> I suspect there may be some correlation between High IQ, fast thinking, fast learning and suggestibility (meaning insufficient scrutiny of learned information). What if fast learning comes at the expense of scrutiny? What if fast thinking is tested for as a proxy for fast learning?

Precisely. Speaking from experience, in school, every claim that I was supposed to accept and reproduce on an exam or in homework was met with a gut response: "Is this really true? Is so, why? How do you know?". I wanted to verify the information and know the justification for believing it, the reason something was true. What's more, I had trouble with the coherence of the claims being made. The physics we are taught in school, for example, raises very serious metaphysical questions. This produced in me a spirit of rebellion. I felt a certain vague disgust for the way things were taught that frustrated my motivation. In some sense, it didn't feel like truth was being treated seriously. The ceremony of education, with all its trappings, is all that was treated seriously. "Getting the grade", not understanding something was what it was all about. It felt like an acrobatics contest and a game of one-upmanship.

Now, sometimes, the justification for a claim was obvious, at least given certain premises (these are often left tacitly assumed, often implied: the danger), but that's not always or perhaps even usually the case. Even in math, a science that can be done from the armchair, we are given formulas and methods that are supposed to be taken on faith and simply used. Through repetition, we are supposed to become better at identifying situations in which we can apply them. But where do these formulas and methods come from? What do they tell us, and how do we know?

And I emphasize "faith": there is no way the valedictorian has verified everything he or she was taught or knows the justification for them. A "good student" keeps up, and since scrutiny and analysis take time and skill - time no student is given especially as the workload piles up, and skill no student possesses - a faithful student, a student who obediently accepts what he or she is being told. You can imagine that blind faith would produce the "perfect student". (Curiously, we are simultaneously commanded to "question everything" - except questioning everything, of course - but then required not to actually practice that advice.)

Now, you could argue that students are too young to understand the justifications for the claims being made, and in practice, we are always relying on faith in some authority. Few people realize how much faith we rely on in our lives. Society entails a certain epistemic deference, even if merely practical or perfunctory. In practice, it is unrealistic not to rely on faith. Faith has its proper place.

Someone might also say that students could be bracketing the information they are receiving. They may simply be entertaining it as a possibility in good faith and playing with it, until verification becomes possible or necessary. Maybe. But given the intellectual immaturity of students, and the obedience at the top, I suspect there is at least a superficial assent given to what they are taught. Otherwise, school is a game to be played, one that, we are told, is an instrument for climbing the ladder of social status. The content doesn't matter. What matters is that you play by the rules of the game and that you play by them well. When you do that, the kingmakers and status granters will throw you a few golden chips and elevate you in the eyes of society. You will be in.

Sounds cynical. After all, wouldn't an institution that wants to select for wisdom also create barriers? Of course, regardless of how effective they are. But the differences cannot be ignored. The intent and purpose are different, for one. The means of selection are another. Education is bureaucratized. We think that bureaucracy will create a "level playing field", eliminating the biases and favoritism that "personal judgement" is bound to entail. But who designs the bureaucracy? What does it actually select for? And does it not often commit the fallacy of confusing features of the method for features of the real?

We're obsessed with rank, and bureaucratic methods make us obsessively so. We imagine there is a sharper slope and a smaller peak than there really is. There is a slope, to be sure. I am no egalitarian. But come on.

Anyway, for all that rambling, what are some of the morals here?

I suppose my first point is that education ought to be focused on first principles first. It ought to be focused on understanding and truth and learning the competence of being able to get there, as that is the whole point. The trivium and quadrivium of old did this. People think of the Middle Ages as some kind period hostile to education. They think it was like the Prussian-style of education (from which modern education gets a lot of its ideas), oriented toward mindless obedience and unquestioned submission to the state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities were renowned for open discussion and debate, perhaps most famously in the form of the disputation. The Scholastics were famous for intellectual rigor, a rigor that puts to shame the pompous pretensions of the so-called Enlightenment that never missed the opportunity to erect straw men of the Medievals to ridicule.

Second, rewards and penalties are selection mechanisms. We get the behavior we reward and we get less of the kind we punish. Habits are like this, too: indulging a habit of overeating reinforces and magnifies the habit, while restraint has the opposite effect. What does our education system feed? What does it starve? We should ask this question ceaselessly.

My life experience and resulting sentiment is extremely similar to yours.

I feel that the education system is deeply flawed and rewards all the wrong things because we refuse to select based on real factors because of political ideology. I think those that are successful become so despite of it, instead of because of it. When you looks at the biographies or people who truly pushed the enveloppe and changed the world, it becomes evident.

We need to ask if the cost of the education system are really worth the rewards. Considering how large that cost has become nowadays, my premilinary anwser would be no. And I feel that the shift to rent seeking economy as well as reduced innovation and iteration speed is deeply linked to that. Most of the recent growth came from IT, a field that was notorious for be full of dropouts. That should tell you something. Now that the field has been innunduated by college graduate, it has shifted to fully extractive behavior.

Any push back against the system is met with suspition because most people feel they should have a shot at making it big, because they are worth it. In practice, it seems that the inequalities never disappear anyway, and people just have to pay more upfront in order to try to prove themselves. In the long run, it mostly end up exactly as it started and society just pay a dear cost for what is basically unproductive behavior.

You behavior remark is quite on the nose, because from my point of view this is exactly how tyrannies are created. If you get rewarded too much for simply being obedient to the autority in place, overtime any other strategy gets pennalised dispropotionally and you end up with a bunch of sycophant you will never push back against the order, no matter how bad the decisions/rules get.