Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
time.com
time.com
There are quotas for minorities. Many otherwise qualified students are denied acceptance because their places are reserved. And not just a few... many.
Logistically, kids need to be bused from other schools, but transportation is uncooperative and the schools resent the hassle. There is also an additional bureaucratic and testing cost. These costs are in addition to running the programs themselves, but _these_ costs specifically antagonize other political entities in the school district.
And of course... unlike special ed, teachers resent busing away their best students. They fight over dumping the worst, of course.
Politically (within the district) gifted education is a career for pariahs. They create hassle for the "normal" (aka "real") teachers and they have no power to deter neglect or abuse. The teachers and staff in the department are paid less than require more education than "real" teachers. This drives away the best teaching talent and firmly entrenches the some least ambitious teachers within the department.
The curriculum is a petri dish of all sorts of inane pet political agendas. Especially in science and math, the teachers don't know the subjects themselves, so these subjects simply aren't taught beyond a pre-packaged lesson plan.
The consequence: the most qualified students leave the district (if they can.) Instead of integration, communities become more and more segregated. Fact is, if you don't "segregate" special resources for the best within a community, the best will leave. School districts only have incentives to reduce segregation with their local district. But segregation is inevitable, and failing to deal with it merely bubbles the segregation to higher levels.
Hence, I'm writing this from Silicon Valley and not the midwest.
Update
So nerd education is the nerd of education.
If you were a nerd in school, and you remember how _you_ were treated, doesn't that seem like a plausible extrapolation?
Also, director means choosing curriculum and teacher selection.
And I'm not trying to derail the conversation, I'm suggesting anecdotal evidence about educational priorities (or lack of them) in public schools.
I hope your mother has nothing to do with the science curriculum. This city wouldn't happen to be Kansas would it?
You don't have to believe in evolution, you just have to be able to understand that the facts have supported this theory enough to the point in where you "believe" in anything else you're probably wrong. You don't think it is wrong for an instructor to hold such beliefs? I guess we should have doctors who don't believe in bacteria or scientists who believe in gravity.
The good days of Reddit anyways were when it was comprised of just computer scientists who happen to be Atheists.
I did post a negative comment and for that I apologize. I was just annoyed he did not read the article and his original, unedited post made that obvious(it was the first line of the essay above).
The practical upshot is that instead of going to a different school and being surrounded by teachers who were in tune with my needs, I stumbled through a public suburban high school replete with all the drama that Judd Apatow can fit onto the screen.
I consider this a very lucky occurence.
Why? Because it forced me to keep myself occupied rather than expecting anyone else to do so. It freed me from a mindset of educational entitlement.
By spending this years in a regular school, I was able to learn take on a host of other activities that I found interesting at my own pace and at my own behest. My intellectual development and curiosity drove me forward.
And it forced me to learn how to navigate elements of the "real world" that end up being speedbumps along the way. Isolation from that is a mistake. I've many friends who've learned that the hard way.
Now I'm a happy adult with a precocious son. I'm getting worried about his teachers in kindergarten are going to deal with a child who happily decides if numbers are primes and points out square roots.
How do I teach him to learn for himself. To realize that his school gives him a starting point for his education, and not the entireity. To help him end become a ferociously curious individual who gets stuff done, not in some isolation chamber gifted bubble, but in the real world -- omplete with alliances and politics and emotions and conflicts.
It's hard. It was hard to live through as the student, and I expect it to be hard for me to live through as his guide.
But it is absolutely the right place to end up.
I always enjoyed learning interesting things, but school had nothing to do with learning. School was a place you went to maximize your GPA by doing rote busy work, and any learning done was just an accidental side-effect while pursing grades.
I never considered myself smart while in school; I saw myself as a worthless slacker with an unhealthy programming obsession. This was the image instilled in me from my teachers, school administrators, and parents constantly chiding me to do my homework. I didn't have the perspective nor the self-image to seek out the kind of help I needed. I also don't think an 8 year old should be expected to come up with theories of why he's failing in school.
The theories that the school administration came up with were just based on one observation: Jey doesn't do his homework. Solution: make Jey do his homework. There was no thought given to root causes, nor any experimentation with different strategies. It always just came down to keeping a notebook of homework assignments and making sure I did them that evening. All this bullshit just made me consciously give up on the educational system and write it off as worthless and ineffective.
