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.
And, many definitions of success. If your definition is being NORMAL, then yes, many prodigies will fail and that is the case whether they go to college early or not. It is not going to college early that makes these kids weird - they are extreme outliers who will by their very definition not be normal. Some research suggests most people who go to medical school are in that "optimal" zone of intelligence - they tend to moderately gifted people. If this individual was such an extreme outlier she likely would stick out in the environment no matter her age. Do you believe giving her four years of unhappy high school first would have made her just like everybody else?
For me the much more important definition of success is will the person be well adjusted and HAPPY. To take a person who cares deeply about intellectual pursuits and confine them to an environment where they have no access to appropriate intellectual outlets is not the foundation for a happy well adjusted individual. That same individual skipped to college may find much more possibility of acceptance. Our child has happy positive experiences every single day in college and that most certainly would not have been the case in middle school.
That said, I think very little is accomplished by trotting out anecdotal stories and attempting to extrapolate from them. What makes more sense is to look at the research on radical acceleration and it is clear that when it is carefully chosen it can work very well. There was a good quote from Julian Stanley in the whiz kids article posted earlier...
"It depends a lot on the parents--whether or not they get the kids motivated and involved and encourage independence, and if they're facilitative, not exploitative. That is, they're not trying to 'create' brilliant kids. They have brilliant kids, and they're trying to help the kids use that brilliance"
