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The Wrong Gifts

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Clarissa

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Is everybody sufficiently caught up in how this game is played or do I need to explain?

Instead of developing your gifted kids who will expect a decent compensation for their work when they grow up, who will be mouthy, opinionated, and know words like “democracy, human rights, freedom, and constitution,” it’s easier to use gifted kids from somewhere else where people are more obedient and grateful for whatever they are given.

Inventing “anti-racism” was truly a stroke of genius on the part of the adepts of Milton Friedman. Turns out Americans will adopt every austerity measure in existence if you tell them it’s “anti-racist.”

4 responses to “The Wrong Gifts”

  1. Just George Avatar
    Just George

    If this is countered by teaching gifted students the need (and imo obligation) to undertake life long autodidactic study, it may lead to the opposite result intended.

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    1. el Avatar
      el

      // If this is countered by teaching gifted students the need (and imo obligation) to undertake life long autodidactic study, it may lead to the opposite result intended.

      It will be countered by teaching parents of those students the need to take their kids out of public school system. Richest whites and not richest Asian parents will do so first. If public schools worsen for everybody as a result, others may follow.

      The article talks of the ‘purple unicorn’ of differentiation (differentiated learning), meaning teachers needing to know how to teach students of various abilities in one classroom. Naturally, it is completely impossible with high school math, physics, chemistry. Either students are being prepared to take high level exams or not.

      Of course, elementary school may be different. Yet, as somebody who studied in ‘gifted’ programs both in elementary school in Ukraine and in Israeli high school,I can tell that the only benefit – albeit one of utmost significance – of those programs was studying with students more like myself than would’ve been otherwise. Those students took studying seriously, didn’t have discipline problems, quite a few were more intellectual than in a usual class. I felt ‘among my own people’ and feel worried that with destruction of those programs many students would miss those social benefits, even if for most of them it wouldn’t negatively impact their future careers imo.

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      1. Just George Avatar
        Just George

        Respectfully, I would have been in those classes myself had anyone offered them. In university, I was surrounded by so-called gifted, and those who went to private schools.

        In my observation and experience, the so-called gifted generally do better at everything they do no matter what it is, so long as they have at least some discipline, plus don’t get caught up in destructive behaviours like drug use, plus learn how to make their own decisions and seek out their own desires. I mention the latter because in my observation many quite gifted Indian and Asian people in particular have their lives destroyed by parents who stifle and make decisions for them.

        In regards to private school students, I personally couldn’t tell much of a difference between them and public school students except that they were disproportionately represented in the course, which in my opinion occurred because their teachers tended to be on the boards that wrote exams, meaning that private school students were really being prepared to get a high mark, not to be a high achiever.

        In my opinion, nothing can be said against what you said about pulling children out of US public schools that seem like Marxist brain destroying factories to me. Still I maintain that the most important thing to do, above which school they go to supposing the school provides a minimum standard, is teach your child how to teach themselves from a young age – which really just means show them how to find, assess, categorise, and act on information independently.

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  2. Izgad Avatar
    Izgad

    To be fair to Milton Friedman, he certainly did support the existence of gifted and talented programs. See 10:40 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUgvtO9WATY. His argument here is that there is no difference between people who are talented musicians because of their families and people who are rich because of their inherited wealth.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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