I was educated when the nurture/nature arguments were big. U of Chicago desperately wanted it to be nurture so they could affect the child and blew off nature. I see things as in the middle.
I always hated the way they sorted us. In high school, they broke the 200 girls into 6 groups and named us M-A-R-I-O-N. What you studied was completely dependent upon what group they put you in. I was an M, so wasn’t allowed to take typing, which I knew would be fundamental to me, so I had to do that in summer school every year. My husband had his IQ estimated at over 230 as a child. Quiz Kid and 64K Question. Some advantages, like being able to take college French in grammar school and not having any school on Fridays so he could go for “educational opportunities.” But he lost so much in sticking out.
To me, education should be about stuffing people’s heads. It’s their responsibility after that to use the information to find their path and their peace and their happiness.
My husband had his IQ estimated at over 230
That is quite remarkable. The IQ scale is normalized at one standard deviation per 15 points: 120 is roughly 9% of the population, 130 is 2%, 140 is 0.4%, 150 is 0.04%, 160 is .003%, and 170 is .00015% (about 1 in a 600,000 people).
Anything above 160 is pretty much a crap shoot, and no generally recognized standardized IQ test even tries to measure above 180 (1 in 20 million people).
To have an IQ of 230, that works out to 8.67 standard deviations, or 2.225x10(-16) percent, which is 1 in 449 quadrillion people (1 in 449,483,457,956,756,989 people).
Given that the population of the Earth is roughly 7.4 billion (7,400,000,000) that seems a bit unlikely.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=iq+230
Basically, any claim of an IQ above 190 (roughly 1 in a billion people) should be taken with a grain of salt.