I was no genius either, but I was always recognized as a gifted kid. I had a private tutor when I was very young, then I studied in a pretty decent downtown Russian school and fell prey to the same old trap (which few children who are the smartest in their class and know it can avoid): zero challenge, zero socialization, zero work ethic. In my case, I had one outstanding skill, English language (well, aptitude for languages in general, but I started learning English at a very young age), so my parents naturally decided to guide me along that track and I didn’t resist… but I did nothing to prepare for real life, either. I loved learning English through video games, books and, later on, Internet, and thought it would be like that in college too. During the last year of high school, after intense training, I got third prize at the regional “Olympiad” in English, and secured a free admission to a fairly prestigious university. A year later, drained and demotivated, aghast at all the difficult and obscure subjects and skills (like advanced phonetics and medieval European literature) I was required to learn, I dropped out. Things went downhill from there on, until I got finally diagnosed with my brain condition and started getting treatment. And I still occasionally feel like a useless burnout. That lesson wasn’t all that terribly painful to me, but it was a colossal waste of time. I’ve since read up on the perspectives of many kids who found themselves in similar situations during high school; I pity them. So many burn out or just end up underachieving. It seems that no country’s educational system can currently help young people who have high IQ but not the willpower or social skills to capitalize on it.
Many of us heard many times about the typical problems of gifted children, but is there a reproducible working solution?
Contacting intelligent people with each other can be useful to remove the feeling of “I am alone with this problem”. But then what? You essentially get Mensa—a group of people who are happy to belong, but at the same time they are all used to be special, and they all want to be special in the same criterium they now officially recognize: intelligence. And the signalling war starts. Everyone talks about “what is intelligence”, “how should intelligence be measured”, “why the most intelligent people should rule the world, but unfortunately the majority is too stupid to accept this simple logical fact”, random redefinitions of intelligence, quack intelligence tests, pseudoscience of every kind, and also the theory of relativity and quantum physics because you are supposed to talk about it and prove Einstein wrong even if you never learned the basic theory… and I guess behind this all is one big unspoken fear that if you do not prove to be the smartest among the smartest, then you don’t really belong anywhere: too weird for the everyday life, but not exceptional enough for the elite.
Schools for gifted children? I have only one data point (and would like to hear other reports), but it was mostly signalling. So you put all the gifted kids in the same building, and you get a building with many entitled children with mostly zero work ethic, and now what? Some of the children win olympiads and you present this as the result your school has achieved. Then they are out of school, ready for the typical life failures of the gifted children.
Socialization is not the complete answer. Guidance is needed, too. In addition to study what separates gifted children from average children (there is already a lot of literature on this) we need to study that separates successful gifted people from unsuccessful gifted people, and how to teach the latter to become the former. Who knows, some things we do for the gifted children may be even harmful in long term. I think it is good to let gifted children work on their own projects, but we should be extra careful not to reward them for sloppy work. Also the proverbial lack of attention should not be an excuse for a bad behavior.
I think if I was a child again in today’s world, I would probably prefer some long-term support outside of the school system (so I don’t lose the support system when I change school). It should be some organization with more people (so I don’t lose the support system when one person quits). Something available both online and personally, where I could ask questions, where people would give me study resources, guide me through my projects, and also look at my finished projects and review them seriously (not “wow this is great for your age”, but “you did this part correctly and that part incorrectly, see me again when you fix it, and here is something related to study”). And while supporting me on my desired way, they should also sometimes challenge me to try something new. I wouldn’t need anyone to tell me that I am special (that just creates anxiety: what if I stop being so special?), but I would like to have as much help as possible to become stronger. Unfortunately, I feel our treatment of gifted children is mostly “you are so cool, and we actually have no idea about what to do next, so just enjoy your coolness as long as you have it”.
Schools for gifted children? I have only one data point (and would like to hear other reports), but it was mostly signalling. So you put all the gifted kids in the same building, and you get a building with many entitled children with mostly zero work ethic, and now what?
Shouldn’t schools for gifted children work so that you present them with a challenging enough workload that they’ll end up developing a work ethic? I thought that was the whole point of gifted-kid schools—to create an environment where you don’t need to worry about the ordinary kids not being able to keep up with the unnaturally difficult curriculum that you’re teaching.
