Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as “public schools with good gifted programs”.
This seems dubious and hard to ascertain. What evidence do you have that most other countries lack such schools?
(There are public schools for gifted children in Russia, and I’d guess in many places. The usual setup is not to filter directly by IQ, as Viliam_Bur describes (which does seem potentially socially inappropriate) but to admit students based on hard competitive tests in math/physics, and have as teachers either college professors or former math/physics olympians.)
There are public schools for gifted children in Russia, and I’d guess in many places. The usual setup is not to filter directly by IQ, as Viliam_Bur describes (which does seem potentially socially inappropriate) but to admit students based on hard competitive tests in math/physics, and have as teachers either college professors or former math/physics olympians.
Filtering by mathematics correlates positively with filtering by IQ, but it is not the same thing. Most gifted people are not great in maths.
One of advantages of teaching in a school of children filtered specifically by IQ was that it disproved my many prejudices about high-IQ people. Those children were different from the average, but it was not easy to say how exactly; the simple explanations all failed. For example some of them were great at maths, certainly much higher ratio than in the average school, but most of them were not. Similarly with other traits—many interesting traits were more frequent than in the normal population, and yet, even within the gifted population they remained a minority; just a greater minority than usual. If you try to filter by these traits, you will find many gifted people, but even more gifted people you will filter out.
As a student I was in a math-oriented high school. I would say most people there were highly intelligent too. Yet, it was different. The interesting aspect of the IQ-filtering school for gifted children is that you get many talents of a different kind together. Often you have one child with multiple talents—in a math-oriented school they would probably develop some of them and supress the rest. In IQ-oriented school, they can develop their math talent during the math lessons, and e.g. artistic talent during their art lessons. Without an IQ-oriented school they would have to choose, either math or art; or at least only one of them at school, and other only in afternoon activities.
As an example: on the school for gifted children we started organizing a high-school competition in making computer games. That is not exceptional per se; there exist many other programming competitions. The difference is that in a typical programming competition, you have an exact problem, and you get points for algorithm that solves the problem. In this game-making competition you get points for multiple aspects of the game: graphics, music, storyline, presentation, and the technical flawlessness. So the programming is important, but the algorithm is not everything, other aspects matter too. In my opinion, this difference is a nice metaphor for the difference between the schools.
My primary evidence is that Canada is more on the liberal and open side of things relating to most countries in the world, has a higher diversity of educational programs than in most places AFAIK, and is quite high up the prosperity and economic stability scale by current worldwide standards—yet it has no such things as public schools with gifted programs.
The closest to “gifted” programs there is is the International Baccalaureate program, and yet even that gets diluted and stretched into an additional unnecessary year in Quebec (the rest of Canada implements the program a bit more directly, without the additional stretch year). There is no additional content, and the program that I took here barely meets the basic requirements for the certificate of accomplishment for Middle Years of the Baccalaureate program (this I obtained together with my local Diplome du Secondaire, slightly inferior to an actual High School diploma, at age 17.)
Basically, If you’re gifted here in Canada, the best you can hope for is to either get lucky with a private school filled with awesome teachers, or have excellent homeschooling. Since Canada scales rather high on the aforementioned global metrics, and I have a decent prior that Canada has a bigger per-capita education budget than most countries, it seems likely that Canada not having any such schools is much more likely in worlds where having such schools is a very rare or special thing for a country, rather than in worlds where Canada is somehow a strange cultural outlier and represents the exceptions.
I have specific evidence of such schools in the US, I remember hearing of two examples in the UK (but I don’t remember the examples themselves—sorry), and I’ve read or heard many times of such schools in Tokyo. China pumping lots of money into anything makes the news, and I’ve seen a few articles that says they’re expanding their current programme to get more geniuses working for them in the future.
(small jump to represent some internet searches and being surprised)
On the other hand, while writing this and looking for some of my previous sources, I just found this.
