I was reading the "Beautiful Minds" article in another thread, and this crossed my mind again.
The whole concept of "acceleration" depends on acceptance of the premise that school should be organized around social education and not around intellectual education. We need to do more to refute that premise instead of accepting it and trying to work around it.
Why do we (I would say "as a country", but it appears that we are the same around the world in this regard) just assume that children of the same age should be taught the same things and that any child who learns something earlier is somehow a threat to the system? Does it stem from the fact that we have a certain age for starting school--they all start at the same time, therefore they should all be in the same place for the rest of their education? If we accept the premise, we are forever doomed to working around it and trying to prove that allowing this one child to be "accelerated" won't send the whole educational system crashing down on our heads.
Let's start from the premise that kids will get along socially when they are around people who are intellectually their equals, and see what happens.
