You have my sympathies. How much reading/learning has your DH done about the benefits of congregated gifted education vs. alternatives? I get the impression, which could be wrong, that he is perhaps overweighting his own personal experience in education and his teaching experiences vs. research findings.
That is a lovely way to put it! I usually put it "you just always think you know so much better than every one else, including me!"
Seriously, he doesn't read and research. That's my job. His job then is to question the decisions I make after the fact and throw wrenches into the processes I've started, which drives me nuts.
No, I'm being unfair, he usually trusts me and supports my choices. It's only that telling him to read up on stuff doesn't help at all. This is resistance at a a visceral level, the way chay has described it, too. He teaches high ability kids himself, has taught gifted ed (until they cut the program at his school, he was actually the coordinator but they weren't happy with the way he did things, advocating actual gifted testing for gifted ed as opposed to teacher recs being one of the things the powers that be found unpalatable) and prides himself on the fact that gifted kids thrive in his classes. Which I am sure they do - in his classes, on their own. He does admit they are mostly on their own for the rest of the time.
He has always found peers, kindred spirits, outside of formal education. His best friend growing up didn't go to school with him but did votech high school, trained as a mechanic, before going back to school. He helped him in math so he could go to college. But they both share an ability to build absolutely everything they want to without needing anyone else to tell them how. They used to communicate silently when they worked together, handing one another tools without asking etc,. It was uncanny.
DS went to a European public university for a STEM degree, doing research. Im sure that at a certain level of advancement in a physics degree, everyone you meet will be at least MG anyway, even at European open enrolment universities. That was NOT true for a social science and languages student like me! I had to go to an elite school in the UK to find people who thought and felt like me, who crave the same level of intellectual stimulation in their discourse. This makes me want congregated gifted ed for my kid. For my DH, it is a kind of special ed that may make his kid unfit for the real world.
