Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Race to Nowhere- any thoughts?

What I'm thinking Wren, and I'm just a thinker not a economics expert of any kind... I think the difference is this time the local fall out is from globalization, which means when the dust settles It's not going to be Canada, Spain, or England that gets everything. Technology and transportation has made us into a global community. Each person has become their own little independant corporation. Nobody stays at their job their whole life. There's still niches. My brother keeps learning Japanese because he's in video game design. It depends on what you're into. If you're going to be a doctor you gotta learn Latin, right.


I'm a "planetary native", I've got the button and the patch.
http://woodstockearth.net/thisCategory.asp?ProductTypeMain=16

Interesting perspective La Texican. And I think you have a good idea there but that then assumes no safety net. Medicare, social security. What about public schools etc. Each man an island.

Greece got 98 billion a year ago and didn't do the stuff it was suppose to and now could default. Gone are social programs like that. You could see rapid changes across Europe with those kinds of things. Ireland, Portugal could be next in line.

Which means the dollar probably goes up against the Euro, which isn't so good for our capturing back some manufacturing jobs.

And going back to the Race to Nowhere. This whole discussion diverged into early college entrance. Although we (and I put myself in to the guilty party) justify acceleration because our kids learn faster and we don't want them to get bored, where are they heading to? We are more guilty of racing our kids than the average parents.

Because I couldn't get acceleration in DD's gifted program, I do horizontally offer her options, like the science at the museum, like Chinese, like CTY for her math -- to allow her to go at her own speed. And yes, she can get get bored with her classroom math -- though her teacher is great with teaching them report research and writing. Skills that work and don't bore her since her research is done at her own level. She does love being able to play with her age mates. Being one of the younger ones in her class -- late birthday, and small for her age, a head shorter than most of her classmates, this works. She can give a good run playing tag -- she would be too small to compete with second graders in many sports during gym, even though she is pretty athletic. And that would make her feel bad.

Sometimes I want her to accelerate, sometimes I think of her 15-16 in college and think of myself, drinking way too young, because of 2 skips. And I also think that she doesn't have to enter the workforce early. She deserves the time to grow emotionally and physically.

We just got back from Egypt. It was a great time to go, empty so no standing in hot lines to get into tombs. On the plane, we were talking about where to go next. She has been to 12 countries and she is 6. She has whale watched and snorkled, gone to see volcanoes, 2 thousand year old Mayan pyramids and 5 thousand year old Egyptian pyramids. Stood in a gymnasium for gladiators and then walked across to the Colliseum itself.

There is so much to experience, whether it is working with wolf reserchers in Montana, space programs with Nasa, seeing the Amazon and swimming with piranhas.

I think there is so much to offer a child without necessarily rushing them through college. Totally understand the need for acceleration, in math particulary -- since I was several years ahead. But there is other stuff. A lot of other stuff before they race off to somewhere.

Ren

I haven't read every post in this thread -- has anyone brought up a gap year as a way of delaying entrance to college?

Ds11 and dh and I really like the sound of it, from what we know so far; and the options seem only to be increasing, as the idea catches on in the US.

Ren discussed the pros and cons of acceleration. Some articles about Julian Stanley and his work with accelerants are

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0697web/whiz.html
Yesterday's Whiz Kids:
Where Are They Today?
By Melissa Hendricks
Johns Hopkins magazine June 1997

and

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0400web/16.html
What Brilliant Kids
Are Hungering For
By Dale Keiger
Johns Hopkins magazine April 2000

I think overall radical accelerants have been pretty successful, but one doesn't know if they would have been just as successful if they were not accelerated.

Early college for our child has been the exact opposite of a race - more like a leisurely stroll without the stress of high school. Maybe that's the ultimate revealing illustration of the problem with the AP system, that many kids find college much less stressful with more time for open ended exploration.

Our kids are all different. Going "horizontal" works great for some kids. It is what we initially hoped for and tried hard to make work, but it wore thin quickly. Our child didn't want more enrichment with agemates, he wanted to be going forward in his education with other people ready to learn at the same level. Early college was the best way to provide it and still provide plenty of leisure time for pursuing interests in arts, sports, etc. etc. etc.

