Right:
access to books, art materials, cultural events, animals, and loads and loads of people from all walks of life, exposure to international politics, argumentation and debate, etc. We lived in a district with exceptional GT programming at a time when it was the "golden age" for such things in my state. (1970's) I entered college with as much dual enrollment credit as my DD had last fall when SHE entered. It wasn't bad, even by today's standards. But it was definitely intended for MG students, and that wasn't really me.
Wrong:
unstable home due to parental mental illness, significant medical neglect and physical abuse. My mother REFUSED a "recommended" grade skip-- four years running, no less-- and failed to intervene in self-esteem issues that were probably rooted in an undiagnosed math disability which impacted my ability to attain automaticity at math facts. I was never told that I
could do more, and nobody expected me to, that much is certain. I'm not sure that I knew that a PhD even existed when I was in junior high and high school. (Really, not kidding). They didn't shelter me from being a side-show freak when my IQ score (FSIQ, old-school SB) became widely disseminated by my malicious middle school classmates and teachers. They also didn't understand that having that kind of
intellect didn't mean that I had the life experience to actually BE 21, even if I acted like it a lot of the time-- it was inappropriate to expect me to police my peers and serve as a
de facto chaperone, and this is precisely what my mother expected of me, punishing ME anytime a group of my peers refused to listen when I told them something was a bad idea and it predictably turned out about as I expected. {sigh} My mother also allowed teachers to flatly be kind of abusive toward me (thinking of one math teacher in particular, who said to my mother that I had better not take calculus in HS, because he was the only one that taught that class, and "I just don't like her," with 15yo me right there to hear it, even)-- my mother was herself a public teacher, mind. She was HORRIFIED by that statement, all right, but she certainly didn't say or do anything about it, except for telling me that it was okay not to take calc with him.
That guy was a misogynistic pig, quite frankly, and someone SHOULD have called him out on crap like that.
Neither: Benign neglect, or free-range parenting back when that wasn't the term. Exposure to how the educational system produces sausages. I was permitted pretty wide leeway to escape the horrid educational setting that I endured for so many years.
I am EG.
