The ideal educational environment for challenging gifted children would not be limited to the curriculum and pacing of common core.
Children would be encouraged to access curriculum which stretches their abilities including college-level material, based on interest and ability, regardless of their age.
There would be no
beheading of tall tulips or cutting of tall poppies to create an appearance of uniformity:
A man is working in the gardens and I am intrigued by what he is doing. There is a bed of tulips, golden like sunlight, lifting their heads to the high Edinburgh sky and the man is tidying the bed, weeding between the plants, removing leaves that have blight. I feel a sense of pride that I understand this; my mother has explained it. But he is doing something else that I can't understand. Some of the tulips have grown faster than their peers so that they are taller their golden heads stand higher than the others and the man is cutting off these heads so that the stalks stand bare, denuded, but now the same size as the other plants in the bed. I ask my mother, in puzzlement, why he is cutting down the tall tulips, and when she answers there is a trace of sadness in her voice. "He wants to make them all the same size, darling, so that they'll look tidier. But I don't think that's what gardening is all about, do you?"
Updated link:
https://www.davidsongifted.org/gifted-blog/small-poppies-highly-gifted-children-in-the-early-years/
