I want to get on a tangent inspired from your comment. Myself included, many Hacker News readers would probably be in the BS-detecting, questioning, critical category of students. However, I personally really think that every school child can become great at something, regardless of whether they are the little questioners in the classroom or not. And I personally think that an education system that labels children into "regular" and "advanced" is not a good idea, because it really hurts the self-esteem of the "regular" students.

My point is: different flavors, different emphasis, different difficulty in homework among the essentially same-subject classes is fine. However, we should phrase education as an experience with choices, especially for pre-college (because their personalities are very malleable, imo), instead of making kids feel like they are laggards.