Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/a-tale-of-two-teenagers
Long essay about gifted teenagers and inadequacy of our education system, don't really have much to say about it other than it might interest people here.
I was at school with someone who seemed genuinely gifted for both primary and high school, he went off with our international Olympiad team eventually. He very rarely spoke, spent most of his lunches reading novels. He didn't seem unhappy. However we were at a very good, academically rigorous, school. I suppose there are the people who can 'read the room' like him and then there are people like Georgios who are immensely cringeworthy. Yet they probably do deserve more attention and effort than intellectually disabled children, from cost-benefit grounds alone.
That the UK doesn't have any special school for gifted students at all (it doesn't seem to be hyperbole, they cancelled the program in 2010) is pretty bad. I think we could learn a lot about governance by observing the UK and committing to the opposite approach.
Fun post! Western schooling seems to be a total mess of conflicts of interest and horrid compromises.
I think it’s possible to extend the “Georgios problem” beyond the exceptional to many other students. I’m fortunate enough to have a bright wife who I believe was drastically underserved by the UK comprehensive education system. Despite being placed in the top set for all of her classes, she found herself bored and unchallenged due to the need to follow the national curriculum and progress at the speed of her least capable classmate.
I’m not sure I fully believe the full extent of Bloom’s claims about the superlative impact of individual tuition but it’s a pretty tantalising thought on how we could better serve our brightest students. As a friend pointed out, the intensive tuition of Von Neumann and Einstein received in childhood might be a bigger contributor to their success than their Ashkenazi heritage.
We also have underemployment of young, highly educated STEM people. Tuition seems like a no-brainer to me.
Someone did the maths and it turned out to be cheaper to pay a bunch of grad students or postdocs competitive wages for hourly 1:1 tuition instead of paying for college. Of course, that doesn't come with a certificate, which is why more people don't do it.
If I was a well off person with a gifted kid, that's certainly the route I'd like to take with them.
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