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One thing which stands as obvious to me is that we should, as a society, strive to provide the "special education for gifted" to everyone. Then we'll magically have more "gifted" children. At my kids' school, there's one day a week where all the "gifted" kids are going on "special program", where they do chess, some electronics, robotics, math, in a very free atmosphere. This should be the standard education, not some elite program for selected kids.

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There is „gifted“ children and then there are gifted children. To give you an example there are more than a million university students in Germany but only roughly 5000 are supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. You just won’t find enough students with 3 sigma deviation in a typical high school. What is more a typical teacher won’t be able to support them in any meaningful way because they quickly run out of things to teach them. Students like that are best supported individually by extracurricular activities and direct contact with PhD and Professors, as well as participation in competitions.)

I agree with your general point that normal education could be made much more interesting as well. Although it would partially defeat the purpose of education to not prepare students for the boredom and rigid schedule of ordinary work early on.

> I agree with your general point that normal education could be made much more interesting as well. Although it would partially defeat the purpose of education to not prepare students for the boredom and rigid schedule of ordinary work early on.

I think you're right about the need to support the specially gifted kids and that generally means treating them differently as you suggest. However I think there is scope for altering the current system to make it more interesting for the rest of the kids and possibly stir up/inspire/awaken whatever more limited "giftedness" they might have. If the aim is solely to prepare kids for the the boredom and rigidity of ordinary work I'd say we're not getting value for money. This is particularly so in places high percentage of people graduating with Bachelors or even Masters degrees.

There's no point in designing schools for "three sigma". Schools should be designed to push the median upwards. "Three sigmas" should be homeschooled, any sufficiently large system will only inhibit them.

"Three sigmas" and above aren't distributed only in the population of people capable of home schooling very bright children.

Funny thing though - home schooling so easily beats the institutional kind, you don't have to be very good at it to school very bright children.

Further, if the teacher at school with their class of 30 did nothing but tutor the students, each student would get 10 minutes (in a 5-hour school day). You as a parent can beat that the 1st 11 minutes of your home-school day. That leaves you hours of the day for moving ahead of the classroom.

>"Three sigmas" should be homeschooled, any sufficiently large system will only inhibit them.

Many (most) parents don't have the resources to do that. If we don't make adequate provisions for the exceptionally gifted, we're squandering a lot of valuable talent. Nobody would tolerate a child with an IQ of 55 being made to sit in a mainstream classroom, because it's obvious that they wouldn't get anything vaguely resembling an education; we should be equally outraged about a child with an IQ of 145 in that mainstream classroom.

You’ll have enough gifted students in any reasonably sized metro area to fill a special school. That’s what should be done, IMO.

Doesn't even have to be 3 sigma. Even in a "tiered" secondary school system like in Germany (students are split up to three different levels of school after elementary, about 50% in the highest tier), you maybe have a handful of 2 sigma students per regular year of around 100-150 students per school.

Getting bored and actually having worse grades for these students is a real thing. Especially in classes that need effort and not intellect. On the other hand, forcing intellectual challenging activities (like solving math puzzles, playing chess or building robots) isn't fun for a lot of people that do not like to challenge their brain for fun.

Personally my school grades skyrocketed from slightly above average to the 95% percentile in the last two school years, which was at the same time as I was allowed to participate in a junior student program and was spending one day per week at campus instead of school. I wasn't doing more for school, based on attendance actually less, I was just more inclined to listen and interested in learning, while I was being challenged by my university lectures (basic algorithms, data structures, databases and data modeling).

My son (9 years old) goes to a special school one day per week. Another day he's in the school's own gifted program. He has to do the regular 5 day school week in the remaining three days. This seems to be working quite well.

You won't magically have more gifted children if you treat all children as such. Different children have different needs. Some learn better in a classroom like situation with a teacher presenting the material, others learn better when they figure stuff out by themselves. Some need lots of hand holding, others don't. Some have talents and interests in specific areas, others in other areas.

One school we visited has decided to try a different direction to present the material: normally they start with the basic concepts and build bottom-up to the big overview. For gifted kids, they want to try the opposite: start with the overview and zoom in on the basic concepts from there. I can see how that might work better for gifted kids, as they know what they're working towards and trying to figure out what it's made of, whereas other kids might get lost along the way.

I think the best education system is one that keeps an eye on individual children's needs and talents.

