Different

[supergee]

The burden of a great potential [1843]

Thanx to Arts & Letters Daily

Comments

[weofodthignen]

The other side of Harrison Bergeron—the well-meaning people who think boredom is good for you and who wish their kids could be rid of their brilliance because they don't have little friends. The last one telling her son in front of the reporter that she hopes he'll be the first genius to be happy. I'm very sorry for the woman who aborted her child rather than risk his or her being as unhappy as her. And the reporter found so many unhappy families. But this is a trope, with a large heaping of classism and "Hammer the nail down if ikt sticks up". That poor boy getting put in the hospital three times! They should prosecute the living daylights out of the bullies' parents, and the teachers who didn't intervene. When I got my cardigan ripped at my elementary school the head stood me up on a chair and ripped into the school body for allowing the youngest girl in the junior school to get hit. (From then on we conducted our fights out of sight making sure there was no damage except honorable scratches, and that boy and I respected each other as opponents.) They noticed and they said something. But there's a serious disconnect between the info from Mensa people and that from experts cited here, and I appreciate the rundown on what IQ tests supposedly test (I never made it through one). Math is soooooooooooooooooo important, right? (And apparently puzzle sequences test maths ability. Eyeroll.) But it's apparent many of those opining are confusing being clever (like me, I have three degrees too, and 4 A levels with A grades plus an S level, ditto, before that) with being off the charts bright (I'll never register a patent, LOL, and nor did I get a PhD and a job offer at age 8—citation needed on that, actually) and couple the curiosity (I believe that is more indicative than IQ scores) with the "poor social skills" and the drivenness; has this reporter never heard of the spectrum? Didn't the Mensa informants think to mention it?

In any case, I like special schools, especially if the kid gets a choice, and especially if (unlike those in the USSR for example) they are not primarily math academies. And I gather between the lines that one thing has changed for the better in the traditionally anti-intellectual UK: no mention of kids being compelled to go out to play at recess, as I was for ten years. I believe they're also a little more willing to advance kids a year: I was one of vanishingly few in my time, and was made to suffer for it after we moved (but it meant I escaped New Math). It's lazily overused in the US, as is holding kids back. But the difference in that respect between the two countries is a salutary reminder that there are a lot of differences between places in how they do education, including theory as well as practise.

Anyway, back to work.

M