this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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The GT program isn't about tracking kids to become smarter or harder working. It's just about segregating the rich family kids from the poor family kids. Plenty of rich kids go on to live full, happy lives. Plenty of rich kids go on to be burned-out failures who keep squandering second chances until the money finally runs out. Plenty of rich kids have ups and downs and a plethora of endings.
The poor kids, on the other hand, tend to have it go from bad to worse. Higher rates of everything bad. Lower rates of everything good. Infirmity, addiction, imprisonment, destitution, premature death all haunt them more heavily.
Reactionaries get to point at the data and say "Look! See! Our system worked. We spotted all the gifted kids early and helped them succeed. The ungifted ones were going to fail anyway." But the cruel truth of the matter is that if you didn't get slotted into one of the coveted GT positions, you got short changed your whole way through school and spat out the back end with a big "Failure" stamp on your forehead to signal to your future employer that its cool to overwork and underpay you.
I don't know about GT programs. I used "gifted kids" in a descriptive sense.
But this reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a colleague. She thought about sending her kids to a Montessori school where kids can choose more freely and learn on their own basis. But it's far too expensive for her and it's frustrating that rich kids can go to expensive private schools like that and her kids can't
In my experience, the big expense in Montessori isn't the activities nearly so much as the student-teacher ratio and the real estate costs.
These schools tend to be located in rich neighborhoods where owning enough land to operate a school is spectacularly expensive. And the care they provide ultimately boils down to the number of eyeballs necessary to prevent serious liability should you let your toddler out of their crib. It's much cheaper to just keep kids caged up for eight hours a day than to let them roam under supervision.
On top of that, pre-K schools are disease hot-houses. It is, similarly, much easier to keep your space hygienic if you limit the kids' activities. I tried to send my son to daycare last month. He got four illnesses in six days, including COVID. Then he spread it to the rest of us, so we were out on our asses for a week each. Absolute nightmare. Had to pull him out again, despite shelling out a month's mortgage payment for enrollment.
We could have public institutions that are well-regulated and fully staffed, on public property that's professionally cleaned on a daily basis. And could require vaccinations for enrollment, include a properly researched educational plan, incorporate the buildings into big workplace settings so parents don't need to add 30 minutes or more to a commute to drop off/pick up... all sorts of good stuff. But that would require civil planning, which is basically communism, so...