Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

I am sure evidence is not needed in this forum, but I will provide some anyway: http://www.newsweek.com/america-hates-its-gifted-kids-226327

The article's comments are worth reading, too.

Fact is: I think most teachers would be relieved if my proposed amendment were ratified into law.

It is an easy concept to grasp: Every American citizen is entitled to 13 years of free public education beginning on their 5th birthday and ending on their 19th birthday. Ready.Set.Go! If you can earn three university master degrees before your 19th birthday, We The People will pay all of your tuition for you.

If you want to create an incentive to learn and to excel, there it is. Make it better if you can.

Steven A. Sylwester

There's no idea so good that people won't ruin it.

A) Low-SES families will pile on the pressure for their kids to complete at least a bachelor's by then, because there aren't any other good options for them. This gets the low-SES kids into the Tiger Cub game, only without the necessary support structure.

B) Higher-SES families will pile on even more pressure for their kids, regardless of their ability levels, because the new status symbol would be "how many years of school did YOU complete before you were 19?"

Dude,

My proposed amendment includes this language:

3) Students whose academic skills competency and knowledge proficiency are measured in the aggregate minimally either two years below or two years above age-appropriate-grade-level shall be designated as Special Education students and shall receive educational funding at twice the normal rate (competency and proficiency testing shall be done when requested by a teacher, parent, or student).

* * *

The notion of "gifted" is something different than "accomplished" or "piled on" or "pressured." A child can accomplish a lot through relentless determined effort and endless practice, but I am not someone who would ever say that genius can be manufactured, no matter how much will power is put to the effort by the child or a parent.

In other words, though both Mozart and Beethoven were certainly victimized by their fathers' ambitions for them, I contend that both of them certainly had superior natural gifts that were truly extraordinary. The ambitious fathers might have been key in unlocking the musical genius, but the genius was fully there nonetheless and anyway.

Understand this: anyone involved in sports would not be interested in taking advantage of my proposed amendment, and that is a whole lot of people.

Steven A. Sylwester

Confusion: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...y-identified-gifted-in-the-united-states

Clarity: http://cambridgeadvanced.org/wp-content/pdfs/rs-article-dec-2011.pdf

Steven A. Sylwester

Right, so tiger parents have to push their kids into being two years ahead. That's what you'll get. The bottom line is that you can set the barriers to entry as high as you like, tiger parents will still try to either push their kids over them, tunnel under them, or knock a hole through them.

Not sure what "knowledge proficiency" is, though.


Oh, that's an easy one. School districts already have certain age requirements around competitive sports anyway, so it wouldn't be a far stretch to allow 13yo high schoolers to go to the middle school for sports after school. And tiger parents are just the ones to petition/pressure the school districts to make those changes.

They'd even have some parents of legitimate gifties on board, because I wouldn't want my child to have to choose between athletics and an education. She enjoys both, and I think it's important that she be both healthy and well-educated.

Certain universities would also throw their weight behind this. Stanford comes immediately to mind.

Dude,

You use "tiger parents" as your frequent basic argument against change. So I ask: "tiger parents" compared to what? By your definition, what defines the parents that are the ideal parents?

Again back to Mozart and Beethoven. How much does the world of music owe to the ferocious tigers that were the fathers of Mozart and Beethoven? Left to their own devices and to the influences of their childhood playground peers, what would have been the outcomes for Mozart and Beethoven? Would we even know the names of Mozart and Beethoven today if their fathers had not been such beasts in the raising of their sons?

I am not endorsing child abuse, but I am also not condemning a willingness to unlock the potentials of genius if the genius is shackled and chained by society's conventions. I hate school, but school is something we are stuck with. Concluding that, I ask myself: What can be done with what we have to give the greatest opportunity possible to our most gifted young people?

If you ever find time to read my "NASA Academy of the Physical Sciences" proposal, you will find this key measuring stick:
http://nasa-academy-of-the-physical-sciences.blogspot.com/
QUOTE: "NAPS will put an enormous academic and emotional strain on its NASA Scholars, especially during the junior year. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that each and every scholar can relate in a genuine supportive way with his/her classmate scholars especially, but also with scholars from the other two grade levels and with the “high school” teachers. Because emotional maturity is not always on a par with intellectual maturity, gifted adolescents in the transition to adulthood need friends who can understand them. Gifted adolescents are adolescents at risk who are sometimes very vulnerable to social challenges, and they tend to know this about themselves. But, in usual settings, they are alone with their fears. NAPS academies will have the opportunity to create a safe haven in which truly extraordinary young people can experience what it feels like to be ordinary, at least during the while when they are among peer classmates; the importance of this cannot be overstated: a NAPS site will either succeed or fail in its primary purpose by whether or not it can succeed in making its scholars feel ordinary."

