Miraca U. M. Gross proposes an experimental study:
Let us take a child of average intellectual ability, and when he is 5 years old, let us place him in a class of children with severe intellectual disabilities, children whose IQs are at least four standard deviations lower than his. The child will stay with this group for the duration of his schooling and he will undertake the curriculum designed for the class, at the level and pace of the class.
We will carefully observe and assess at regular intervals his edu- cational progress, his feelings about school, his social relationships with classmates, and his self-esteem. We will also observe the child’s parents and their interactions with the child’s teacher, school, and school system. They will, of course, have had no say in the child’s class or grade placement.
As one cannot generalize from a sample of one, the study will be replicated with 60 children in cities, towns, and rural and remote areas across the nation.
If this proposal appalls you, rest easy. Such a study will never be undertaken. No education system would countenance it. No ethics committee would approve it.
Instead, I will report some findings from a real-life study that is ongoing and that mirrors the hypothetical study described above. This study of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above is in its 22nd year, and the majority of the subjects are in their mid- to late 20s. Like the children in the hypothetical study, the majority undertook their entire schooling in classes where the average IQ was 100, at least four standard deviations below theirs. These children, and their parents, were less than happy. The education systems were unresponsive and no ethics committee raised a whisper, as this treatment is common practice in Australia, as well as in the United States.
[…]
In the 1920s and 1930s, school systems grade-advanced gifted students much more readily than they do now; by the time they grad- uated from high school, 10% of Terman’s entire subject group had skipped two grades and a further 23% had skipped one (Terman & Oden, 1947). By contrast, the majority of the exceptionally and pro- foundly gifted children in the present study have been retained with age peers for the entirety of their schooling, and few of their schools have actively structured socialization opportunities for them.
[…]
The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated, or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relation- ships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization.
While Gross was right about acceleration/supplementation often being a good idea, she was wrong about much of the rest, in particular the reason people keep citing her these days in conjunction with Karpinski (which is usually to argue that high IQ kids are either crazy or made crazy). Her results are just a selection effect from ad hoc recruiting from child psychologists and the like – it is no surprise that she gets the most dysfunctional kids screened through this way, and that more systematic surveys like SMPY do not yield the same sort of results. (The SMPY kids, for example, very often fit in fine with their classmates, and so it is scarcely an ‘appalling’ proposal.) She should also have known better than to claim to have found an entire third of all the kids given that high IQ scores are not normally distributed and there tends to be an excess, so she probably found substantially less (implying it’s even more skewed).
Gwern, why would you send smart children to listen to lectures given poorly by marginally literate teachers and socialize with America’s finest future nobodies?
“Mensa has attracted losers since its founding.” Indeed, Gwern. Indeed.
Smart children denied promotion learn quickly to do the minimum to get by. When my history teacher begged me to try harder, to please him I started studying the afternoon before the exam instead of the night before. Some children have nourishing home environments and after school hours can escape into the company of others like them. A lot do not.
Michael strikes at the heart of the matter.
School is child prison. For smart boys, school is literally worse than the Holocaust.
Call me an Abolitionist because I will NEVER FORGET.
I also hated school teaching. Seldom had I a teacher who deserved the title.
I have to admit I enjoyed school, but then again I was fortunate enough to find a group of friends very similarly disposed to myself, and was again fortunate in that the teachers essentially left us to our own devices.
Dan would get every math assignment for the quarter from the teacher on the first day and ignore the lessons and simply do all of the assignments in a week or two during class, have them filed, turn them in at the required time, and then spend the rest of the quarter reading books or drawing or programming, except for exam days, which he always passed with ease.
I would read far ahead of the assigned readings for English, and then just skim 10 minutes before hand to refresh myself on the day of the exams. During discussions Mike, Dan, Ryan and I would essentially just have a 4 person discussion about the books and ignored almost everyone else. We learned how to play devil’s advocate and that you could essentially argue anything with the right rhetorical tools.
We also would read books together and discuss them, spontaneously. There was no coordination, just that someone would find something good, recommend it, and within a few days everyone would be reading it. We averaged about 90 books a year with this model.
Dan and I would practice our French because almost no one else took the class and it amused us to be able to speak so that no one else would understand us. I can still read French fairly well, despite having not really used it or looked at it in almost 2 decades. Speaking is a train-wreck though.
I guess, upon reflection, I didn’t really like school, I just liked my group of friends, was stimulated by their company, and enjoyed the fact that we were mostly left alone to learn and teach one another.
Huh. Yea, you all win, school blows.