What? Terry was identified by his parents. The quote is referring to his parents mistaken assumption that the system would identify his needs and that in putting him into the school system early they'd done their bit. His first school failed him utterly. Later, he was accelerated because his parents carefully chose a school that would do this and took part in the decisions throughout.

You're surely not excluding Terry Tao, the youngest ever IMO gold medallist, the Fields Medal winner? He's as PG as humans come. (He was very sensibly not exposed to calculus at age 5 - but maybe I'm taking you too literally. I'm confused about what your point is here.)

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/ read and scroll down for interesting links about Tao's childhood development. I agree with ColinsMum on the history.

I dunno if Terence Tao is as PG as people come, but that might be because I don't know enough about math; his main achievement so far seems to be a joint theorem with someone else, based on the other person's prior work, and I believe I've read that great mathematicians can go downhill as they get older. Val said it pretty well recently about great geniuses generally having a large dollop of creativity that sets them apart. My favorite example of someone in that vein is John von Neumann; I don't know of anyone more PG than him off the top of my head, as he was intensely creative and also about as maxed out as we come on processing types of abilities. The whole package.

[ETA: this may be a misunderstanding, come to think of it; when I say "as PG as people come" I mean something like "so gifted that it doesn't really make sense to think you could reliably define a class of people who were more gifted" - that is, if you had a practical instrument [i.e., not just someone's opinion on greatest achievers] which claimed to identify the most gifted people on the planet and Tao wasn't one of them, I can't imagine what you could do that would convince me your instrument was any use. I don't mean "the most gifted person on the planet bar none" - if you argued that Shelah is more gifted than Tao, for example, I wouldn't want to get into an argument about it.]

Err... splutter... no really, trust me on this, or rather, trust the community of mathematicians :-) You're referring to the Green-Tao theorem, perhaps, but Tao's reputation does not rest on that alone. And some, but by no means all, mathematicians go downhill as they age; the same is true in any walk of life. You're perhaps thinking of the adage that mathematicians often produce their best work before the age of 30, but even that is not always true. Tao certainly shows no sign of going downhill yet; see the work that was awarded last year's Polya Prize for example.

Incidentally I think there's a real danger of rating people based on what we can understand of what they do, rather than on what they do. I don't remember even who was involved let alone what if anything you said on it, but there was a thread recently where I was spluttering too hard even to join in, in which people were opining that physics hadn't seen anyone as clever as Einstein since Einstein. That's IMNSHO total rubbish. Which people end up thought of as geniuses depends on how easy their work is to popularise, as well as on how important it is or how hard it was to do - with odd results, sometimes. (Of course, if the person who claimed this was an active researcher in theoretical physics, I might possibly have to stand corrected, as I'm not one!)

You commit an online spluttering, and hope to wash it away with an emoticon, ColinsMum?? But points taken. Mr. Tao does seem to be at the very least HMG++. {wink} The work he did which won the Polya prize looks pretty interesting, and of obvious immediate practical application.

:-) I'm glad someone got to appreciate my edit comment before my next edit accidentally deleted it!

Actually...it's not that there hasn't been anyone as clever as Einstein, so much as that there hasn't been a major breakthrough in theoretical physics since the 70s.

And I will now start a new thread on this very interesting education topic so as not to further pull this thread away from its original ideas (which have been lost in time at this point....).

Val

John was also a Polymath. You should read his bio. He was not educated in the traditional way.

http://www.amazon.com/John-Von-Neumann-Scientific-Deterrence/dp/082182676X

Some schools are trying to keep even more students in the Race to Nowhere, removing the off ramp I suggested above:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/educ...7g8G_story.html
School districts move away from honors classes in favor of AP courses
By Kevin Sieff
Washington Post, May 21

Not long ago, honors courses were considered a hallmark of student achievement, a designation that impressed colleges and made parents beam.

Now, those courses are vanishing from public schools nationwide as administrators move toward a more inclusive curriculum designed to encourage underrepresented minority students to join their high-achieving peers in college-level Advanced Placement classes.

Fairfax County’s public schools are at the forefront of the movement, nudging would-be honors students toward more-rigorous AP courses, despite criticism from some parents that eliminating honors will have the reverse effect and lead some students to choose less-demanding “standard education” classes instead of AP.

Honors courses are generally taught from the same lesson plan as regular classes but at a faster pace and in greater depth. An AP course contains altogether more-challenging material — charting a path that coheres to national standards, which are heavily endorsed by the Fairfax school system.

This fall, Fairfax will discontinue honors-level courses in subjects where an AP class is offered, drawing the ire of parents who want to restore what they call an academic middle ground. They have formed a group called Restore Honors Courses.

Prince William County took an even bolder stance about 10 years ago, doing away with the honors track. There has been resistance to that in other school systems — including Montgomery’s and Loudoun’s, where the honors option has been scaled back.

Considerable opposition from Fairfax parents has prompted the school board to review its decision to do away with high school honors courses that for years served as an alternative to basic and AP courses. But it remains unclear whether local advocates of honors courses can resist a national trend to reduce the number of “tracks” for students.

“Honors courses are drying up in many districts across the country because of the push to democratize Advanced Placement classes,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some schools in Illinois, New York, Oregon and several other states have begun phasing out the distinction.

That trend has reduced the number of levels available in a given subject area. A decade ago, nearly all school systems offered at least three tracks in high school — usually regular, honors and Advanced Placement. Now, many have shifted to two options, as Fairfax will in the fall. Some have gone even further, placing all students in a single track.

“We’ve found that traditionally underrepresented minorities do not access the most-rigorous track when three tracks are offered. But when two tracks are offered, they do,” said Peter Noonan, Fairfax’s assistant superintendent for instructional services.

Increasingly, educators are using AP test data to measure the disparity between white students and their black and Hispanic peers, revealing a profound achievement gap in high-level courses.

African Americans, for example, represented 14.6 percent of the total high school graduating class last year, but they made up less than 4 percent of the AP student population who earned a score of three or higher on at least one exam, each of which is weighted on a five-point scale.

<end of excerpt>

Honors courses are lacking off around here also. While, AP, dual-enrollment, and career academies (high school programs with hands-on real world electives) are on the rise.

Dual-enrolment has become the new higher middle ground around here because AP is more rigorous than the regular community college classes.
I liked honors classes because they had more depth than the regular classes, but not as much work as AP. They are a great compromise for the smart and unmotivated.