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giftedness doesn't exist https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1389457676548014080
here's what giftedness is: it is only this and not anything else.
The schools are overcrowded warehouses and it's known that there are not enough resources to teach everyone. So 2/3 of all the kids have to be triaged and educationally abandoned. Thrown over the gunwales.
The schools are overcrowded warehouses and it's known that there are not enough resources to teach everyone. So 2/3 of all the kids have to be triaged and educationally abandoned. Thrown over the gunwales.
and this has to be done early, because any further contact with the detritus-to-be will only hurt the chances of the chosen. so anyone who tests well when they're nine gets a shot.
That correlates with nothing except cultural familiarity with arbitrary academic folderol.
That correlates with nothing except cultural familiarity with arbitrary academic folderol.
In a country where that familiarity is distributed on financial and racial axes, surprise! gifted means - overwhelmingly - white and upper middle class with professional parents with time to spend with their kids.
"gifted" just means a racist capitalist society put you in the lifeboat.
I know; I was one.
I know; I was one.
such a happy "accident" that giftedness correlates 1:1 with the goals of white flight. that your chance of being gifted is overwhelmingly affected by the local property tax assessment.
Tracking probably does "work", in that everyone who didn't get on the academic, gifted track was left to fend for themselves on an ice floe. In other words, it's a perfectly, viciously self-fulfilling prophecy.
The idea my fragile genius wouldn't have been nurtred properly if I hadn't been tracked from grad school is vomitous. The whole practice is so facially unjust that it should be rejected by reflex, and anybody who suggests it should be instantly shouted down.
Oh, I got plenty of calc in high school, by the way. I hated it, hated the way it was taught, and to this day I'm phobic about math. So, good job, you jackasses.
The whole enterprise is designed to psychologically damage anyone who goes through it. You can't but internalize the idea that there's nowhere to go but down; any mistake is evidence of lack of this nebulous "giftedness", an inherent quality without which one faces a shit life.
Because it's true: there's nowhere to go but down. The gifted kid is surrounded by the reserve army of the lumpen ungifted, kids who already lost their futures (so we're told). What separates us? Talent, intelligence, aptitude. Words with no meaning. An infernal mystery.
Of course they shouldn't eliminate subjects. There should be more subjects and the assumption should be more kids can go further. Because they can. The reality is intelligence - to the extent that has any meaning - is widely distributed.
We get the idea that it's rare from the stratified school system itself. It produces the scarcity, not by elevating the best but by destroying most. It's vile. Kids should not start out life by being made to clamber up a pyramid of skulls.
this whole dynamic, track or untrack, is driven by a school system so savagely underfunded that there's only enough money and time to invent ideologies to justify our cruelty to our own children.
(historically, "gifted" education is nothing but a clawback aimed squarely at the mainstreaming of kids with learning disabilities and at racial integration. 'How dare they spend resources on the unteachable and undeserving and make my child rub elbows with them!")
(If you want to know where it came from and why then, that's the whole story, and the rhetoric around it was quite a bit more robust and honest in the 70s than it is now. It paced and was driven by mainstreaming and busing.)
("gifted" education is as nasty historically as it is ideologically.)
