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YES.

There are other programs like this-- Simon's Rock, I think, is another which specializes in very early college matriculation.

I have a problem with this being the goal of any homeschool, and of the parents selling a product promoting it. We homeschool to work at dd's pace, I don't think I am hothousing though when I help support and work with her on her weakest areas. I am doing so in order to help her become more in synch with her higher areas so that life is easier for her, mostly at her request. For DD, this has been writing. She was struggling to get the ideas out of her head and onto paper...writing on a 2nd grade level, when your thoughts are that of an upper middle schooler, is frustrating....just ask dd. Is it hot housing to help her develop this skill more? I don't think so...to me it is parenting and doing what I can to support her, same as I would if she was a normal developing child, I would do what she needed to help her succeed. Do I know if she will be ready for full time college at 12? Absolutely not. Could she be? Absolutely, that is a possibility, although I wouldn't consider her truly ready unless she had taken rigorous highschool level classes first. I would help her seek out mentors, research experiences for her first before we would consider full time college, but that truly could be where a PG child may feel most comfortable, a PG child may have the executive functions needed already at that point, or may with slight support. Who knows. I grew up around a few HG-PG kids who definitely had it all going, no 2E issues and great executive functioning....had they been hothoused there, I don't think so...to me it seemed more of their personality. Will my child be like that...who knows? But she is already definitely self motivated and while extremely reserved around her peers and even those several years older, put her with kids 9 years older to her to adults and she will blow you away with her personality, wit, and the conversations she holds. I got a chance to witness this with her over the last few days. She got to spend time with 2 medical students who are here at the clinic for a few weeks and she thrived...and blew them away. The next day she ended up making two wonderful connections to some consultants who had come onto the island for 2 days to work with Dh's job. The conversations she has, the connections she made, and the way I see her open up and blossom, shows me that I know if college at 10-12 whatever gave her those same responses, then I would go for it, because to see your child, that turned on and alive would be hard to turn my back on just because "she wouldn't have a childhood." I firmly believe she could still be a child, have a childhood, but pursue an education and social life that was appropriate for her, whatever that may be, and whether that would be ideal for anyone else of not.

Okay that was totally rambling, and I have no clue if it even makes since because I was interrupted by DD twice so that she could share something she had just read and the dog kept bring me every toy in the house so that I would play with her. LOL

Oh- And the programs like those in Washington are amazing and would definitely be a first choice option when looking at what DD needed if it was early college, but everyplace does not have something like that, and we might not be in a position to move to a place just for that, so you do the best you can with what you have.

To be clear, I don't necessarily see "hothousing" as a pejorative term.

I fully admit that we hothouse DD's executive skills.

Those are her weakest domain, and the rest of her is champing at the bit while those hold her back.

It's hothousing in my opinion because it is a deliberate effort to modulate her natural/innate developmental timeline. It's just good parenting, though, because it is ultimately for her benefit.

I think that good parents hothouse all the time, whether they call it that or not.

That makes since HK. I always see hothousing as a negative term probaby because when DD was younger people accused me of it...if they only knew that she was dragging me along and I was barely hanging on for dear life LOL. That;s what I was talking about, good parenting to help her on her weakest set, but it is for her own benefit and it was cause she chomping at the bit while those are holding her back.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930510&slug=1700431

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19990404&slug=2953340

These are just two I found quickly. If you want more information, search the Seattle Times. The program has been around awhile so there are several articles.

I think it's two different groups. I don't think they're selling the program to pg families, but hg families. If what they said in the other forum is true, these two families the Swanns and the Hardings put their kids through a boxed curriculum (like Abeka or Calvert) without any differentiation or rabbit trails. An hg kid, maybe even an mg kid, would finish a set curriculum quicker than normal if allowed to work at their own pace. It wouldn't even take more hours per day. Working faster is part of being, even mildly, gifted. The benefit would be, over a lifetime, a few more years of earning, an earlier or cushier retirement, or more time for a higher education before starting your family.
A pg kid, yours HK or the ones at Davidson academy, are a different group. The plan there is not to get to earning quicker, but to "feed the fire", find a passion. That's why all the back and forth in these chats about high iq not necessarily meaning high income. I don't think they're wrong to say many kids can do what they did, with good family support and structure. It also kinda fits with the "nation decieved" spiel and Hoagies gifted's deal spreading the message that acceleration is not usually detremental like was recently commonly believed. If skipping a grade or two in school is harmless, then so is accelerated homeschooling.
ETA: I'm worried that sounded elitist like mg/hg young adults don't need a passion to go to college and get a career. I meant the path a pg kid could take could lead them to a tougher degree from a tougher college so maybe the prerequisite knowledge might be different.

Quite honestly, I don't think you even need to be gifted at all to go through curriculum faster when homeschooling? You have all that "extra" time to learn that in a traditional school setting would be spent on non-productive activities like settling down, explaining instructions to the whole class over and over, waiting for the slower classmates, covering the same topics repeatedly, etc. So even without giftedness coming into place, you get more done in the same time period homeschooling that at a brick & mortar school. Not that I have any experience with it yet, I'm just using my logic

I still think that there is a big difference between skipping a COUPLE of grades (which would mean a child who is a 16yo college freshman) versus skipping 4-8 grades, which is what the Harding family seems to be suggesting is a desirable and attainable thing for any dedicated family if they just homeschool with the right mindset and materials.

Frankly, while there are homeschooling curricula that I'd call "solid" for K-8, most of the prepackaged ones are downright deplorable for science and math at the secondary level. I was not a fan of Calvert for science/math, and didn't think it was anything all that special for literacy, either. This is the curriculum that our charter school used when my DD was in 3rd-5th grade. I did not personally feel that it was all that great, and I looked at Abeka and found it highly deficient (in my opinion).

