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>This doesn't sound like something that would commonly happen today, alas. Seems like in the past, it was accepted that talent and potential was not uniformly distributed and that it was in everyone's interest to seek out and support those who have it, so that they can do great work for society.
>Today you'd probably consider that kind of kid "privilege" and seek to divert investment from him to someone w/o his gifts, to seek a more equal but overall lesser, outcome.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense. There are still elite schools around the world and difficult programs to get into. Some people study with prominent researchers and others don't. How's this any different?
Today we have more schools and more people can get higher education. If anything, many other people who had similar talents back then would be unable to pursue a career in those days because their options would be limited. We're much better off today.
When one studies the biographies of great people one often comes across a noticeable characteristic which is that they often have interests and or experiences in other areas or professions quite different to their chosen field. No doubt good schooling and training helps but what they also have in common is an uncanny ability to make relevant connections between seemingly very tenuous concepts/ideas between these interests—connections not noticeable to most of us but which end up being important. For instance, early on mathematician and all-round polymath John von Neumann studied chemistry and physicist Richard Feynman came to the attention of security personnel at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project for his expertise in picking locks—a trite example perhaps but it's an indicator of his all-round ability.
Whilst most of us don't possess such genius it's nevertheless very noticeable that those who've diverse interests and experiences are often much better at solving unexpected 'left-field' type problems than those who don't. (In a similar vein, I recall a once boss of mine saying that, in general, he'd much prefer to employ a graduate with a MSc over one with a PhD as the latter's training was too narrow to be really useful.)
Every high schooler has entry level knowledge in multiple fields that can rival an ancient polymath. Only specialized knowledge is useful and everyone is specialized in some narrow field as a result. Even using multiple javascript frameworks is pain now.
It's not that specialized knowledge is the only thing useful. The system simply rewards and produces specialized graduates as a result of modern education and employment practices, so that's what we get.
...The system simply rewards and produces specialized graduates as a result of modern education and employment practices, so that's what we get."
I think you're pretty close to the mark here. I'm reminded of a discussion I had about a decade or so ago with the head of the physics school of one of the local universities where I live. Before the discussion I'd only known him vaguely as the group where I first met him had nothing to with physics and I'd never discussed physics with him previously, nevertheless our conversation deepened to the point where he was correcting my somewhat vague notions of the quantum mechanical model of electrical resistance. The conversation then somehow segued into one about the depth and breadth of specialized knowledge and the difficulties of how one ought to train students and specifically PhD candidates. He used an instance from his own school to illustrate his point. During the evaluation of a PhD candidate whose study was on some specialist aspect of the all-too-familiar LED one of his colleagues asked a straightforward basic question of the candidate about how a bipolar transistor worked and how it was able to amplify a signal and he was completely flummoxed and could provide no answer. Almost anyone with basic electronics training could answer the question (that is without delving into QM) but he could not, nevertheless there wasn't any question over whether the student knew his work on LEDs as clearly he was well versed in the subject.
The professor then expressed great concern that something was wrong with the way we teach and or direct PhD candidates and it wasn't just limited to his school but essentially it was the norm almost everywhere. The point he was making was that a diode junction in a normal bipolar transistor functions as does a LED at its most basic (conduction) level and thus the candidate should have made mincemeat of the question in a second but he could not (electronics is a large part of my profession so it was an elementary question for me). He went on to express the fact that educators were doing a disservice to candidates such as this person because if his work became less important he could become unemployed and would have to be retrained. He stressed the fact that training should be broad enough and sufficiently cross-disciplined ensure those specializing in physics would remain employable throughout their careers and that instances such as this ought to be awake-up call.
A similar event happened some years back in the physics school at another of the city's universities. A professor who was well known for writing the new textbook for high-school physics set a one-line question in a third-year university physics exam which simply asked:
Explain F=ma
Surprisingly, this question flummoxed many students. I'm unsure of how many students were confused by the question but is was sufficient to cause somewhat of a local uproar at the time. It seems some students troweled the depths of Lagrangian mechanics citing Lagrange's equations and so on whilst others simply didn't know what to do. The answer the professor actually required was:
Force = time rate change of momentum
(mv−mu)/t = m(v-u)/t
but a = (v-u)/t
∴ F=ma
I gather the proportionality constant 'k' wasn't even required. The point the professor was making was that students had lost the woods for the trees and that their training was too linear and predictable thus accentuating the problem.
Unrestrained nepotism is stupid, but its opposite is equally absurd.
>Unrestrained nepotism is stupid, but its opposite is equally absurd
I think the opposite of unrestrained nepotism is meritocracy, which is surely a good thing.
In the olden days we had few schools that made sure every CS graduate were fizzbuzz experts but back then computers were an expensive rarity that could only be touched by a fizzbuzz expert. Now that everyone and their grandma have a pocket computer that's more powerful than an IBM mainframe, of course the requirements will be different. Not every piece of software is mission critical, not everything has to be perfect. Crappy software is better than no software.
The opposite of nepotism is where no one grants an advantage, privilege, or position to relatives or close friends in an occupation or field. That's not "equality of outcomes" by any stretch. A hypothetical system that grants privileges purely on merit would be its true opposite.
This dude contributed a tremendous amount to his country by being a marvelous engineer. I am sure part of that is due to his genetics and part to his parental influence and training - and - great! We've come out ahead as society, is my point.
There's nothing to complain about.