education. I think a lot of people do. It's one of the things most people are happy to pay taxes for.
It seems to me that the correlations for IQ are not too high for many of what people might call "success."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...