How is it letting an advanced kid "be a kid" more by leaving them behind to tutor other kids because nobody wants to teach them? I should really read the movie, I'm just responding to the title. If it's a "race to nowhere" then is it on a road that leads to nowhere? Would anybody say that education leads you nowhere? They're just complaining that everybody wants to go at their own pace, or what?

On the tangent Wren I think we'd still have roads and schools and taxes to pay for them. Where I live there's a lot of businesses, even restaraunts, that do business in "the two Laredos" because it's considered a Laredo-Nuevo Laredo Metropolitan area with the Mexican city right across the bridge. There's a lot more local business, it seems, between these two international cities than between Laredo and San Antonio which is two hours away. There's still US and Mexico. I just think, like people here call everything international I imagine universities will become more international, maybe our world can work togeather on global warming, and space exploration, better medicine... A big hi-5 to who ever decided to de-salinate ocean water for consumption. Nice.

I just mentioned the "every man is an island" because I think historically you could expect to learn a job, work for a company, be loyal, work hard and stay there until you retire. The Net says that's history. Besides that everything seems to have become very global. Wren, If I ever win the lottery you're going to be my travel agent. You have the best vacations outlined.

They have physical limits, sure-- and I've referred to them before on the board-- but ones like electrochemical transmission rates etc. are pretty much irrelevant in my opinion to discussing ability, in a non-disabled human, to learn to think abstractly. Vague mentions of memory limits also prove little to me, and certainly not that we have reached the limits of humans to learn. Muscles are completely different; muscles move through a predetermined range and have an easily understood physical functions and limits. Brains and minds are not nearly as well understood, and we don't know their limits; we can only observe how brains and minds perform on tests after being taught with methods that continue to change with each passing generation.

Since we teach better than we did hundreds of years ago (I hope we can agree on that), and more people think at a high level than hundreds of years ago, and our limits haven't been shown to be discovered, I don't see value in assuming we've reached limits.


Sure. I don't understand why you assume that those things can't be learned to some extent too. AFAIK there is a pretty healthy industry around teaching people to think divergently. To at least some extent, you can learn rules about learning rules. See the Creative Whack Pack and similar ideas, going all the way back to divining solutions to problems in animal entrails. In addition, as an ex-software developer, I can tell you that a person can definitely increase (and I mean greatly increase) an ability to memorize rules too, in terms of total capacity and speed of learning.

Why does it make more sense to think that those things are not learnable? I mean, I wouldn't assume that evne going back to the tensor calculus example. We humans didn't evolve brains to do calculus-- except maybe in Soviet Russia for a while there, where they were pretty hard on their engineering students. We mutated to have better language facilities, which allowed the development of logic, from which everything else flowed.


I think that cognitive talent is part biological, and part environmental. Stimulation increases intelligence. A biological advantage is an advantage, but that doesn't mean it's the only possible advantage.


I firmly believe that I could take any ordinary baby and turn it into one heck of a college applicant, starting early enough. I agree with you anyway, but more because the world needs garbage people and only has so many research positions to give. That means, to me, that the ones who show the most intellectual achievement should get the best chances to continue doing so, but it doesn't imply to me that we do an optimal job of optimizing talent today-- for anyone.


I agree that every person has a limited ability to take in new information in any situation and do something useful with it, and that those limits are different for different people. I just don't think we are all that close to optimizing development. Limits at any point in time are just a snapshot of a person's developed potential. I also think that not enough is done for most kids very early on, when stimulation is probably most important.

Anyhoo, it seems like we don't disagree much on the college issue, just on the reasons. I really think anyone could go to college if they were taught correctly, and that in a perfect world, everyone would. It's not a perfect world.

Still waiting for hard scientific evidence.


I didn't mention rates specifically. I just said "processes," which also can include the amount of a particular neurotransmitter. There may also be anatomical considerations, such as the amount of white matter, myelin thickness, placement or number of synaptic connections, and on and on.