It seems that being gifted visibly correlates with some kinds of psychological problems. If the school would only increase the workload, some children could not pay attention, and some might commit suicide.
In my opinion it would be better to separate psychologically healthy gifted children from giften children with psychological problems. Unfortunately, the idea of “elite education” is so politically incorrect that it is already a great success that there is one such school in Slovakia. So this school contains both kinds of giften children, and officially decides to err on the side of caution. Which means that children can choose the increased workload voluntarily, per subject (during some subjects, the class is split into “standard” and “advanced” parts, there are also additional elective subjects). Some children choose these advanced lessons, many don’t. And you can’t even press the volunteers too hard, otherwise you lose them.
In addition, the whole school system in Slovakia is failing, there is a grade inflation and a political pressure to give everyone university education regadless of their skills (result of intra-EU signalling competition: which nation will have higher % of population university-educated; it also helps to hide some unemployment), so there is like no external motivation to study hard. And the intrinsic motivation only work for some children, and even there only for selected subjects.
Failures of the school systems could be a whole separate topic. I already gave up hope, so I’m trying to think about solutions that work outside of the system. For people who don’t have teaching experience, here is a great no-nonsense blog by a British teacher, some parts are relevant for other countries too.
If the school would only increase the workload, some children could not pay attention, and some might commit suicide.
Increased difficulty is not the same thing as increased workload. I always found that I learned best in classes which had difficult material but did not necessarily place huge demands on your time. That way I could always pick one or two things that really interested me and put a lot of extra effort into them, because I would have time and energy to spare.
For example, in a computer architecture class in college, we were supposed to design and simulate a miniature MIPS-like processor. We were given considerable head-starts and hints, and diagrams, and so on. I found that class particularly interesting, and I had some spare time, so I ignored the hints, invented my own instruction set, a stack-based CPU architecture, made an assembler and simulator for it, and designed the hardware. It worked, and I got a nice grade—but more importantly, I learned a lot from this, and had a good time doing it. If my classes had been loading me down with large amounts of work, I never would have had the chance, and my education would have suffered.
Later, when I did teaching, I always offered my students alternate options that were harder, but potentially less work. The ones who voluntarily took me up on the offer learned more than they would have otherwise, and generally had more fun. A lot of them ended up doing quite a bit more work than they had to, apparently just because it was interesting.
Agreed that access to learning resources, guidance through and serious review of projects, and occasional challenge are the way to go when educating exceptionally gifted kids. Also, I would argue, when educating non-exceptionally gifted kids. Also adults.
I suppose that you want your children to have knowledge at least comparable with a decent high-school student. And then, as adults they can decide whether they want to study at university, but they should be ready if they choose so. (This is what I would want for my children.) I have no experience with unschooling, because it’s illegal in my country, so maybe I’m missing something obvious, but here is what I imagine:
For simple things, like grades 1-4 of elementary school, teaching your children should be trivial, except that it takes a lot of time, and depending on their temper, perhaps a lot of patience. Probably not possible if both parents work full-time, but should be possible if one of them stays at home or works half-time.
For the rest of elementary school, and for high school, teaching your children is possible and not very dificult, but also not trivial. You would need some preparation; maybe there is a subject that you didn’t understand well at high school; maybe your children will want to learn a foreign language you don’t speak or something else outside of your competence (for many parents, computer science would be a good example). Good part is, your children can already read, so you just have to give them good materials and make sure they use it.
Still there is a problem of choosing the right studying materials. (In my opinion, this is a very important task of school system. Teaching per se is often done badly, some students would be better with a book and/or internet. Problem is, there is a lot of nonsense published, and as a total beginner you have problems to separate good resources from bad resources. Selecting the good resources and providing you with a top-level view is an important thing school does. Another good thing is contacting you with people who study the same thing at the same time.) How do you want to solve this part, especially in subjects which are not an area of expertise of neither you nor your wife? Though even for an expert it may be difficult to recommend a study material accessible for a newbie. First idea is Khan Academy, what else?
