Warning: soapbox..... This is also why I get so frustrated by teachers and family members who constantly dismiss DS's learning needs by insisting that "He MUST learn to get along in the real world." Well, actually, mostly, no. I am quite confident that the moment he is allowed to escape his public school box, he will put himself into a reality of his own choosing - and it will NOT involve spending all day every day trapped in a room with people with whom he has no shared interests, listening to a one-way drone of highly linear, repetitive, shallow and slow-moving information about things he knew years ago and don't interest him even vaguely. Your reality, lady, not his.
Actually, I disagree: this idea is framed here in too extreme a way to be true to my experience. It's fun to think that the world will just make a path for geniuses, but I've seen brilliant people flame out because they can't organize themselves. (Some of these are people who go to grad school but spend much too long there because they can't get it together to write consistently, people who are considered by their colleagues to be a pain in the neck because they don't contribute practically to the running of the lab, and so forth.)
I do not consider the acquisition of EF skills a waste of time at all.
The idea that the person should spend time in an otherwise inappropriate learning environment to get EF skills is of course ridiculous. But it is a separate issue from learning the EF skills.
As to Bostonian: one may be born with a particular set of predispositions for EF, but one can learn strategies for managing. What you're born with is not who you are in this regard.
