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
- 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.
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.
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.
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.