That sounds like homeschooling. The difference for unschooling is, you don’t use “learning resources”.
Kids who aren’t exposed to the soul-crushing institution that is school, will learn things on their own. Having someone around to help them learn how to use reference materials and teach them to read is a good idea, but that’s about all they need. Unschooled children tend to do better and be brighter than schooled children (though most of that might just be selection effects). I know several siblings who were unschooled, and they’re all very interesting, intelligent people who are very well-adjusted.
It’s particularly helpful if you bring them around and do whatever activities they’re interested in together.
Please note that I don’t overestimate the quality of school system (I was a teacher and then I quit, because I felt the system is hopeless), and I also do not underestimate natural curiosity, especially of a child that has intelligent parents, so is naturally exposed to talk about interesting topics. Here are my two pieces of evidence:
Montessori education is based on giving children great freedom, and only providing them interesting learning tools. Are you saying that removing those tools would make education even more efficient?
Internet is full of distractions. Many people on LW suffer from procrastination (see, we even have a special word for “spending all your time on internet, accomplishing nothing”). I thank Bayes for not having internet access when I was of school age. Today many children play online games all day long. What makes you think that a child will be able to resist all that?
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we’d oppose with violence if necessary (though more likely by moving).
The legality of unschooling in the US varies mostly on a state-by-state basis. When compulsory schooling was first introduced in Massachusetts, there was armed resistance and the children ended up being marched off to school by soldiers. Fortunately, there are still some bastions of sanity—at least, in most places you can just fill out some “homeschooling” paperwork and they won’t bother you.
Good for you. Unfortunately, there’s no other state that would admit me, probably ever (unless I become very rich somehow). I have to live under laws I can’t really influence and just hope they don’t change too much for the worse. This is the situation for the great majority of world people.
Opposition with violence to your state sounds completely unrealistic, in any state, including the US. You yourself say that in MA the state sent in soldiers and won. Moving is plausible, of course.
Opposition with violence to your state sounds completely unrealistic, in any state, including the US.
It’s not unrealistic at all. It’s what the US was founded on. It’s why there exists the second amendment to the constitution. Yes, most revolutions will fail. But as far as we’re concerned, the proper response to a stranger trying to steal your children is “Over my dead body.”
Yes, most revolutions will fail. But as far as we’re concerned, the proper response to a stranger trying to steal your children is “Over my dead body.”
It’s a little ironic that the ‘defection’ here is the act of not having the “Over my dead body” reaction when successful defiance is not realistic. If other people go about doing suicidal defiance you get most of the deterrence benefits and at least get to live on and have more childeren!
It’s not unrealistic at all. It’s what the US was founded on.
And yet some states have passed mandatory education laws, which makes me assign a nontrivial probability to a future where more states will do so, until they all do or you find that you don’t wish to live in any of the rest.
Yes, most revolutions will fail
Given that, and given that resistance to this particular governmental intrusion has already failed in MA, and that there doesn’t seem to be very widespread popular support for such a resistance unless on principle (percentage of people who homeschool or unschool where legal today is low) - why do you still proclaim defiance?
Signalling defiance for deterrence is expected, but will you personally really risk your life and be jailed or otherwise punished, merely to make a public statement of protest—the most likely outcome?
Signalling defiance for deterrence is expected, but will you personally really risk your life and be jailed or otherwise punished, merely to make a public statement of protest—the most likely outcome?
Yes. It might be irrational—I might change my mind later. But in my opinion, if your children are being tortured, abused, raped, etc., then you do whatever you can to try to stop it, even risking your life. And knowing that parents really do say “Over my dead body” (with an implied “Over your dead body first”) when it comes to their children’s safety, really does make their children safer.
I think if I was a child again in today’s world, I would probably prefer some long-term support outside of the school system (so I don’t lose the support system when I change school). It should be some organization with more people (so I don’t lose the support system when one person quits). Something available both online and personally, where I could ask questions, where people would give me study resources, guide me through my projects, and also look at my finished projects and review them seriously (not “wow this is great for your age”, but “you did this part correctly and that part incorrectly, see me again when you fix it, and here is something related to study”). And while supporting me on my desired way, they should also sometimes challenge me to try something new. I wouldn’t need anyone to tell me that I am special (that just creates anxiety: what if I stop being so special?), but I would like to have as much help as possible to become stronger. Unfortunately, I feel our treatment of gifted children is mostly “you are so cool, and we actually have no idea about what to do next, so just enjoy your coolness as long as you have it”.
