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From: ins_avrd@jhunix.UUCP (Victoria Rosly D'ull)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Universities, and high school education
Message-ID: <2220@jhunix.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Mar-86 18:00:40 EST
Article-I.D.: jhunix.2220
Posted: Fri Mar 14 18:00:40 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Mar-86 01:18:44 EST
References: <162@pyuxc.UUCP> <588@hoptoad.uucp> <1119@burl.UUCP> <14792@onfcanim.UUCP>
Organization: Johns Hopkins Univ. Computing Ctr.
Lines: 102

(Linda writes:)
> >I cannot help but think that 14 years is a long time to wait for your
> >intellectual peers, and that some very good minds are being wasted
> >because university is not challenging enough for them.  The notion that
> >``college is a minimum requirement in a field that will afford a 
> >middle-class income'' is the problem.
(Dave Martindale responds)
> 
> She goes on to argue that an environment that trains the middle class is
> not a good environment to stimulate those interested in and capable of
> original work.
> 
> So maybe people should get to university sooner?

	Some people do.  I dropped out of high school after two deadly dull
years of getting B's and A's without doing *any* work or learning very much
at all.  I had two distinct kinds of teachers; ones who thought I was brilliant
and let me go to the library and read, and ones who thought I was bratty and
yelled at me for staring out the window.  Johns Hopkins, which had a program
(now more or less defunct, I think, since the professor who ran it retired)
for testing gifted children, accepted me as an ordinary freshman when I was 
fourteen.  I still go to the library and read a lot, and I'm getting mostly
B's nowadays, but here I am LEARNING.
	Hopkins is full of former child prodigies, and a lot of my friends
say they wish they had started college sooner.  However, I don't know a soul
who finds Hopkins' curriculum "unchallenging"; this seems to be more related
to individual boredom/burnout on education and acquiring knowledge than with
the subject matter or teaching.    
> 
> Curtis Jackson writes:
> 
> >Except for the last semester (25 semester hours of
> >all nasty stuff) I managed to work 20-30 hours per week, do a LOT of
> >partying, and GROW UP A LOT!!!
> >
> >I cannot begin to stress the latter, I don't think there are *many* people
> >who can do heavy-duty work before about age 20 and not miss some of the
> >finer points in life; often they end up severely depressed individuals
> >by the time they are 30.
> 
> Well, I think he's probably right.  Getting to university early isn't
> often a good thing.  So, given that every one has to put in their time
> in high school..........
	
	Not always!  High school was BAD for me in a lot of ways that
university has been GOOD.  I had almost no friends at all in my grade in
high school; I was too bright, too shy, and too all-around weird to be
very acceptable.  Most of my friendships were based around extracurricular
activities, namely horses and Dungeons & Dragons, and quite unrelated to
school.  At the university level, I've found plenty of people who are 
perfectly comfortable with my intellect and various quirks of personality;
though I'm one of the youngest people I know here.

	It's true that this mine may be very likely an unusual case, but
it's important that these cases be assessed on an INDIVIDUAL level.  It's 
not always practical to change the system (I remember a lot of embarassing
elementary-school experiences when my parents tried to do that thing), but
sometimes it can be perfectly well worked around.

> 
> So, if I ever have children, and if they are "bright", how do I prevent the
> same thing from happening to them?  Send them to a private school, assuming
> that it can be afforded?  What happens to bright kids who don't have
> at-least-middle-class parents, so private schools are an impossibility?

         Sometimes, alas, private schools can be even worse.  The educational
levels may be a bit higher, but so is the pressure to conform.  A kid who
really stands out intellectually in a group of age-peers in one school will
very likely do so as well in any other, right up to university level.  However,
many private schools do at least have better learning facilities, such as
libraries, labs, and teacher time.  Most private schools, even on the elementary
level, do provide scholarships on a need basis for very intelligent children.


>  
> Or perhaps spend as much time as I can with them, trying to provide
> stimulation, and trying to convince them that being intelligent is a good
> thing in the long run, even if it seems to be a handicap sometimes at the
> moment? This seems more like wishful thinking than a practical alternative.
> 
	Yes, very likely this is wishful thinking.  My parents went out
of their way to raise genius children; today my brother (the "bright one"
in the family) has failed out of one college and dropped out of a second.
He's nineteen years old, gifted with pretty considerable brains and mechanical
aptitude (he built a stumpily elegant little robot for an eighth-grade science 
fair), and is now hammering walls together in a recording studio in New York for
minimum wage.  My parents have given up on him.  
	The case isn't hopeless, though -- intelligence can be pretty addictive
to a child, so long as it's neither thrust out or denied.  The world at large
is a pretty stimulating thing for a kid to learn in --  you can encourage that.
Books are great for kids; so are electronics sets, computers, even newspapers
and watercolor boxes and broken radios to take apart.  If your child is bright,
let that be discovered for itself -- it's one hell of a lot more interesting
to be smart than to be dumb, anyway.

					  tra-la!   
					     Vicka d'Ull
					     Johns Hopkins University
					     Psychology Department

"Dum, dum, dum, da dum, dum, dum ---"
"It's not dum, YOU'RE dumb!  You're supposed to sing Tra-La!"