No better than public school curricula for the masses, basically.

Eclectic/WTM materials are another matter.

I guess the other thing is the notion of year-round homeschool, which many families do pursue. That generally results in about a 2y acceleration automatically if you do it for 10 years.

But it doesn't result in 3-4y accelerations unless you are pacing things faster or skimming topics.

Statistically, though, how unusual are HG children? Rare, right? So "many" is a specious term to be using there, and I am suspicious that this is about marketing, not reality, and is setting up kids who are bright/MG to be labeled failures because that kind of system doesn't "work" to produce the desired 12yo matriculations with that more plentiful cohort.



My horrified question there (being familiar with both, as noted)-- is WHY?? WHY would a parent do that?? If the child is advanced enough that a 2X rate is 'appropriate' and that college-level material is necessary at age 10-12...

then WHY would you keep your child locked into that type of lackluster curriculum for those first 7 years to begin with?? Wouldn't you seek out something more suitable for their learning needs?

Holey moley, I do not understand that one. That curriculum-- alone, without side trips, etc-- is seriously not suited to gifted learning needs without a heckuva lot of differentiation and enrichment, and even then it is not a comfortable fit by any means. We should know-- we've been doing it for years.

In that case, I am still left scratching my head at the willingness to send the child to COLLEGE, but not to provide more meaningful preparation at the primary and secondary levels. It's like treating K-12 as a sprint or something. I don't get it-- for a MG child or for a PG one.

I'm horrified that a parent would push children to adulthood to "maximize lifetime earnings" for that child. If true, that is seriously among the very worst arguments I have ever heard for acceleration of a child. WOW.

A lot of people pay good money for their kids to go to private schools and use Abeka. My sister has a teachers degree and she's homeschooling my nephew with Abeka. I'm looking at wtm writing, aops, moems, those books Val said, etc... but a lot of people consider Abeka rigorous and private schools use it. I think Abekas strength is that it does a lot of memory work in the early grades. I think working memory is one thing the forums say is very plastic, and excercising it might make you a better student. I'm actually considering (learning and) introducing my kid to sports on tv and the internet so he can start learning players as memory work. I don't plan to use Bible, but I think memorizing might be good skills training (education) anyway.

I'm saying the program they're selling is target to mg/hg consumers because eg/pg parents would think there's more to education than getting a good job from it. Security and a job you enjoy is actually kind of a fine goal. What's making you squeamish about it is that it seems to suggest childhood is just "preparing for your real life to start." That's kind of a one-dimensional view of it. The kids probably do normal kid stuff every day and they work on making their future. They probably think they still have a life while it's happening.

I don't want to sound like I'm arguing in favor of the program. It doesn't look like something I want to buy. I'm afraid my post sounds like it, and I'm reminded again why sometimes people have called me a contrarian. Really, I just see the pros and cons of so many plans that I just don't think I should subscribe to.

Yeah, I guess I just see this as a pretty binary thing.

Just because you CAN doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

My basic assumption is that acceleration in the formal sense-- that is, a child entering an external setting one or more years prior to chronological age would ordinarily indicate--

is always a means of more-or-less last resort, and seldom something that should be done in the absence of other accommodations for learning rate/ability. I'm relying upon what I've read here (and seen in the TV clip) that indicates that this was boxed curriculum used as directed/intended, and without extensions/differentiation.

Ergo, if a child CAN be accelerated several years like that, they they SHOULD be accommodated by reaching deeper than standard curriculum goes, and broader as well. Not "instead of" but as a set of first line intervention strategies. If that isn't sufficient, then you start looking at acceleration or other alternatives.

The reason is that there are real and long-lasting consequences for being socially and chronologically that out of step with 99% of the other people you will ever encounter in your life. KWIM? It leaves you with gaps in shared experience when your high school years don't include driving, dating, or even puberty. Those things matter in terms of relating to others socially.

So you don't do that without the alternative being more or less "bad for the child."

I also know from many years of experience that kids who are actually capable of this kind of acceleration deeply deserve a better fit than curriculum that was written with average learners in mind. Faster pace doesn't make the material better all by itself.


I'm not against acceleration. But I do think that kids who need acceleration need other types of interventions, too. Kids who don't need acceleration, (I'm reluctant to say this because I know that it sounds elitist/harsh,) I truly think it's better for most of those kids NOT to accelerate them.


I guess part of my objection is that this seems to play to EXACTLY the very worst impulses that I see in the hyper-competitive parents we run into locally. The ones with MG kids who are determined to "discipline" them into PG status. Arms race. Tiger Parenting. Whatever you want to call it. Those parents are perfectly okay rationalizing 16 hour days out of their middleschoolers under the auspices of "instilling a good work ethic," even if I personally think that is abusive.

See, these are parents that actually are REALLY THINKING the wry things that JonLaw posts which make me laugh so hard. They really believe that they are preparing their kids to compete for scarce resources when the Zombie Apocalypse happens-- or at least to save themselves from a fate even worse... mediocrity. I don't laugh when I hear local parents say them, though-- because they mean them. They sincerely believe that if they groom their kids well enough, they can guarantee Harvard admission and the Busby Berkeley musical number that is your entire life afterwards, I guess. But it's Hard, Very Hard Work to get into get your child into Harvard. Oh, the shame if it were only Stanford or Brown or Princeton...

This produces a "hurried" child. It's one thing if the child is the one in a hurry-- many, many HG+ children are like that. For all I know, this is the case in the Harding clan.

It's very different if it's mom and dad working that magic ON a compliant son or daughter, though, and that's where I object to the statements that Mr. Harding made on television. Not only can "any family" not do this-- more to the point, most of them SHOULD not. But there is a terrified group of parents who are worried that their kids are not going to be "competitive" enough... who may be tempted to try.