> Different children have different needs.

Which is what most "education for the gifted" programs boil down to: meeting individual needs.

I wouldn't be so sure that you'd suddenly have many more gifted children. Intelligence isn't entirely nurture.

You would get some additional gifted children, but it's a question of cost vs returns. I agree that programs like that would be cool to have for kids, but I'm not entirely sold on whether they would help.

> You would get some additional gifted children, but it's a question of cost vs returns. I agree that programs like that would be cool to have for kids, but I'm not entirely sold on whether they would help.

What you say is true. As much as some don't want to admit it not everybody has the same potential (at least academically) and that's okay. With regards to the programs I don't think the aim should be solely to unearth some hidden geniuses. I think it should be to give every kid a rich and broad learning experience as an aim in itself. And secondly to enable to fulfill whatever potential they might.

I'm a fan of the Mathematician's Lament by Lockhart (might be misspelling his name). The idea being that we need exploratory learning. It expands outside of math as presented in his essay.

My best friend, while in highschool, had routine problems in core classes. Simple algebra? Forget about it. Spelling? Grab a bunch of letters and pray they slam together right. Instead, let him at something that interested him, and it was amazing. When he was 15, he had already rebuilt a couple engines and a transmission and was getting an old Corvette up and running that he was giving by family. If you heard a plane go over head, he could identify the sound of the engine, name the model of the plane, and rattle off the history of it, leading back to ww2 or whatever. At junior college, he took a geology class and suddenly he was academic. He saw how math helped and passed through trig. His spelling and essayship became solid as he saw the value in communication about geology.

The long story short: people, even those who might not appear promising, can shine when exposed to something that interests them. Education should be broad and varied at the beginning to help kids find what interests them. A few lucky ones will learn to be interested in most things and for them, most schooling will be easy.

Folks, I doubt anyone actually believes that just attending a gifted program will make everyone equally gifted.

The statement that you’ll get “more” gifted students if all the programs run that way is mostly just a clever way to observe that current efforts to identify which students are gifted, are probably missing some kids with untapped potential.

In addition there is plenty of evidence that more engaging pedagogy will get more out of students, even those of average potential. The biggest impediment to that is probably finding teachers who are capable of teaching that way consistently across the required range of subjects.

Yes. Thank you for phrasing my thoughts more clearly.

The whole point of "special education" is that it does things that don't scale to everyone (so it involves guessing who's going to get the most benefit from it, and these are the students you regard as "gifted"-- although in practice commitment and "grit" are a lot more important than supposed aptitude). Individualized teaching for each student, with a "mastery learning" model (i.e. no fixed time-based curriculum; you keep working near your current level in any given subfield until you achieve mastery at that level, then move on) is what gives the best results, but it can only be achieved practically via computer assistance.

Of course, because here in Lake Wobegone, everybody is above average!

Not necessarily absurd, though. Every kid can be above average in something.

Why?

Because you've got kids who have more below average marks than everyone else maybe?

If you constrain population to that of Lake Wobegon, it's not logically possible for everyone to be above average in anything.

If you take the reference population to the world population, then it's possible for Lake Wobegonians to be above average in some things.

No, because there is more than one thing to be good at. One may be above average in piano, another in cello. One may excel at baseball, another at chess. All may have some exceptional performance.

Ok, that is one interpretation that logically works.

Sure but what Garrison never told us is that there is a rigorous application process to be selected to live in Lake Wobegone.

This isn't as obvious as you might think. I've had the opportunity to teach kids of a variety of ages. Something I found surprising is that even by primary kids show remarkably different aptitudes. And this is not some aberrant thing. These differences tend to just continue to grow year after year. This can making teaching remarkably frustrating because it leads to a stark polarization in the class room. You have some kids that do not have any interest in learning, others that browse their textbook for entertainment, and then a good chunk in the middle.

So how do you teach to a class like this? The current trendy solution for this is supposed to be 'differentiation'. [1] There's a lot of fancy research and terminology associated with it, but it's a very simple idea - approach topics in a way appropriate to the aptitude of the group whom is learning. It's an extreme burden on the teacher and there's scant evidence of it providing any benefit.

