ADHD is not at all well accommodated in public schools. I could never finish most homework as a child, because it was too boring and repetitive(I got it in 1-2 repetitions, but they made us do 20). My ADHD was severe, but I still got put in G&T classes because of my IQ tests, but that didn’t help much. GT classes were an hour or two in a different classroom doing silly “creative” projects, but then it was right back to normal classes where we were in the same room as students that had to sound out words in their paragraph of the class reading in the same amount of time many of us had read ahead a dozen pages. I never completed most homework and had poor grades putting me almost in the bottom half of my class. Everything changed when I got to AP and other advanced classes. They were more interesting and I easily rose to the top of them while nearly failing the boring standard classes. If it weren’t for AP classes followed by more interesting college classes I’d be a janitor or something. Us neurodivergent smart folks can be absolutely crippled by being stuck in boring regular classes. Having a mental difference/disability makes us hard to understand and accommodate. We can be both special needs and gifted/talented at the same time.

The instructional approaches I mentioned in the parent comment are not based on pointless 'busywork'. In fact, quick feedback to the pupil is considered an essential feature, which helps cope with the all-too-easily distracted "monkey mind" that's typically associated with ADHD.

> deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.

These things come after one has the basics down pat. Modern "Progressive" education rejects this point altogether. It's whole approach is entirely founded on putting the cart before the horse.

> Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span

Attention span is a function of engagement. As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students for whom other drivers of high effort mighy be not nearly as effective, as you hint at.

> Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?

Singapore/Hong Kong/Japan/Taiwan/Macau dominating the PISA

I'm just saying that when the institutional schooling system seems to "spend money on the disadvantaged" it's merely pretending to help the disadvantaged and marginalized, while actively rejecting the approaches that, at least as judged by readily available evidence, would likely help these students the most, and probably close at least some of the gap in outcomes.

Not exactly the same, but Basil II of eastern Rome had his enemy soldiers blinded after a decisive victory and sent back to Bulgaria to be a burden.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion

Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests.

However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.

The equality of outcome can take many forms.

Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.

Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.

China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.

I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.

No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used.

> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class.

The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room.

Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.

> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.

USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.

You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake, especially considering that those kids could become """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try. Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged households will ironically probably do more towards improving the number of high achievers than allocating too many resources to the children of the rich, which is what we're doing now.

These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.

> The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself

The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior?

As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?

A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.

> invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?

So you would rather have the cleaning lady, the garbage collector, the truck driver,... not got proper read/write/calculate/economics... education and increase their chances of ending on the side where they fall for addiction instead?

No, I'm talking about regular kids who grow up in hard circumstances that just need an opportunity for a better life.

This can mean a jump from working class to middle class and nothing more. That is absolutely driving society forward.

Not offering a means out of "the shit" for these kids is a way to hold them down into the circumstances they were born into and nothing more.

Zero kids I'm thinking of who went through these programs went to Yale or any other ivy. Most have great lives 20 years later, off the backs of that early opportunity for achievement.

I'm not. All I want is that students get trained rigorously. The last thing I want is as what NYT used to report: a straight-A student who dreamed to be a scientist couldn't even pass the placement test of a city college. That shows how irresponsible our school systems became.

Generally I agree with you.

The part where I disagree is the 'why' and the 'who'. There are a number of very strong forces (aka lobbying groups, aka decisions like 'no child left behind') doing their best to destroy the public school system. By making this conversation about gifted vs not gifted, we are again distracted and pitted against ourselves.

Public schools should be well funded and funded in an egalitarian manner that doesn't replicate residential aggregation of race or money. It should be funded for kids who need remedial help, help appropriate for their age, and help because they're advanced. It should be funded so that people who move from one group to the next, and you can and do move from one group to another, are supported

IMO the goal of the lobbying and shit policy is to make private school the default option for those who can afford it and those who can barely afford it. Public school will be left to the masses, and will be defunded leaving a populous more easily controlled, with less social mobility.

> I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.

You know by the way people (Gary Tan, etc) talk about it the only students that matter are the first generation Asian kids who didn’t grow up rich. As another first generation Asian kid that didn’t grow up rich but had the privilege of educated parents but didn’t achieve anything that you’d consider “moving society forward” what should happen to everyone else?

I believe most successful people have high IQ. Perhaps not as high as 140, but probably more than people in general realize. That Gates have 140 does not surprise me at all.

There are so many confounding factors are at play that you're ignoring and attributing the achievement to high IQ (and that only).

The Guinea Worm is on the verge if eradication, mostly on the back of the multi-decade efforts of Jimmy Carter. I don't what his IQ is, but I'll assume it's below 140 and above whatever is the ballpark minimum required to enroll as a Navy Nuke.

I posit that you don't need to be a genius to eradicate a disease, just drive, a platform and the right resources and/or connections

This would imply a greater focus must be made to ensure they have a chance at success yes?

I'm exceedingly skeptical that there's a low bar for "moving society forward" if the bar is "being in a gifted and talented program or equivalent". But if society is made up of a small set of overmen burdened by pulling the undermen across the finish line I absolutely would be an underman.

Why is it unfathomable?

The romantic notion that geniuses need an institution to coddle them and that by the grace of some government or non-profit organization then are humans capable of higher order thinking. The institutions are the tools for getting larger investments to allow for smart people to do their great work, not to create the people through education. Education systems today are fundamentally broken and reinforce feedback loops of poverty and dependency. It’s a prisoners dilemma. Case in point TAG programs are gamed often by wealthier families which makes the selection process incredibly unscientific and useless.