Perhaps something like REU programs for high school students that run throughout the year (which would be possible because of the low workload in high school). There are some REU-like summer research opportunities for high school students, and I mention some in my other comment. But it may be infeasible to expand these programs simply because there aren’t enough faculty members who are both willing and capable of mentoring high school students. And, of course, there isn’t always a university nearby.
I was no genius either, but I was always recognized as a gifted kid. I had a private tutor when I was very young, then I studied in a pretty decent downtown Russian school and fell prey to the same old trap (which few children who are the smartest in their class and know it can avoid): zero challenge, zero socialization, zero work ethic. In my case, I had one outstanding skill, English language (well, aptitude for languages in general, but I started learning English at a very young age), so my parents naturally decided to guide me along that track and I didn’t resist… but I did nothing to prepare for real life, either. I loved learning English through video games, books and, later on, Internet, and thought it would be like that in college too. During the last year of high school, after intense training, I got third prize at the regional “Olympiad” in English, and secured a free admission to a fairly prestigious university.
A year later, drained and demotivated, aghast at all the difficult and obscure subjects and skills (like advanced phonetics and medieval European literature) I was required to learn, I dropped out. Things went downhill from there on, until I got finally diagnosed with my brain condition and started getting treatment. And I still occasionally feel like a useless burnout. That lesson wasn’t all that terribly painful to me, but it was a colossal waste of time. I’ve since read up on the perspectives of many kids who found themselves in similar situations during high school; I pity them. So many burn out or just end up underachieving. It seems that no country’s educational system can currently help young people who have high IQ but not the willpower or social skills to capitalize on it.
Many of us heard many times about the typical problems of gifted children, but is there a reproducible working solution?
Contacting intelligent people with each other can be useful to remove the feeling of “I am alone with this problem”. But then what? You essentially get Mensa—a group of people who are happy to belong, but at the same time they are all used to be special, and they all want to be special in the same criterium they now officially recognize: intelligence. And the signalling war starts. Everyone talks about “what is intelligence”, “how should intelligence be measured”, “why the most intelligent people should rule the world, but unfortunately the majority is too stupid to accept this simple logical fact”, random redefinitions of intelligence, quack intelligence tests, pseudoscience of every kind, and also the theory of relativity and quantum physics because you are supposed to talk about it and prove Einstein wrong even if you never learned the basic theory… and I guess behind this all is one big unspoken fear that if you do not prove to be the smartest among the smartest, then you don’t really belong anywhere: too weird for the everyday life, but not exceptional enough for the elite.
Schools for gifted children? I have only one data point (and would like to hear other reports), but it was mostly signalling. So you put all the gifted kids in the same building, and you get a building with many entitled children with mostly zero work ethic, and now what? Some of the children win olympiads and you present this as the result your school has achieved. Then they are out of school, ready for the typical life failures of the gifted children.
Socialization is not the complete answer. Guidance is needed, too. In addition to study what separates gifted children from average children (there is already a lot of literature on this) we need to study that separates successful gifted people from unsuccessful gifted people, and how to teach the latter to become the former. Who knows, some things we do for the gifted children may be even harmful in long term. I think it is good to let gifted children work on their own projects, but we should be extra careful not to reward them for sloppy work. Also the proverbial lack of attention should not be an excuse for a bad behavior.
I think if I was a child again in today’s world, I would probably prefer some long-term support outside of the school system (so I don’t lose the support system when I change school). It should be some organization with more people (so I don’t lose the support system when one person quits). Something available both online and personally, where I could ask questions, where people would give me study resources, guide me through my projects, and also look at my finished projects and review them seriously (not “wow this is great for your age”, but “you did this part correctly and that part incorrectly, see me again when you fix it, and here is something related to study”). And while supporting me on my desired way, they should also sometimes challenge me to try something new. I wouldn’t need anyone to tell me that I am special (that just creates anxiety: what if I stop being so special?), but I would like to have as much help as possible to become stronger. Unfortunately, I feel our treatment of gifted children is mostly “you are so cool, and we actually have no idea about what to do next, so just enjoy your coolness as long as you have it”.
