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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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