Intellect is limited by teaching a lot of the time today; I guess that the closest I can come would be a child denied vitamins growing up, and turning out to have stunted growth. We've figured out nutrition to a greater degree than teaching and learning.
..... And if you had tried to teach someone ordinary algebra in adulthood, perhaps a person with above-average IQ for that time, but dulled through lack of teaching that would be ordinary today, you would have had a much tougher time, perhaps an impossible one, much the same way a child raised by dogs can't learn much human language in the end.
I shouldn't be posting this early in the morning, and no offense intended lucounu, but my brain can't handle both of those frightening thoughts in one post.
I think you are correct about the nutrition analogy, which makes the hair on my arms stand up straight.
The raised by wild dogs comment seems to be such a perfect, a perfectly horrifying, description of my son's encounter with K-8 education. I don't know if it's like that for ND kids, and looking back to a time when algebra was a big deal I think we can be pleased with how far we've come. But you maybe right.
I remember dropping my son off at school in 2nd grade (his 'bottom' year) and the only way I could make myself do it was to remember all the English Novels I had read about heart-broken parents sending their boy-children off to work in the coal mines. I had no idea why dropping him off for 2nd grade
felt like such a tragedy. But I would have felt about the same dropping him off to be raised by wild dogs. All my instincts were screaming that I was doing the wrong thing, day after day, but I had no sense of having any alternatives, and couldn't imagine why our 'very good' public school system might be a bad fit for our 'ordinary to me' seeming boy.
((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity
