' – everything is destroyed.'
This may be the same message which grows inside those who feel shortchanged by their education... that they missed their one and only opportunity.
Limiting access to gifted programs or advanced academics by creating artificial limits and lotteries breeds discontent and despair. It may also create an undue sense of competition and even begin to agitate people against each other.
Because there are enough school buildings, enough seats for children, and enough teachers, it ought to be a simple matter to repurpose any needed number of those schools, student seats, and teachers for gifted programs and/or advanced academics. Each child ought to receive an education in which they routinely experience the joy of thinking hard, puzzling through a challenge, and the reward of reaching that aha moment. Each student learning something new every day, with intellectual peers.
This may create a more peaceful, cooperative society in which misguided parents are not harming their children with all-or-nothing thinking.
