Exactly-- I started buying college gen-ed textbooks for my daughter when she was about nine-- I just didn't tell anyone.
One other thing that we found gave us away with the school, though, was when my then-3rd grader was choosing things like, er...
Langston Hughes when asked to "choose a poem" to memorize, that kind of open-ended assignment. We learned to keep an eye on the curriculum four to six grades up after that first year, because she had
inadvertently chosen literature selections which were assigned in later grades.
whoops!
We also realized that in so doing, the school was frowning at us and assuming that WE were the ones doing it on purpose-- for what reason I'm not sure, but anyway. This is why my DD wasn't
allowed to read some novels until they were assigned in High School literature classes, though-- because we had learned that they wouldn't flex around those fixed assignments, so she'd only wind up reading it more than once. That happened anyway with a few things, because the curriculum shifted under us as she went. Walt Whitman was added to tenth grade when she was an 8th grader, for example-- but a full year after she'd read a bunch of his more notable works. {sigh}
And really, as playandlearn noted, neither acceleration
nor enrichment is a real solution beyond some LOG; it has to be both at a minimum. This often pushes school teachers and administrators so far out of their comfort zones that they simply shut down and refuse to see what is right in front of them.
