[after dark]

Yeah, but it is the fact that gifted and talented kids are perceived as being protected that is causing people to do all sorts of things to see to it their children are labeled as gifted and talented.Gifted and talented classes are viewed as a rubber stamp ticket to easy street.My area had an influx of Asians and engineers. Both of these groups are extremely gifted ,so the lottery was invented . I feel many kids are not as well educated as they could be.This is sad on many levels. I collect old text books from 100+ years ago. It is very jolting to realize how much material "normal" kids were expected to learn .If old fashioned discipline and learning were brought back to "normal" classes, people would not resort to dirty tricks in trying to put their children in exceptional classes ,and you would not be worried about geniuses being dumbed down.

[CobaltBlue]

Gifted and talented classes are viewed as a rubber stamp ticket to easy street.

My experience is that GT teachers have much higher expectations. There's no "easy street" in AP classes, and GT classes are the functional equivalent for earlier grades.

I agree that public schools used to be more challenging in some classes, but back then public school wasn't mandatory.

Of my four grandparents, only my dad's side graduated high school. My mother's mother only finished 8th grade, her husband only 4th. Strange because the brains are on my mother's side, but they had to work and it was considered normal not to continue.

Also, I doubt that most public schools back then were teaching calculus, much less matrix algebra or differential equations. Not to mention microeconomics, macroeconomics, anthropology, psychology, astronomy, etc. being taught by Ph.D.'s in the field.

Which is a small fraction of the classes offered at my kids' high school. Every time I read people complaining about public schools, I can't help but wonder what home schooler or private school can offer all this and more. Some very elite private schools do, but not many.