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Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

>Throughout high school, Kaczynski was ahead of his classmates academically. Placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he soon mastered the material. He skipped the eleventh grade, and by attending summer school he graduated at age 15. Kaczynski was one of his school's five National Merit finalists and was encouraged to apply to Harvard.[17] While still at age 15, he was accepted to Harvard and entered the university on a scholarship in 1958 at age 16.[19] A classmate later said Kaczynski was emotionally unprepared: "They packed him up and sent him to Harvard before he was ready ... He didn't even have a driver's license."[9]

But we also need to make sure that we respect the humans who possess those brains too...

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Letting them get ahead is usually the best way to respect an intelligent student. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in one classmate's opinion about someone's emotional state, and a driving license is hardly the be all and end all (I didn't have one when I went to university, and never missed it). "Don't put students of any age through interrogation-style experiments that are designed to stress them" is probably a better lesson to take from Kaczynski's case.

Sure if you want the student to never be around same aged peers and struggle to develop a social life so they instead focus on their work, I agree.

Students can tell who's smarter and who's not, and someone at the same level of learning will always be far more of a peer than someone who happens to be the same age. All the available evidence is that the best thing for children's social life is to let them interact with people at the same learning level rather than the same age. (To say nothing of the fact that segregating students by age is unnatural in the first place, and traditional cultures where kids grow up around people of a wide range of ages are far better for their social development than the western school model...).

You know what else is natural? Dying of polio

It's not coincidence that through most of human history doctors did more harm than good. Yes, sometimes unnatural interventions are better for us than the ancestral environment, but that's very much not the default case.

The opposite causes the teacher as well as the peers to resent the more intelligent child, so which is better?

I could read since I was 4. When others at school were reading one word per minute spelling letter by letter, I finished the whole article and then continued to another and another. Result? I got a teacher's note (a big deal where I live) almost every lesson, and bad grades. And the children hated me, probably mostly because of the teacher mocking me for not paying attention. I would give anything to be boosted to similarly skilled children. I was friends with them anyways, never really liked the kids from my grade (but that could've been avoided if I wasn't forced to "learn" with them).

I've never seen a boosted child say it wasn't worth it or that they had much problems being a year/two younger than their classmates. Actually, smaller schools here usually combine 2-3 grades into one anyways and the children are friends alright, so boosting the taught curriculum is really not a big deal (unfortunately the system didn't allow it when I went to school).

I'm sure it was very hard for you to be a genius surrounded by dunces and I'm sorry those dunces didn't like you for no reason.

Kek

Would they have success at developing a social life if they were surrounded by same-aged peers of average intellect? It'd be a crapshoot.

I mean sure, Hacker News is proof of that, but most hyper successful adults that were prodigies went to places like Exeter, Andover, Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, Bronx Science, etc. where they are around smart people their age.

Being at the same ability level matters way more than being at the same age. Speaking from personal experience, the whole "let's try to pretend that this kid is normal and that with enough time he will fit in" has had terrible consequences on my mental health, and even on my social ability with the rare people that I feel comfortable with.

I think that in many case, trying to pretend that people are the same when they are not is causing a lot of pain for everyone involved. Holding a conversation with a normal person requires me to expand a lot of energy to not be myself, because if I am I will quickly be hurt and/or rejected. And just like I often hurt people by being myself, other people hurt me by being themselves. Trying to explain it to them has been pointless in all situation, and most of the time makes the situation worse.

Why would any of us have to endure that, when we could instead be with groups of like-minded people and enjoy life more? I don't feel superior to those people, and spending more time with them leads me to develop more negative sentiments towards them. I think the sane option is to avoid them as much as possible, while making sure that I treat them with respect. I can't change fundamentally who I am, they can't change who they are. I can't understand why you advocate for a situation that creates so much suffering for everyone involved.

You realize there are plenty of places like Exeter, Andover, Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, Bronx Science, etc. full of genius children, right? I agree those places are much better than a given average High School.

The problem is putting a child in an environment where they are surrounded by adults all the time. Like being 17 and having your 'peers' be 30 year old post-docs who are getting married and having children is a complete mind-fuck.

Why are you so focused on the NYC high-end high school segment? It is utterly unrelatable to 95% of all students and conservatively 85% of users here.

Being surrounded by adults all the time is only a problem if you never spend time around actual peers. Nobody should be forced to isolate themselves like that.

Yes. It is a brutal existence. Social isolation can continue long past when you would expect it to end, after graduation from high school or college, because of the exploitive behaviors of employers and the self-exploitive nature of someone who only finds solace in work.

What is the solution? I will not spoil it for you, but it does not involve giving up.

For those who, like me, were wondering - this excerpt is from the Wikipedia page [1] about the Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

Thank you. I couldn’t figure out who they were talking about.

There should be some sort of university made for people like that - where they’re learning high level stuff but with people their age.

Bards college at Simon's Rock did something like this. My friend went when he was 15ish. I used to visit during the summers and while the education was relatively accelerated, there are a host of other issues that don't often get brought up with this model.

Added bonus is they come out of it being able to cast 4 first level and 2 second level spells each day

It’s a Bard college. More likely they learned to play the lyre and sing ballads.

Bard is also a character class in many RPGs (nethack, Bards Tale); GPs comment makes sense in that context.

I think you’d still have a problem mixing 7, 12 and 15 year old kids. Perhaps not as much as 15 with 20, but still.

This growing up thing is hard.

You are so far from wrong, it hurts me to think about it.

Due to having a reading level 10 years ahead of my peers, and already having learned math concepts at least 4 years ahead of them... at age 8... I was put 3 years ahead of my peers in school until the teachers realized the other kids were having none of it.

They put me back in the 'proper' grade, because 'I' somehow wasn't going to develop social skills well enough in such an environment.

They might not have been wrong, but they would have been more correct to tune in the little buggers causing me grief. Or at least let me tune them in...

I was horribly bullied for being more advanced than my same-age classmates AND older children at high-school, placing me with even older kids (with whom presumably I would have even less in common) doesn't seem like it would have helped my situation.

Yeah, no... it probably wouldn't have helped; very much so for the reasons I have stated in reply to Tambourine.

That said, I should add that 2 of those students ended up running into me again years later. They apologized, which was nice; but then offered me the chance to go do lines of coke with them...

I declined, and went on with my life knowing doubly that my instinct about them was correct the whole time. Wastes of skin.

> Wastes of skin.

I would flag your comment if I had the authority. This is not acceptable language for this forum.

Sorry Manu40, I’m just saying this whole growing up thing isn’t easy and with few correct answers.

Most are still struggling to get over it decades later, myself included.

I mean, who can blame any of them, ourselves included. Instead of doing the right thing and setting the little snots straight, they instead hampered our progress all to make things easier for themselves while placating a bunch of children who needed to be taught the reality of the situation, not coddled into thinking they were 'just as capable' (when clearly they weren't).

Quite frankly, I think we all should be banding together to sue our old schools over this stuff.

Surely there’s more to life for the top 1% of learners than trying to get retribution against public institutions. One might ask if you’re really as brilliant as you say if you can’t see that - or maybe you were just early as a child, and that’s all.

As discussed in Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XCsE5NffMA

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