Government Guts Gifted Kids

ALL YOU NEED to say about government education is: Why? When the working class of the nineteenth century were crowding around the school house door, when 90 percent of children were literate and 90 percent of them went to school, why did government have to take over?

And why do liberals, who so famously celebrate diversity, want one size fits all when it comes to the education of our children?

One thing they want is to keep gifted children back. They want to mainstream everyone’s kids so that nobody gets left behind—or gets too far ahead. Even President Bush has signed onto this pernicious notion.

Some people have been trying to do something about this. Thomas Sowell marks the death of a longtime champion of special education for gifted kids, Professor Julian Stanley of Johns Hopkins University.

Stanley ran a bunch of programs for gifted kids at Johns Hopkins.

He created special programs for unusually bright high school students on weekends and during the summer at Johns Hopkins University. The success of these programs has inspired similar programs at Purdue University and elsewhere.
Such programs have not only produced academic benefits, the gifted students in such programs have expressed an almost pathetic gratitude for finally being in a setting where they are comfortable with their peers and are viewed positively by their teachers.
In regular public school classrooms, these gifted students have been too often resented by their classmates and their teachers alike. Some teachers have seemed glad to be able to catch them in occasional mistakes.

Yes. You can understand why many public school teachers wouldn’t be too fond of having bright kids around. Students in graduate colleges of education usually come from the less able students in undergrad school.

But the question is, why is the government in this business in the first place? Can’t we trust parents to know what is best for their children?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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