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pessimizer an hour ago

> As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.

Somehow it is impossible for people to blame the system, but instead they diagnose physical deficits in children based on their inability to adjust to the system.

Maybe the random way we chose to mass educate children a couple hundred years ago isn't perfect, and children are not broken?

bluGill 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Blame the system is only useful if there is a different/changed system that would be better. The current system isn't perfect, but if you can't handle it I'm not aware of any change that would be worth it - there are a lot of changes that would get worse results (sometimes for everyone, sometimes for a different subgroup of people). Remember results is not how well you do in school, it is how well you do in life after school that counts. (economics is only one measure of this, it is important because wealth is a good proxy for a lot of useful things like enough food)

fwip 7 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're not familiar, you might like reading about the social model of disability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability

TL;DR: Disability is not inherent in difference, but rather a combination of the difference and an environment in which that difference is not well-supported. For an analogy - a deep-sea fish is blind, but not disabled by their blindness. Similarly, a kid who "can't sit still" isn't disabled unless we put them in an environment where they have to.