Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Parenting arms race article

Exactly. This "open to all" thinking is just strange to me but it might be because I see "special educational need" as anything outside of the central 2 standard deviations.

This strikes me, therefore, as inherently about as silly as a group of people arguing that their insurance companies should cover a seeing eye dog because they happen to like Golden Retrievers a lot. (Come to think of it, there are people who like dogs so much that they see no real harm in falsely calling them service dogs. {sigh} Nevermind.)



It's not a "need" for a some of the people rushing to the front of the line. The reason that they are doing this is that there is an arms race in terms of college resume-building. This problem (mostly) wouldn't exist on this scale if not for mediocrity pushing up from beneath and high-pressure perfectionistic standards pushing DOWN from on high. Er-- at least, there wouldn't be such an issue if regular classroom settings were doing a reasonably good job (as noted multiple times within this thread).

.....

The upshot of all of this is that when parents are allowed to redefine what education means (so that it's easy enough for their kids to hit the ceiling, they might well be VERY strident about wanting that ceiling LOWER) then it's absolutely about making sure that nobody looks more capable than their own kids.