I still don't know how exactly I should have been helped, but a huge problem is that the educators themselves are not aware of the pattern I was exhibiting. It's well documented that many "gifted" kids exhibit the same symptoms: extreme abrasive cynicism, defiance and hatred of authority, lackluster school performance, and depression. Part of the problem is that these kids will be pretty rare; gifted kids are rare to begin with, and these kids form a fraction of the gifted population. There should be some effort to educate educators of this pattern, and research on what kind of help works for this population. I think any solution that would have worked for me would've had to capitalize on my high level of curiosity and harnessed it in some way. Assigning more bullshit busy work (a la AP and Honors classes) wasn't the solution. If I had a teacher who engaged me in the material, and presented material as interesting and challenging rather than as work, I think I could've done better. AP and Honors classes seem to make the classes harder mostly by increasing the volume of work. On the other hand, this could just be wishful thinking and maybe there is no strategy that could've made me get through formal education. I don't know, but I think it's worth doing the studies to find out, as I'm not a one-off oddball case.
Getting kicked out of university was the first step to recovery for me, and it's the best 'disaster' that has ever happened to me. I'm now a happy person, and really enjoy who I am and what I do. I just wish there had been a less painful way to get here. Going to public school and suffering through the crap did help me develop socially and form healthy friendships, something that I would've completely missed out on if I had been homeschooled.
"How do I teach him to learn for himself. To realize that his school gives him a starting point for his education, and not the entireity. To help him end become a ferociously curious individual who gets stuff done, not in some isolation chamber gifted bubble, but in the real world -- omplete [sic] with alliances and politics and emotions and conflicts."
Engage his natural curiosity in the learning process. Make learning fun and a process of discovery, not a process by which a bunch of facts are memorized to appease some authority figure. My dad did this by using the socratic method, and encouraging me to ask questions. Feynman tells a similar story about his experiences with his dad in the first chapter of "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Finding-Things-Out-Richard/dp...
The only time I ran into a hitch was when, while having to turn off a portable DVD player because the aircraft was landing, he loudly asked:
"But Daddy, why does the movie interfere with the nabigational [sic] equipment?"
It didn't seem like a good time to talk about that particular topic.
If you surround a phrase with asterisks, you get italic text.
Sadly, it appears I've gone past the edit window. I'll have to hope the editors fix it up. Or risk looking like a dork forever.
I poked around for a few minutes trying to find the ML, but had no luck (where is it?!). And I wanted to write while it was an itch I had to scratch.
Imagine - a large market open to innovation - education startups!
(We send our daughter to private montessori)
As a general rule, markets are good when they transmit information (like the relative scarcity of goods) and bad when they hide information (like the chance of default on subprime mortgages). I think it's far more likely that a free-market educational system will behave like the latter than the former, because it's much more difficult to ascertain the quality of an education than the quality of a laptop.
I do think more choice and accountability is necessary. I went to a public charter school, and it was the best decision I (well, my parents) ever made.
A basic level of education is something that needs to be provided free for all people. It's even in the UN Declaration of human rights. If we go to to a free market education system, every child will need some sort of grant that they can use to attend some school for free.
The options I have now: put my daughter in a "free" system that will destroy her future, or pay dramatically too much in a private school so that she has a chance. I've chosen option 2.
What the UN thinks is quite irrelevant as the current system is not only broken now, its been broken for decades and continues to get worse. School isn't "free" now, it is paid for by taxes. The problem is, there is no incentive for the public schools to get better, and they just won't. In a private system, all the "free" money taken out of the private economy in the form of taxation would be put back into private hands. Then parents could decide where to send their children, weighing the costs/benefits and choosing schools appropriately. There has been and will continue to be very large sums of charitable money to help educate - I believe Gates now has the largest charitable fund focused to a great degree on education.
The bottom line: privatizing education would be dramatically less expensive (think of the immense cost of the beauraucracy now in the education system) and more efficient, and more innovative. Why, you ask? Because the schools would be competing for students, and the bad schools would go out of business as they should. The good schools would get bigger and more plentiful. The cost of education would go down as new innovative ways are found to provide quality education. etc.
The alternative: dooming our children to mediocrity in the public system.
I went to that mediocre public school. No, realy, it was that lame. We were really a place for a lot of kids to get enough shop skills to end up at the local GM plant.
I slipped around the edges of it all, did stuff I wanted to do, and, frankly, succeeded.
My goal now is to teach my son to do the same. In the public school system.
A modest amount of public education protects against small scale market inefficiencies -- quacks selling poison, the illiterate being defrauded by their employers -- thus liberating a lot of spending power which is gobbled up by large scale, centralized market inefficiencies -- the myth of cancer treatment, the American college system, the legally sophisticated defrauding their employees.
There is no incentive for the really wealthy -- the people with the people's taxes, their work hours, their confidence -- to put money into education that would only make them harder to control.
