Gifted Programmes Are Bandaids

they aren't worth the trouble + school will still suck

I.

What is their point, really?

Is it to provide a place of intellectual stimulation for the more cognitively gifted? Or to encourage academic excellence? Or maybe to venerate them as the ideal learner?

Either way, I plan to show how they kinda suck at whatever their purpose is. Going so far as to judge them a net negative. Even if they have some upsides.

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Anything we can do to not kill the spark from kids' souls is to be tried - Rohit Krishnan

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While I do agree with the above quote, I also think the controversy and downsides of these programmes aren’t worth the marginal (if any) benefit. And I hope to explain why in the following paragraphs.

To do so, we need to first look at the programme for what it is: a marginally different version of regular school with (slightly) more challenging coursework. You may get slightly better teachers (but I wouldn’t bet on it), or more autonomy (definitely wouldn’t bet on it), but it is still school after all.

Of course, it's challenging in a disappointingly homogenous way. And still involves only what the education board judges to be the "mandatory syllabus". The state has enough power already. Why would you trust your "gifted child" to them too?

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Picture of an ideal gifted class = empty chairs.

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I would be willing to give more credit to those programmes if there were any modern examples of genius coming out of the ranks of the "gifted". Even without considering factors such as selection effects and whether it happened with or despite the help of such programmes.

The truly gifted were famous for a precociousness that reduced their teachers to tears. Or displayed a marked tendency towards auto-didacticism. Sure, Vitalik happened to be put into a gifted class, but so were a million other kids. How many of them went on to create Ethereum?

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II.

If you couldn't tell, I'm no merito-elitist.

And even if I was, I don't trust any of the popular reductive measures of ability, intellectual or otherwise. So asking me to believe that "gifted" means anything in the real world is...well, it's a big ask.

My argument is that precociousness is an indicator of early investment, which in turn is a signal for continued investment. Children with parents willing and able to provide them with early access to resources will receive both encouragement and the resources required to go all the way.

The age at which the selection process happens is ridiculously low (4 years in New York), even as we have evidence that it may be much easier to pick up specific cognitive skills at a later age. Yes, even math. As well as studies that show kids do alright even if they miss large parts of school.

It isn’t far-out to suggest that the entirety of middle school curriculum could be picked up within (at most) a year of study. Yet we ask children to spend thousands of hours painfully working on those same skills throughout their formative years.

Precociousness is also a sign of trying hard. Which is good for the individual, I suppose. Trying hard usually gets you what you want. So more accelerated courses mean that the try-hards are encouraged to try harder. But only in the official school-sanctioned way. Within the clear boundaries of the syllabus and in competition their homogenously elite peers.

Which explains why while not many of your gifted kids will drop out, even though far fewer will go on to any truly impressive success. Elite overproduction, anyone?

So at best, gifted programmes have a purpose as selection mechanisms. But they're particularly poor ones. Even assuming that accurately selecting for genius at such a young age on a nation-wide scale was possible in the first place, you're selecting more for not-an-idiot than for true genius.

The consequences of this selection are not trivial. Even if we ignore the stories of burn-out and "the weight of personal expectations". And forget how badly young children handle labels. There's still the fact that, implicit in the idea of gifted kids is the idea of not-gifted kids. There is no need to make this explicit with a separate program.

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III.

There's enough ways we do this already.

Scholarships, grades, Olympiads, AP classes and valedictorians aren't going away anytime soon. Because they serve a clear purpose, which they accomplish more often than not. To reward the explicitly academically successful through largely one-time, domain-specific encouragements or opt-in courses. Trophies and side quests, not gated membership.

This should be obvious, but I'll say it anyway: I'm not calling for the end of academic merit. Acceleration exists. Unschooling exists. So does playing hookey and half-assing it (the author’s favored strategy). Pick your own escape.

The libertarian outrage machine may want us to see it as the end of their beloved meritocracy, and the beginning of a Harrison Bergeron-esque dystopia. But that just isn't true. The real world will continue to reward genius, and the truly gifted will find a way to make their mark regardless.

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if some coin and trinkets is all it takes to discourage you from the ambition of your heart, you were never fuckin' ambitious to begin with anyway - Visa

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There’s a popular argument that goes like this: We admit that there are bio-deterministic advantages in areas like sport and singing, and therefore attempt to allocate more resources to those with special gifts in those areas. How is school any different?

The answer is a simple one. The crux of which is the fact that very few of us will ever pursue those activities as anything other than a hobby, but we all live in the knowledge economy. In sport and art, we are explicitly attempting to improve outlier success. Not so with public schools. For better or worse, they serve as the large-scale sub-optimal solution. Something built to cater to “everyone” isn’t going to be fixed with a few special classes.

Furthermore, expertise in those areas is heavily skewed towards the tacit (as this author has often personally (and painfully) discovered). Requiring significant personal investment and near one-on-one interactions. Even so, the internet has made great inroads there too. I know of more than a few musicians, artists and athletes who’ve honed their craft through the democratized tacit education that Youtube provides.

Which is my second point, i.e. the death of gifted programmes creates no vacuum. As the most recent example of a gifted kid that Google News brought up, Braxton Moral talks about how it was the exposure to new ideas that was inspiring, not the program itself. No points for guessing what decades-old networking technology provides similar access to a practically infinite collection of ideas.

There may have been a time when these program were integral to the progress and development of promising students. But those constraints on resources have been lifted enough to make do without special classes and the accusations of segregation that come with them.

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IV.

There's a bunch of other (equally unsubstantial) arguments I've seen.

I’ll go over some of the more popular ones here, and readers are encouraged to sound off in the comments if they have any others.

Bad argument #1: Gifted classes protect nerds from bullying.

Look, I’m really glad some people found solace from harrowing experiences. A negative util prevented is a util earned, in my book. But the problem really is in another castle here. Is it only the sacred group of "gifteds" that merit protection from bullies? Holding up gifted programmes a (band-aid) solution to bullying, while simultaneously denying it to the majority of the student population, is a pretty bad justification in anyone’s book.

Bad argument #2: They allow kids to meet peers with like-minded interests.

Is it so difficult to fraternize normally? To visit a library, or join a few forums and strike up conversations? Or do we absolve our geniuses of the regular rites of friend-making? I don’t have much experience with accelerated learning, but the few classmates I knew that would be admitted to such programmes were not the ones I’d want to be friends with anyway.

Bad argument #3: Smart kids are wasting valuable time in classrooms that hold them back.

If we were really worried about “wasted time”, it would be obvious that the solution is getting rid of mandatory attendance. Or mandatory subjects for that matter. Or build places where they can spend time learning outside of classrooms.

Bad argument #4: Low-income students will lose out.

Look, there’s a small chance that your gifted programme is effective. And an even tinier chance you’ll be letting in the folks who really need it. Those are the kids at the border between prodigy and under-privileged, and I doubt your selection mechanism is good enough to find them. Even lotteries would work better. Your money would be better spent on infrastructure (libraries, computer labs, clubs). Or y’know, as checks directly to parents.

You know what else makes people feel like they’re losing out? Denying them access to a selective program for “advanced learning”.