It does not equate anything. It describes the correlation and steps to not waste huge talents. In fact it does say they do not know exactly why some highly intelligent people do not achieve much.
It is surprisingly easy to waste talent. For example, get a gifted person through standard school and they will likely never extend enough to achieve full potential, often by growing lazy and coasting. Or push them into a wrong field, they will do good but not exceptional.
See, if your niece was challenged enough, she would probably place more value on achievement and thus achieve more. It is a positive feedback loop. The correct approach is to give them as much challenge as they can take. Evaluating where this point is takes some major interpersonal skills and experience.
Emotional support is a necessary ingredient as well so that failures do not break them and they remain human.
IMO the whole idea of "potential" that can be "wasted" is toxic. As soon as you feel yourself falling behind -- which you always will -- that idea that you've wasted your potential shows up to make you feel bad.
This inevitably drives people toward easier kinds of achievement like awards, promotions, and degrees. But a lot of real progress happens outside systems like this! I think it's valuable to have smart people working on stuff for its own sake, not chasing any kind of achievement.
It depends on where the pressure is places. If the pressure is placed on kids, sure. If it's placed on schools, that's not toxic. The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast.
The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart. There were plenty of smart kids I knew -- some smarter than me -- who got horrible grades going through one of these school. Many of them did not, in any real sense, succeed.
Imagine being placed in a room, today, and forced to listen to lectures on what you already know, and be given menial make-work tasks, like adding big numbers and copying letters, and doing that for hours each day. Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.
> Some people are resilient enough to survive that. Others get pretty broken by it.
And the third kind (full disclosure: I was of this kind) get very rebellious and were multiple times in strong danger of being expelled from school (not because of bad marks). I still hated school and love to ask the inconvenient question: Who is the more evil person: The kid who does a school rampage or the politician whose decision not to drop lawcompulsory school attendance (in Germany for example home schooling is disallowed) leads to suicides of schoolchildren. Both people clearly leave traces of dead people.
Reminds me of the dialogue is Yes, Prime Minister:
- Education in this country is a disaster. We're supposed to prepare children for work.
Most of the time they're bored stiff.
- I should've thought that being bored stiff was an excellent preparation for work.
- The school leaving age was raised to 16, but they're learning less.
- We didn't raise it so they'd learn more! We raised it to keep teenagers off the job market
and hold down unemployment figures.
OTOH, would allowing home schooling really solve suicides by schoolchildren? Seems like if a parent is worried enough about their kid's mental health to home school them, they'd do so even if they have to move country (especially nowadays, when you can live and work in different EU countries easily). Isn't it more a matter of the adults around not perceiving the problem?
The dialogue is the unspoken truth. The age limit was actually instated to prevent kids from working damaging factory or repetitive jobs. There are much fewer of those nowadays.
Curious to how a school wold work on not wasting talent without putting pressure the talented kid.
"Oh, we have prepared a special curriculum for you because you are gifted and hired these teacher to give you room to fulfill your potential and not waste it. No pressure though, if you want to waste your potential and become medioker, just say the word and we will throw away the investment we have made in you!"
I don't think you have to go so far as big investments in extra teachers and curriculum to serve gifted children. Just get out of the way and let them work ahead, or get their busy-work done fast and read on their own. Don't waste their time, and turn school into a prison that they have to shuffle through for eight hours a day, bored to tears.
"The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast."
If they need something extra, like programs for talented and gifted children, that's an investment. A child that is assigned to a "Program for Talented and Gifted Children" will feel pressure to not let that talent/gift go to waste.
Your solution is to do nothing extra for them, just let them idle away in the library reading random books. Not a guarantee that they wont waste their time/talent by their own doing. While cheap, I don't think it would be very effective.
My argument is that most of the school systems work hard to retard and beat down students that are smarter than the average bear, or cripple their growth by forcing them to do unpaid labor as defacto teacher's aides. It would be nice to provide resources at a higher level, but that higher level material is beyond the capability of most of the people that are employed as teachers anyway, so the best, most economical result is to stop actively getting in the way of students that need to go faster than what the lowest-common-denominator can handle, and just let them.
> Just get out of the way and let them work ahead, or get their busy-work done fast and read on their own.
I would have loved that as a child. The problem was: All the interesting papers/books in the internet were behind paywalls (today we have SciHub and Library Genesis, which are nevertheless still illegal).
Where's your study proving the opposite? Or is your proposal to do absolutely nothing without a study first telling you to? G&T programs try to utilize the diversity of students, rather than just ignoring it or trying to will it away. In a world where things actually have to function prior to the conducting of infinite studies, that makes a lot of intuitive sense.
The programs can be good or a complete waste depending on how they are ran. The study referred to in the article pointed out that children do better in the short and long run if they are given extra opportunities to learn more on their own. That's the entire purpose of these programs to begin with, really. The same way as other Special Education programs which may or may not be well ran, but often do more for the students in them than letting them try and teach themselves.
Achievement cannot really be measured either. Doctorates and patents are used as proxies. You could also add scientific papers, renowned works of art, successful businesses, charities etc.
There's a socio-affective component to 'achieving'. The pupils have to care about the people and about what society think is an achievement. And for this I believe they have to care about said pupils identity (which they might not understand for lack of overlapping common views)
It is surprisingly easy to waste talent. For example, get a gifted person through standard school and they will likely never extend enough to achieve full potential, often by growing lazy and coasting. Or push them into a wrong field, they will do good but not exceptional.
See, if your niece was challenged enough, she would probably place more value on achievement and thus achieve more. It is a positive feedback loop. The correct approach is to give them as much challenge as they can take. Evaluating where this point is takes some major interpersonal skills and experience.
Emotional support is a necessary ingredient as well so that failures do not break them and they remain human.