Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Are Gifted Classes Useful or Harmful? (NYT debate)

Having gone through Scarsdale/Edgemont school system as a child myself for 8 years - ugh, I would never send my kids to a school system like that one. DH grew up in a town with similar "prestige" and we both have very bitter tastes of having grown up in towns with uber-crazy tiger parents and "top notch" schools. Maybe it has toned down since I left but I told myself I will never raise my children in an environment like that, no matter how "good" the schools are.

It may have been "challenging" but what a toxic emotional environment - full of kids stressed out to meet the pressures, rampant cheating (my mother knew of a mother who hired an architect to do the model project for a sixth grader, and when the teacher failed the student for obvious cheating, she went to yell at the teacher and that is just one of many examples I can think of) and cut-throat competition to the extreme. I doubt that is any better for a sensitive gifted child who really wants to learn.

Thanks for sharing your past experience notnafnaf, I agree a cutthroat environment is certainly no better for a sensitive gifted child. If that's the environment they have there today, I doubt that it is a healthy environment for any child. It's not the type of challenge I had in mind.