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Comment by wanderingbort | Hacker News Reader

We chose to do the opposite. Our kids are in a school that provides excellent opportunities to build the skills they struggle with.

They already pursue the things that come naturally to them. As parents, feeding those flames is easy and we take that responsibility personally.

It is the other life skills that we need help with. Having qualified educators work on our kids non-preferred skill sets seems to be a better balance of resources.

They may miss out on being nationally recognized math olympians BUT life is so much longer than that period.

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I hope it works for you. My parents chose to leave me in the normal school and curriculum "because that would surely make me normal". It was miserable for me. Social skills never came naturally, I was isolated and bullied, and bored to death in classes. At the end of my childhood the results were trauma and bad grades. I'm quite sure I would have been happier getting more stimulated on what I loved. They made the common mistake of thinking that improving skills you are already strong would be somehow detrimental to others.

> It was miserable for me. Social skills never came naturally, I was isolated and bullied, and bored to death in classes. At the end of my childhood the results were trauma and bad grades.

Concerning the social skills argument: the only "social skill" that school teaches is becoming capable of hating other people so much that you deep from your heart wish them to be dead.

Herding kids of all the same age into daily hours of structured instruction is an anti-socialization, I'm sure of it.

Perhaps for a small segment of the school-going population but this is not universal and you know it.

> Perhaps for a small segment of the school-going population but this is not universal and you know it.

Indeed: there exist perpetrators and victims (or specifically for bullying: the bullies and the bullied ones). And there exist people who are simply "blind" to what happens around them.

Cmon. There is everything to learn in school in regards to socialization, perhaps besides cross cohort-socialization.

Well, we aren’t trying to make them normal. Just using the school system to provide opportunities we cannot.

Out of curiosity, did you feel as though you got stimulated in the topics you loved outside of school? We are trying hard to amplify anything we can rather than suppress or ignore it.

How succesful you are in life tends to be related to how much you can leverage your unique talents. Unique talents set you up for high paying jobs that make life much easier.

And yes you can go too far with that, but generally speaking being average at a lot of things is much worse than being good at one or two things.

I think I missed the mark in how I positioned it.

Generally, I feel it’s my job as the parent to draw out, amplify and support their unique talents. Schools aren’t really set up to maximize unique potential so, we are using them for what they can provide.

I suspect people read that we chose a school to address the challenges our kids had and stopped there.

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