The first thing that jumps at me is that there seems to be a lot more schools with gifted programmes in Ontario than I was led to believe, and the six random ones I checked were operating back in 2003/2004 (which is around where my family and I started looking). This suggests either that we searched incorrectly, were lied to by the counselors and advisers we consulted, that they were simply much harder to find and get into back then than they are now, or any combination of those.
At any rate, it seems I now need to re-evaluate those beliefs. One fact remains, though: Our family expended above-average effort in trying to get me to a gifted program, skip a year, or otherwise get me out of the fatal failure mode I was in, and failed utterly. I also don’t see much for Quebec, unfortunately, but as the page is in English it would be expected that its writers would not be aware of french-language gifted schools, if there are any, which makes it seem more likely that there are some.
The above-average effort claim doesn’t seem hard to support—the average parent would simply not care that their child is gifted and would not attempt to get them out of a “normal” school program, as far as I’m aware. Actually seeking to do anything in this case seems like the exceptional non-status-quo reaction. As for failing utterly, well, I completed my normal high school curriculum and then dropped out of cégep (pre-university college thinghy corresponding to last year of high school).
Basically, I don’t have a formal education as good/equivalent to regular american high school diplomas. My experience was utterly boring and unproductive. I gained virtually no adjustment skills and still hate every moment I spend with “average” people (I literally feel like I’m interacting with inferior beings, which means I have to spend effort to suppress these feelings because they’re irrational and not reflectively coherent, which means I dislike these interactions partially because of this). I have no hope of going back into higher education for at least one more year, and even then I’m not sure I want to at all. I’ve been trained to loathe formal education, hate those who would prevent proper reprogramming of the whole system, and generally have strong emotional responses linked to the years of boredom and (that-psychological-thing-that-felt-like-torture) whenever the subject comes up. If all of this is not considered a failure, then I consider the entity doing the considering to have a flawed and counter-productive evaluation method and point of reference.
Anyway, hopefully this rant wasn’t completely pointless and useless to everyone else. If anyone has further evidence one way or another for the issue of gifted schools and how available they are, it would be welcome. If someone has evidence or arguments that could make me dissipate my vendetta against the educational system, even better—unless they have evidence that such a vendetta is a desirable and effective thing to hold, but my credence in this belief just took a large drop, and by looking at what kind of evidence I had been searching for in the past I believe I’ve already seen much more of the evidence for this than for its counterpart.
(My objection is primarily to your apparent overconfidence in the strong claim about the absence of such programs in most countries, for which you do seem to lack adequate evidence, and so it is incorrect to assert it in that form.)
I agree. It felt like I had more evidence, and I had a strong belief of comparative mental category to things that warrant such confidence. Thanks for leading me to debunk this.
Well, as I recall the gifted program I attended (in the States, in Texas specifically) was just harder busywork. Logic puzzles featured prominently, and there were crosswords instead of wordfinds. It was there that I formalized my hatred of formal logic problems. (The problems frequently featured concepts or information which, if you used knowledge which came from outside the puzzle, would lead you to the wrong answer. Not uncommon in logic puzzles, and completely wrongheaded; it always reeks of doublethink to me.)
The problems frequently featured concepts or information which, if you used knowledge which came from outside the puzzle, would lead you to the wrong answer.
Could you clarify if this means “an answer marked as wrong, but probably correct in the real world” or rather “an answer clearly wrong in the real world, with the premises of the puzzle broken”? I also notice that the latter interpretation leaves ambiguous whether those answers would usually be marked correct or wrong, which might be intentionally left out if there’s no specific correlation there.
I’m uncertain what you mean by the latter—the former is one case, but if you mean that the correct answer to the logic puzzle would clearly be wrong in the real world, the latter is also true. So possibly both; I was referring to a pretty broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles.
Ah, yes, upon re-reading my wording wasn’t quite clear either.
What I was referring to is an annoying category of puzzles that require certain specific outside knowledge bits to arrive to the “correct” answer as would be marked, even though by the premises of the puzzle and the information given this is clearly a wrong answer and the desired answer isn’t even applicable to the real world in non-contrived scenarios.