* * *

The same applies here: if what I have proposed does not succeed in allowing the exceptionally gifted young person to feel ordinary in an academic setting, then I have failed to achieve my primary goal. If you read the "Santiago's Brain" article that I linked at my previous post ("Clarity" at #186926), this quote should have startled you:
"There are an estimated 72,000 exceptionally gifted kids between the ages of five and 18 in the United States, and almost all attend public schools. What those schools offer — skipping a grade or two, or circumscribed "enrichment programs" — are useless to them. The American educational system is predicated on a conviction that age-peer socialization is developmentally indispensable, radical acceleration is destructive, and tedium is benign. No federal legislation mandates programs for gifted students. Only six states both require and fully fund gifted education programs, and none of those programs focus on the exceptionally gifted. It is practically impossible for an exceptionally gifted American kid to find a public program that will take him or her from elementary school to college. The number of public K-12 schools for exceptionally gifted kids in the United States is one. Based in Nevada, it was founded in 2006." (Santiago's Brain by Jeff Tietz, ROLLING STONE, December 8, 2011, page 81)

The people I care about are the "estimated 72,000 exceptionally gifted kids between the ages of five and 18 in the United States," especially those who are attending public schools. If their parents are "tiger parents" who are desperately trying to advocate for their children in a stifling atmosphere that does not welcome their tiger-like involvement, then I say: "God bless them!"

Dude, the joke in our home was that whenever I telephoned my daughters' public high school a "Red Alert" was immediately issued from the school office that immediately resulted in everybody being unavailable to take my call. But guess what? I have two children, and both of them earned full-ride academic merit scholarships to the public university of their choice. They got free tuition to a U.S. public university because they earned it; they worked hard throughout high school and thereby earned a free ride through a university. Yes, it can be done.

But know this: my oldest daughter took her first on-campus university course when she was 11 years old, and my youngest daughter — a National Merit Scholar — finished high school with 100 credits already earned on her university transcript.

What is telling is this:
http://school-usa-proposal.blogspot.com/2011/06/regarding-tia.html
When I personally gave Tia Holliday a copy of that letter of recommendation, she humbly thanked me for the letter and then very sincerely thanked me for something else, and that was for demonstrating to her how important it was for her to start advocating for her own children's needs at their public schools, that the teachers — her professional colleagues — could not be depended on to always do their best without the clear knowledge that a "tiger parent" was watching from the sidelines.

Excellence is a challenge for everyone concerned: for the student, but also for the parent, and for the teacher, too. Everyone has their role to play, and not one role is easier than another in the final analysis. One lazy uncaring person can easily kaput the efforts of everyone else. You can maybe rightly question the tactics of a "tiger parent," but never question their good intent.

Steven A. Sylwester

Dude,

"Knowledge proficiency" is a placement measure used by universities to correctly place a student within a course of study's defined prerequisite stream.

For example, my children attended a Japanese language immersion school, my oldest entered the school in 2nd grade and my youngest entered in kindergarten. A foreign language immersion school teaches its language in a remarkably different way than does a university. The university stresses the rules of grammar in a very objective and removed way, while the immersion school teaches the same in a way that stresses the intuitive knowing of the language much, much more than the academic knowing. So my daughters knew Japanese through language immersion in Japanese, but then had to be placed in the university prerequisite stream at a place where they could succeed without being bored and without being expected to know grammar structures that they had never learned in a strictly academic way. Such placements were awkward and not entirely correct because they were necessarily conservative, but they had to be done to make the leap from one setting to another. So at 11 years old, my oldest took Second Year Japanese at the university during Summer Term, that is: an entire three-term (one year) sequence in one term. My youngest took two terms of Fourth Year Japanese at the university at the beginning of her freshman year in high school.

Steven A. Sylwester

I define a tiger parent as one who pushes their child to the point of exhaustion, psychological abuse, and an inability to function independently. It also contributes to the development of sociopathic behaviors, as the child learns to value ends over means, and that cheating is a perfectly acceptable method of accomplishing your objectives, because everyone else is doing it, too.

The opposite would be neglect, so obviously that's not ideal.

The ideal is a parent who pushes their child right up to the edge of their abilities and interests, a parent who has a realistic recognition of their child's strengths and weaknesses, sets appropriate expectations and boundaries, and who pushes while also balancing achievement goals with the vital needs children have for socialization, free play, exercise, and rest.


I'm not familiar enough with their personal histories to comment either way. Of course, we only know anything at all about how their fathers treated them because they achieved greatness. We never heard about any of their peers who were pushed just as hard or harder by their parents, failed, and self-destructed.

I could also bring up some of history's greats who weren't relentlessly driven by their parents, like Alexander the Great. Anecdotal evidence, though.


Advocating for your child's genuine needs isn't tiger parenting; it's parenting. Advocating for more than your child can reasonably handle is tiger parenting.

It's probably true-- but--

has anyone else noticed that as Testing-Frenzy (tm) has taken hold in K through 12, college is rapidly becoming the new high school?

I mean, for many people, the federal government is already funding some 13-14 years of education anyway.

Why NOT cram more genuine worth into that time frame?

Would it also not-- just possibly-- reverse some of the endless watering down of content into fluff?


I wonder.

It's an interesting pair of juxtaposed ideas, anyway.

My own definition of TigerParenting fully encompasses what was apparently done to WA and his sister at the hands of the senior Herr Leopold, incidentally.

As for musical prodigy, it might well be a better notion to tease apart the stories of a Felix Mendelssohn or an Eric Korngold to differentiate between parenting strategies that result in "realized potential through respectful encouragement and nurturing" versus-- er-- well, "using the child like a rented mule."

It's quite clear that the Mozart family in particular wasn't averse to delving into the latter realm, and with a 'd*mn the torpedoes' outlook on life balance and mental health. Greatness? Absolutely. However-- not a parenting model that would make many loving parents proud, by any means.