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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

More broadly, we're doing people a disservice today by treating them as juveniles until they graduate college. When someone's that good, we shouldn't waste four years of his life in school he doesn't need, but instead let him be productive immediately out of college.

Christ a-fucking mighty, in some states, the law says that Michelangelo, had he been alive today,would have had to sit on a booster seat at the age at which he made this painting. Absurd.

One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.

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> When someone's that good, we shouldn't waste four years of his life in school he doesn't need, but instead let him be productive

Or perhaps we need more challenging schools. I'd hate to harvest before cultivation has a chance to grow without the constraints of organizational biases

18 years is more than enough time to ripen.

- Marquis de Lafayette was only 19 when he helped the US win independence.

- Alexander began conquering when he was 20, smashed Persia at 25, and "wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer" at 30.

- Pascal and Galois did revolutionary math before 20.

- Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein at 18!

We need more rigorous secondary education and a pathway that lets people with rocket-ship trajectories skip useless tertiary education. I am sick and tired coddling mediocre people by pretending geniuses don't exist. If I ran things, I'd set up magnet schools nation-wide.

What is stopping people from creating schools for gifted youth?

It's controversial in education schools to "track" students, i.e. sort them into ability-categories and tailor each category's experience to its needs. For example, activist groups in New York City have been trying to kill gifted-and-talented schools and programs (e.g. Bronx Science high school) for years. It's painful to watch.

People can and do create rigorous private schools, but they're not accessible to the masses and often embody the same anti-talent mentality public ones do.

Communists.

Nothing, based on the existence of thousands of exactly such schools within the US alone.

On the other hand: a disagreement about the actual definition of gifted, based on the existence of thousands of such schools in the US alone. "Gifted" in some jurisdictions simply means something anodyne like "top 10%" which obviously doesn't get close to creating an actually targeted school environment for your Mozarts.

Mozart wrote his first symphony at eight, his first opera at 14. There are some people who have something extra that most people can barely comprehend.

> - Alexander began conquering when he was 20, smashed Persia at 25, and "wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer" at 30.

I think that we do NOT want to promote this. We need less of that, not more in fact. In fact, we need to keep people like that far away from power.

Some of us don't view the world through the lens of effete slave morality. Success is good.

Hard to make a school designed for a very small group of students. Who's paying?

>One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.

I have more. Most average people need less education. No point in putting them through 15+ years of 'education'. They can start working at least part time by the time they are 12 or so. This way they also grow up psychologically very soon.

The children yearn for the mines

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