In other words, a specific subset of the broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles. Since you were referring to its parent/superset, the point is rather moot.
This seems dubious and hard to ascertain. What evidence do you have that most other countries lack such schools?
(There are public schools for gifted children in Russia, and I’d guess in many places. The usual setup is not to filter directly by IQ, as Viliam_Bur describes (which does seem potentially socially inappropriate) but to admit students based on hard competitive tests in math/physics, and have as teachers either college professors or former math/physics olympians.)
Filtering by mathematics correlates positively with filtering by IQ, but it is not the same thing. Most gifted people are not great in maths.
One of advantages of teaching in a school of children filtered specifically by IQ was that it disproved my many prejudices about high-IQ people. Those children were different from the average, but it was not easy to say how exactly; the simple explanations all failed. For example some of them were great at maths, certainly much higher ratio than in the average school, but most of them were not. Similarly with other traits—many interesting traits were more frequent than in the normal population, and yet, even within the gifted population they remained a minority; just a greater minority than usual. If you try to filter by these traits, you will find many gifted people, but even more gifted people you will filter out.
As a student I was in a math-oriented high school. I would say most people there were highly intelligent too. Yet, it was different. The interesting aspect of the IQ-filtering school for gifted children is that you get many talents of a different kind together. Often you have one child with multiple talents—in a math-oriented school they would probably develop some of them and supress the rest. In IQ-oriented school, they can develop their math talent during the math lessons, and e.g. artistic talent during their art lessons. Without an IQ-oriented school they would have to choose, either math or art; or at least only one of them at school, and other only in afternoon activities.
As an example: on the school for gifted children we started organizing a high-school competition in making computer games. That is not exceptional per se; there exist many other programming competitions. The difference is that in a typical programming competition, you have an exact problem, and you get points for algorithm that solves the problem. In this game-making competition you get points for multiple aspects of the game: graphics, music, storyline, presentation, and the technical flawlessness. So the programming is important, but the algorithm is not everything, other aspects matter too. In my opinion, this difference is a nice metaphor for the difference between the schools.
My primary evidence is that Canada is more on the liberal and open side of things relating to most countries in the world, has a higher diversity of educational programs than in most places AFAIK, and is quite high up the prosperity and economic stability scale by current worldwide standards—yet it has no such things as public schools with gifted programs.
The closest to “gifted” programs there is is the International Baccalaureate program, and yet even that gets diluted and stretched into an additional unnecessary year in Quebec (the rest of Canada implements the program a bit more directly, without the additional stretch year). There is no additional content, and the program that I took here barely meets the basic requirements for the certificate of accomplishment for Middle Years of the Baccalaureate program (this I obtained together with my local Diplome du Secondaire, slightly inferior to an actual High School diploma, at age 17.)
Basically, If you’re gifted here in Canada, the best you can hope for is to either get lucky with a private school filled with awesome teachers, or have excellent homeschooling. Since Canada scales rather high on the aforementioned global metrics, and I have a decent prior that Canada has a bigger per-capita education budget than most countries, it seems likely that Canada not having any such schools is much more likely in worlds where having such schools is a very rare or special thing for a country, rather than in worlds where Canada is somehow a strange cultural outlier and represents the exceptions.
I have specific evidence of such schools in the US, I remember hearing of two examples in the UK (but I don’t remember the examples themselves—sorry), and I’ve read or heard many times of such schools in Tokyo. China pumping lots of money into anything makes the news, and I’ve seen a few articles that says they’re expanding their current programme to get more geniuses working for them in the future.
(small jump to represent some internet searches and being surprised)
On the other hand, while writing this and looking for some of my previous sources, I just found this.
The first thing that jumps at me is that there seems to be a lot more schools with gifted programmes in Ontario than I was led to believe, and the six random ones I checked were operating back in 2003/2004 (which is around where my family and I started looking). This suggests either that we searched incorrectly, were lied to by the counselors and advisers we consulted, that they were simply much harder to find and get into back then than they are now, or any combination of those.
