Posted on 03/20/2014 8:33:23 PM PDT by CorporateStepsister
In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists.
That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future, something previous research has not always found to be the case. But for that reason, perhaps surprisingly, it has also triggered a new round of worry.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
Ender’s Game ??
Then they need to left free to excel.
One of the most important parts of the article: “...Vanderbilt researchers have previously found that those who weren’t challenged in school were less likely to live up to the potential indicated by their test scores. Other research has shown that under-stimulated gifted students quickly become bored and frustrated—especially if they come from low-income families that are not equipped to provide them with enrichment outside of school.”
There’s very little if any convincing evidence that throwing more education at underachieving students helps in any real fashion, but there’s ample evidence that not challenging gifted youth robs the future of valuable, productive, capable and trend-setting individuals.
Yet our society has become so obsessed with the siren-song of “equal outcomes” that we seek to achieve it by brushing the capable under the rug and spending like mad on the incapable.
Instead I would like to point out that all of society, rich and poor, gifted and disabled, benefits when the best and brightest are encouraged to reach for the sky and given every possible assistance along the way. The wealth and groundbreaking advances that can be generated by one brilliant mind can result in more benefit to society than any amount of midnight basketball and “English as a second language” classes.
Today’s gifted children, ignored by our schools and treated with disdain and disgust by liberal elites, could be our future Newtons and Galileos. We’re throwing away the future because we refuse to encourage the more-able to do everything they can with their God-Given Gifts.
This is sleight of hand. Do you see it? There's a missing word word in the second part.
Ping
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. — Kurt Vonnegut (1961)
“You didn’t do that” — Thief in Chief (liberty, money, whatever)
I hate it when that happens!
Performed like a trained seal as required, but did my own thing when ever off the RADAR.
The Librarian was on my side...
Education Marxists are trying to rediscover the wheel. They’re straining to find the proper verbiage to excuse their present dumb-down ethos that they have enforced in the schools, whle feebly searching for a course correction.
Animal, vegetable, mineral -- or color?
I was in a nominal gifted program (what little our district offered and only briefly) and have stayed in the area. Only a couple of the “gifted” kids have been more than moderately successful. Some dropped out, some never heard from again. Some are lonely and bitter from life kicking them in the teeth too much. We do a rotten job of providing opportunities for gifted kids/adults. I have gifted daughters, and I see the same mistakes now. The state assures free tuition for the poor, for illegals, but not the academically talented. This is a crime to humanity.
I wonder what will happen if gifted minds start going to different countries that give them full scope for their intelligence.
education bump for later........
One thing I am certain of is that sooner or later, countries will start recruiting the gifted and will put their brilliant minds to their own use, for good or for evil will depend on the choices of the gifted kid and then of course, the country that has recruited them.
The whole concept of equal outcomes is centered around not hurting the feelings of people who have made all the wrong choices in life/society. The girl who ruts like an animal in heat is certainly not as good as the girl who stays chaste and reads instead of ruts. Yet, the rutting girl isn’t supposed to be made to feel bad about her life and bad about her choices. So we tear own the girl who reads to the level of the rutting whore.
You sound like me.
“I wonder what will happen if gifted minds start going to different countries that give them full scope for their intelligence.”
Sadly, such a brain-draining out-migration would be a more beneficial solution than what our educators would have - namely letting the gifted rot away in obscurity while all educational resources and opportunities are directed towards “addressing inequality”.
At least in another nation the gifted could be getting the necessary preparation and relevant tools to succeed to their fullest potential. That’s better than thinking of all of the medical advances, technological breakthroughs, and revolutionary advances that humanity might have lost by trying to wish away the gifted.
Once-upon a time this country beckoned the world’s brightest and most driven individuals to our shores, today not so much. If you’re not here to collect welfare and vote democrat, or you’re not H1B visa slaves willing to work for third-world wages for a tech giant that hasn’t figured a way to outsource some jobs yet, then we don’t want your kind around.
Our school systems are based on ‘Harrison Bergeron’.
Unsurprisingly we get mediocre results.
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