Shouldn’t schools for gifted children work so that you present them with a challenging enough workload that they’ll end up developing a work ethic? I thought that was the whole point of gifted-kid schools—to create an environment where you don’t need to worry about the ordinary kids not being able to keep up with the unnaturally difficult curriculum that you’re teaching.
It seems that being gifted visibly correlates with some kinds of psychological problems. If the school would only increase the workload, some children could not pay attention, and some might commit suicide.
In my opinion it would be better to separate psychologically healthy gifted children from giften children with psychological problems. Unfortunately, the idea of “elite education” is so politically incorrect that it is already a great success that there is one such school in Slovakia. So this school contains both kinds of giften children, and officially decides to err on the side of caution. Which means that children can choose the increased workload voluntarily, per subject (during some subjects, the class is split into “standard” and “advanced” parts, there are also additional elective subjects). Some children choose these advanced lessons, many don’t. And you can’t even press the volunteers too hard, otherwise you lose them.
In addition, the whole school system in Slovakia is failing, there is a grade inflation and a political pressure to give everyone university education regadless of their skills (result of intra-EU signalling competition: which nation will have higher % of population university-educated; it also helps to hide some unemployment), so there is like no external motivation to study hard. And the intrinsic motivation only work for some children, and even there only for selected subjects.
Failures of the school systems could be a whole separate topic. I already gave up hope, so I’m trying to think about solutions that work outside of the system. For people who don’t have teaching experience, here is a great no-nonsense blog by a British teacher, some parts are relevant for other countries too.
Increased difficulty is not the same thing as increased workload. I always found that I learned best in classes which had difficult material but did not necessarily place huge demands on your time. That way I could always pick one or two things that really interested me and put a lot of extra effort into them, because I would have time and energy to spare.
For example, in a computer architecture class in college, we were supposed to design and simulate a miniature MIPS-like processor. We were given considerable head-starts and hints, and diagrams, and so on. I found that class particularly interesting, and I had some spare time, so I ignored the hints, invented my own instruction set, a stack-based CPU architecture, made an assembler and simulator for it, and designed the hardware. It worked, and I got a nice grade—but more importantly, I learned a lot from this, and had a good time doing it. If my classes had been loading me down with large amounts of work, I never would have had the chance, and my education would have suffered.
Later, when I did teaching, I always offered my students alternate options that were harder, but potentially less work. The ones who voluntarily took me up on the offer learned more than they would have otherwise, and generally had more fun. A lot of them ended up doing quite a bit more work than they had to, apparently just because it was interesting.
Agreed that access to learning resources, guidance through and serious review of projects, and occasional challenge are the way to go when educating exceptionally gifted kids. Also, I would argue, when educating non-exceptionally gifted kids. Also adults.
In my experience, unschooling is a great option. My wife and I plan to not do anything like school with our kids.
What learning resources will you use?
I suppose that you want your children to have knowledge at least comparable with a decent high-school student. And then, as adults they can decide whether they want to study at university, but they should be ready if they choose so. (This is what I would want for my children.) I have no experience with unschooling, because it’s illegal in my country, so maybe I’m missing something obvious, but here is what I imagine:
For simple things, like grades 1-4 of elementary school, teaching your children should be trivial, except that it takes a lot of time, and depending on their temper, perhaps a lot of patience. Probably not possible if both parents work full-time, but should be possible if one of them stays at home or works half-time.
For the rest of elementary school, and for high school, teaching your children is possible and not very dificult, but also not trivial. You would need some preparation; maybe there is a subject that you didn’t understand well at high school; maybe your children will want to learn a foreign language you don’t speak or something else outside of your competence (for many parents, computer science would be a good example). Good part is, your children can already read, so you just have to give them good materials and make sure they use it.