Again, you're going to have to give me hard scientific evidence for your ideas in order to convince me.

Also, and this is something I didn't mention in my last message --- much athletic ability also depends on brainpower. Aspiring pro athletes, for example, have to take the Wonderlic test, which is a test of cognitive ability. There are minimum scores for different positions (e.g. quarterbacks need higher scores than most other positions). This makes perfect sense: to be a good quarterback, you need more than muscles. You also have to make a rapid assessment of conditions on the field and be able to make a correct split-second decision about the best person to throw the ball to.

Your basic argument is that teaching affects intelligence. It's a nice idea and I wish it were true, but I don't believe it is. Good teaching can have a huge effect on comprehension, but understanding something because someone explained it well isn't the same thing as getting smarter because someone explained something well.


Studies have shown that permanent environmental effects are modest and more striking effects are temporary. Scientific studies support this point. For example, JamieH mentioned the discredited twin study and provided references.

Here's an example of a large and very well-known study. It showed that intensive interventions between the ages of 0 and 5 in low premature children had an obvious effect at age three that started to peter out after that.



Another study called the Abecedarian study showed real but modest gains: the average IQ in the intervention group was around 4 points higher than the controls. I don't know the statistical significance of this difference.

That said, there were other real gains, as the Wikipedia entry shows. Yet they were modest: fewer criminals, fewer teenage pregnancies, and more people in college at age 21 (no mention of how many graduated and what they studied).

If the treatment group (but not the control group) had produced, say, a theoretical physicist or a neuroscientist, the people running the project would have plastered this fact all over the place. I can't find anything along these lines. The study subjects were all born in the early to mid-1970s --- making the oldest ones are 39. We would have heard by now if this had happened.

So yes, there were gains, but no, they didn't turn people of below average intelligence (the average IQ at age 15 was in the 90s for both groups) into very smart people. They just made them less below-average. See page 44 of this report for IQ scores. Note that IQ scores in the control group went up while those in the intervention group went down. What does this mean?

Everything I've written goes back to one idea: talent exists, and it's real. It would be nice if we could make individuals more talented, but we can't really. We can make them a bit more talented, which is great. It's too bad our society doesn't put more emphasis on free pre-natal care, high-quality school lunches and other critical social programs. If we cared more about poor people, we'd try to ensure that they get medical care, food, and safe housing. These interventions would probably go a long way toward raising our society's average IQ and making life better for the poor.




You're assuming that going to college is part of a perfect world. Yet some people have no interest in college. Why should their aspirations be considered less worthy than some arbitrary ideal just because of this?

Val

(Sorry if someone's said this, I haven't read the whole thread in detail): to my mind, the best evidence for the mutability of IQ, i.e. for the importance of the whole environment on it, is the Flynn effect. It's obviously impossible for genetic change to account for anything like the magnitude of that effect, so those increases have to be environmentally caused, for the broadest possible definition of "environmentally". Of course, the observation may be of limited use (because, as the limited effects shown in intervention studies suggest, we are talking about the effect of the entire environment, i.e. growing up in today's world, not just about formal education, for example) and even of limited interest (because it's questionable how much the increase in what IQ tests measure reflects increases in what we really care about), but at least this shows that the idea that IQ cannot be affected by environment is wrong - the same sperm and egg combining in 1900 and growing up there would on average have a much lower IQ than that sperm and egg combining in 2011 and growing up here, if 1900s freezing technology had been up to it :-) [I'm saying sperm and egg, not baby, because one of the things that may be important is prenatal environment. I suppose I haven't accounted for sperm and egg quality issues other than genetics, but you have to start somewhere!]

I looked up the Yesterday's Whiz Kids article and read it.
One of the people highlighted was a woman in my Harvard Med School class. She was very weird and socially isolated. She became a surgeon but is not married and has no children, perhaps because of choice.
Nobody else in my class was a "Whiz Kid," yet we all made it to Harvard Med. I guess my point is, there are many roads to success.