At any rate, it seems I now need to re-evaluate those beliefs. One fact remains, though: Our family expended above-average effort in trying to get me to a gifted program, skip a year, or otherwise get me out of the fatal failure mode I was in, and failed utterly. I also don’t see much for Quebec, unfortunately, but as the page is in English it would be expected that its writers would not be aware of french-language gifted schools, if there are any, which makes it seem more likely that there are some.
The above-average effort claim doesn’t seem hard to support—the average parent would simply not care that their child is gifted and would not attempt to get them out of a “normal” school program, as far as I’m aware. Actually seeking to do anything in this case seems like the exceptional non-status-quo reaction. As for failing utterly, well, I completed my normal high school curriculum and then dropped out of cégep (pre-university college thinghy corresponding to last year of high school).
Basically, I don’t have a formal education as good/equivalent to regular american high school diplomas. My experience was utterly boring and unproductive. I gained virtually no adjustment skills and still hate every moment I spend with “average” people (I literally feel like I’m interacting with inferior beings, which means I have to spend effort to suppress these feelings because they’re irrational and not reflectively coherent, which means I dislike these interactions partially because of this). I have no hope of going back into higher education for at least one more year, and even then I’m not sure I want to at all. I’ve been trained to loathe formal education, hate those who would prevent proper reprogramming of the whole system, and generally have strong emotional responses linked to the years of boredom and (that-psychological-thing-that-felt-like-torture) whenever the subject comes up. If all of this is not considered a failure, then I consider the entity doing the considering to have a flawed and counter-productive evaluation method and point of reference.
Anyway, hopefully this rant wasn’t completely pointless and useless to everyone else. If anyone has further evidence one way or another for the issue of gifted schools and how available they are, it would be welcome. If someone has evidence or arguments that could make me dissipate my vendetta against the educational system, even better—unless they have evidence that such a vendetta is a desirable and effective thing to hold, but my credence in this belief just took a large drop, and by looking at what kind of evidence I had been searching for in the past I believe I’ve already seen much more of the evidence for this than for its counterpart.
(My objection is primarily to your apparent overconfidence in the strong claim about the absence of such programs in most countries, for which you do seem to lack adequate evidence, and so it is incorrect to assert it in that form.)
I agree. It felt like I had more evidence, and I had a strong belief of comparative mental category to things that warrant such confidence. Thanks for leading me to debunk this.
Well, as I recall the gifted program I attended (in the States, in Texas specifically) was just harder busywork. Logic puzzles featured prominently, and there were crosswords instead of wordfinds. It was there that I formalized my hatred of formal logic problems. (The problems frequently featured concepts or information which, if you used knowledge which came from outside the puzzle, would lead you to the wrong answer. Not uncommon in logic puzzles, and completely wrongheaded; it always reeks of doublethink to me.)
Thanks for the input!
Could you clarify if this means “an answer marked as wrong, but probably correct in the real world” or rather “an answer clearly wrong in the real world, with the premises of the puzzle broken”? I also notice that the latter interpretation leaves ambiguous whether those answers would usually be marked correct or wrong, which might be intentionally left out if there’s no specific correlation there.
I’m uncertain what you mean by the latter—the former is one case, but if you mean that the correct answer to the logic puzzle would clearly be wrong in the real world, the latter is also true. So possibly both; I was referring to a pretty broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles.
Ah, yes, upon re-reading my wording wasn’t quite clear either.
What I was referring to is an annoying category of puzzles that require certain specific outside knowledge bits to arrive to the “correct” answer as would be marked, even though by the premises of the puzzle and the information given this is clearly a wrong answer and the desired answer isn’t even applicable to the real world in non-contrived scenarios.
In other words, a specific subset of the broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles. Since you were referring to its parent/superset, the point is rather moot.