Knowledge arises as a sort of after thought, and scholarship is a hobby; only in cases where the information asymmetry can be turned to advantage -- in religion, in technology, even in education itself -- does the scholar become a professional. Maybe the wise would be better off hiding their talent instead of making it available for institutional use?
I think it'd be great to privatize education but it still needs to be mandatory and free at a certain basic level.
My parents certainly weren't bad. Not that they ever did much beyond enrolling and sending me off to public school, but still. If public school wasn't there, I'm sure they wouldn't have left me completely illiterate. In fact I'm sure, and my parents now agree, I would likely have been 'better' schooled if it wasn't for public schools' near complete monopoly on funding and mindshare when and where I grew up.
None of the parents of people I know were 'bad' either, including those of many who insist on using mythical 'bad parents' as excuses for public education. Furthermore, amongst those I have asked, none of them seem to have acquaintances with bad parents, and I have asked enough people, from enough different backgrounds, to be convinced this 'bad parents test' could be applied recursively through all six degrees of separation without turning up more than, at most, some exceedingly rare corner cases. Rare as in at least an order of magnitude below likely available private charity to deal with them.
This doesn't mean I think everyone's parents are equally ambitious on their children's behalf, or equally concerned with educating their child; just that in absence of public schools, almost no parent would completely neglect facilitating any kind of education for their children, whatsoever.
The whole thing about evolution is that it never stops. However, evolution's definition of bad parents is brutally simple: those who have few descendants.
sniff sniff
Like evidence "for some" that the tests work when you like the results ---but don't when you don't?
See, I told you it wouldn't be a popular opinion. I don't think it's something that should just continue to be ignored, though. Turning a blind eye to possible facts just because we don't want to believe them doesn't make them go away.
However, even if that is true, it still may be the case that some small amount of bias does indeed exist in IQ tests. For example, I was given an anecdote about a Chinese boy, who, when shown a picture of people using umbrellas on a dry day and asked what was wrong, responded that nothing was wrong with the picture. Apparently he interpreted the umbrellas as parasols, something Americans would be less likely to do.
Regarding intelligence of agriculture vs. hunting, I would argue that hunting may require more skill, but in agriculture, intelligence (and creativity) has a greater reward (than in hunting). That is, it is very difficult to automate tasks in hunting (beyond things like inventing guns, which they obviously hadn't done), but agriculture has been steadily getting more efficient with creative inventions from iron tools to plows to the cotton gin and so on. Hunters today still use very similar methods to ancient times. For that reason, I believe that an agricultural society selects more strongly for creative thinking, while a hunting society selects for physical skill and quick thinking. The creativity required to change society in order to accommodate more crowded conditions also undoubtedly requires intelligence. Anyways, enough of that...
I do agree with you that there is likely a small amount of bias in tests like these, and your example is a good one. Another I have heard was about a question which involved the "knowledge" that lemons are yellow. In Latin America, however, lemons are more often green, obviously giving Latin Americans a disadvantage on that particular test question.
The most important thing for a school age kid is to become well-socialized.
The correlation between skipping grades and turning out well is just a correlation - it may be that those who were not allowed to skip were so messed up socially already that they were less likely to convince their schools to let them skip grades. In contrast, if you're well-adjusted and smart, it's more likely that you'd be able to convince school administrators to allow you to skip a grade. And, of course, Time misses that distinction, making it into a clear case of "the more grades skipped the better."
I can assure you that any negative effects of skipping grades are far outweighed by the effects of holding students back. The latter fosters resentment and frustration, which doesn't help social aspects much. For the former, as long as you're sharing classes with advanced students in higher grades (and why wouldn't you be?), the older students are very welcoming.
Also, arrogance isn't a negative quality in talented math/science students -- it's essential. You just can't get really good at math unless you believe you can figure out difficult problems yourself. Maybe you don't have to admit it, but there's a point where denying your abilities looks foolish. The "I've played a lot of Number Munchers" line only works for so long.
I don't often make comments like this, but LOL, for real :-).
Kids tend to become less arrogant when placed among intellectual peers, even when those peers are several years older. It's because people naturally compare themselves to the folks around them. If they're always smarter than their peers, they'll assume they're smarter than everybody. If instead they're always younger than their peers - well, they'll grow out of that. ;-)
Going to Amherst and majoring in physics was perhaps the most humbling experience in my life, because it was the first time I wasn't the smartest one in the room. I suspect this is the real point of the university system - by bringing all the smart kids together, recursively, you teach them that there's always somebody smarter than them.
1. An educated citizenry is critical for a functioning democracy.
2. An educated citizenry is critical to the economy of a nation.
"The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids" http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/
But, you also can't hide from someone that they're not being challenged by the same academic work as their age-peers, so you'd better be ready with some special challenges for them.