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.
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.