Still there is a problem of choosing the right studying materials. (In my opinion, this is a very important task of school system. Teaching per se is often done badly, some students would be better with a book and/or internet. Problem is, there is a lot of nonsense published, and as a total beginner you have problems to separate good resources from bad resources. Selecting the good resources and providing you with a top-level view is an important thing school does. Another good thing is contacting you with people who study the same thing at the same time.) How do you want to solve this part, especially in subjects which are not an area of expertise of neither you nor your wife? Though even for an expert it may be difficult to recommend a study material accessible for a newbie. First idea is Khan Academy, what else?
That sounds like homeschooling. The difference for unschooling is, you don’t use “learning resources”.
Kids who aren’t exposed to the soul-crushing institution that is school, will learn things on their own. Having someone around to help them learn how to use reference materials and teach them to read is a good idea, but that’s about all they need. Unschooled children tend to do better and be brighter than schooled children (though most of that might just be selection effects). I know several siblings who were unschooled, and they’re all very interesting, intelligent people who are very well-adjusted.
It’s particularly helpful if you bring them around and do whatever activities they’re interested in together.
This seems too good to be true.
Please note that I don’t overestimate the quality of school system (I was a teacher and then I quit, because I felt the system is hopeless), and I also do not underestimate natural curiosity, especially of a child that has intelligent parents, so is naturally exposed to talk about interesting topics. Here are my two pieces of evidence:
Montessori education is based on giving children great freedom, and only providing them interesting learning tools. Are you saying that removing those tools would make education even more efficient?
Internet is full of distractions. Many people on LW suffer from procrastination (see, we even have a special word for “spending all your time on internet, accomplishing nothing”). I thank Bayes for not having internet access when I was of school age. Today many children play online games all day long. What makes you think that a child will be able to resist all that?
Unfortunately this is illegal, here in Israel and in many other countries.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we’d oppose with violence if necessary (though more likely by moving).
The legality of unschooling in the US varies mostly on a state-by-state basis. When compulsory schooling was first introduced in Massachusetts, there was armed resistance and the children ended up being marched off to school by soldiers. Fortunately, there are still some bastions of sanity—at least, in most places you can just fill out some “homeschooling” paperwork and they won’t bother you.
Good for you. Unfortunately, there’s no other state that would admit me, probably ever (unless I become very rich somehow). I have to live under laws I can’t really influence and just hope they don’t change too much for the worse. This is the situation for the great majority of world people.
Opposition with violence to your state sounds completely unrealistic, in any state, including the US. You yourself say that in MA the state sent in soldiers and won. Moving is plausible, of course.
It’s not unrealistic at all. It’s what the US was founded on. It’s why there exists the second amendment to the constitution. Yes, most revolutions will fail. But as far as we’re concerned, the proper response to a stranger trying to steal your children is “Over my dead body.”
It’s a little ironic that the ‘defection’ here is the act of not having the “Over my dead body” reaction when successful defiance is not realistic. If other people go about doing suicidal defiance you get most of the deterrence benefits and at least get to live on and have more childeren!
And yet some states have passed mandatory education laws, which makes me assign a nontrivial probability to a future where more states will do so, until they all do or you find that you don’t wish to live in any of the rest.
Given that, and given that resistance to this particular governmental intrusion has already failed in MA, and that there doesn’t seem to be very widespread popular support for such a resistance unless on principle (percentage of people who homeschool or unschool where legal today is low) - why do you still proclaim defiance?
Signalling defiance for deterrence is expected, but will you personally really risk your life and be jailed or otherwise punished, merely to make a public statement of protest—the most likely outcome?
Yes. It might be irrational—I might change my mind later. But in my opinion, if your children are being tortured, abused, raped, etc., then you do whatever you can to try to stop it, even risking your life. And knowing that parents really do say “Over my dead body” (with an implied “Over your dead body first”) when it comes to their children’s safety, really does make their children safer.
Perhaps something like REU programs for high school students that run throughout the year (which would be possible because of the low workload in high school). There are some REU-like summer research opportunities for high school students, and I mention some in my other comment. But it may be infeasible to expand these programs simply because there aren’t enough faculty members who are both willing and capable of mentoring high school students. And, of course, there isn’t always a university nearby.