However, tracking [2] is another solution. Tracking is essentially dividing a single group of children based on aptitudes. And unlike differentiated instruction there is substantial evidence of this in both directions. By both directions I mean that above average aptitude students tend to overperform even more when also surrounded by other above average students. But there is also substantial evidence showing that these students start to underperform once placed back into educational environments with lower performing students. The main argument against tracking is are primarily related to equality of result instead of equality of opportunity. E.g. - aiming for everybody performing the same as a goal, rather than everybody performing to the max of their individual potential. That is, in my opinion, very literally a 'Brave New World' style dystopia - hamstring overperformers to try to bring everybody down to the same scale of performance.

And so tracking gets back to the question at hand. When you jam everybody together, 'gifted for everybody', it's not the case that you retain the same level of achievement with even more people able to express their aptitude. Instead you end up a situation where everybody starts getting pulled down by the lower performing individuals. In effect instead of the desired result of "magically seeing more gifted children" you may very well end up seeing fewer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_instruction

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29

It always seems to me that views on this nature vs. nurture topic are very clearly divided, between people who've ever taught other humans (and tend to believe that, while training is important, nature plays a strong role in determining peoples' abilities) and those who haven't, and believe all humans are blank slates and aptitude is all down to training.

(Of course, now I'll get a bunch of teachers commenting that they believe in nurture over nature, but c'est la vie.)

The real challenge of teaching is reaching everybody - not just the kids who want to learn, and are effectively teaching themselves with a little guidance.

And this goal is laudable when you're teaching basic literacy and numeracy. If you're trying to teach mathematics or professional software development then it's less practical and probably not even possible.

I'd be sad if in ten years time children aren't being taught via software that's pushing them exactly as much as they can be pushed, and adaptive to the way the child enjoys learning and modes of explanation that have proven effective for the child in the past.

There's (I believe) plenty of value in exposing children to other children for socialization, but I'm not sure this needs to be at the same time as they're learning, rather than via play and activities designed to promote interaction, rather than learning per-se.

About 10 years ago, I started to design a learning system like this. It was before I had heard of Khan Academy. The idea is like that, but on steroids. Imagine a wiki where every lesson is available as a lecture and in writing (and where possible, an interactive lab, either in app or in real life). Every topic forms a graph that is explorable via links to get proper scaffolding. See or hear a word or topic you don't remember or understand? Click and follow the rabbit hole. The system would provide different styles of lecture and reading that align with a given student's preference. Educators could upload new content and students could rate that content as to help the best content raise to the top for other students to explore. To advance up the tree of a subject, a student would have to pass quizzes and the system would identify the holes in the student's understanding and provide content to fill the hole.

Such a system could effectively flip teaching where teachers facilitate and help with questions while the software ensures the "best in class" content is provided and assessed.

I still think about building that from time to time, but life and work don't leave me with the time to start building that. 10 years ago, I got a little ways into the engine for it for an algebra course and that was it.

Of course software can play a bigger role, but don't underestimate the importance of contact with human teachers and colleagues of high expertise, as well as feeling valued by other humans instead of making a virtual skill-level go up

There are some pretty effective adaptive learning systems for elementary schools. Here is one I am familiar with, from The Netherlands, in 2800 schools, around 25% of the total:

* https://nl.snappet.org/

(Apologies that it is only in Dutch).

The adaptive software pushes each child optimally for their individual learning rate. Their teachers can monitor their progress at a very granular level and give individual attention in a targeted way. The overall progress of the class can be compared with all other classes across the country.

One thing about the "gifted program" I may have failed to mention, is that it's a free space with lots of different activities and variety of teachers to support them (and not only in STEM). That is what I would like to see replicated without pre-filtering. It's the opposite of "jam everybody together" (which I agree does not work). Aptitude is not craved in stone, aptitude can be shifted (for some, for the generally healthy kids) given the right ecosystem.

Tangent - if you haven't read Holt's "how children fail", it's a must-read (for teachers and parents alike).

But it has to be done the right way.

"What may surprise you are the implications for teaching that follow. You'll learn why it's more useful to view the human species as bad at thinking rather than as cognitively gifted."

Quoted from Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham.

Any teacher will tell you that not all children are gifted. Academic ability is normally distributed.

In Norway saying stuff like that is sadly extremely politically taboo, so not every teacher will say that.

It's the same in the U.S., for the most part. But they'll say it to you privately.

Academic ability is a small and not especially important portion of what humans can be gifted with.

I agree with you. But gifted has a particular and widely used meaning with respect to children's education and that's the sense of the word that I'm using.

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