Boy, 11, graduates from college and still plans to continue education

Parents Forum
41

If you want some examples of academic prodigies who have stayed ahead of the curve, look at Ronan Farrow (BA at 15, then Rhodes Scholar) and perhaps Lawrence Summers (entered MIT at 16, but was a tenured professor at Harvard at 28).

I think The Big Bang Theory got it right when they slowed the advance of Sheldon’s 16 year-old rival by introducing him to girls, a field no less interesting or challenging than theoretical physics, but one in which he was not preternaturally skilled. I suspect something like that happens to lots of accelerated students.

42

Or you can look at another prodigy…

Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist. A mathematics prodigy, he abandoned an academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle.

Point is when you accelerate intellectual learning, without the same physical and emotional development you may Introduce a host of other problems (not always). Most of the time these kids are pushed by there parents as a point of pride…and I’m not talking about skipping a few grades, this kid skipped middle school through high school at the behest of his parents for the sole purpose of developing his intellect at the fastest rate possible. I’m not sure most psychologists would say this is the right thing to do.

43

Huh? Now accelerated prodigies are destined to be mass murderers? I think this thread has officially jumped the shark.

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There not (except in Ted’s case), but you missed the point.

45

Look at prison populations. How many gifted men are there because they weren’t given opportunities? How many boys act out in elementary school because they are bored out of their skulls? Girls (not me) tend to be more compliant.

Think asynchrony. Round/square peg and the opposite hole. Being held back to be with agemates will not solve the problem of not fitting in. Read up on characteristics of the gifted (its been so long my sources are forgotten). The intellect may be ahead of the rest of their development but they tend to be ahead morally. This causes problems- not thinking at the same level as agemates. Too many people in the top, say 20%, still don’t comprehend how different those in the top one percent are compared to themselves.

There may be far fewer people at the tails of the Bell curve (extremely ■■■■■■■■ as well as gifted- saw some in residency) but also consider they also will have a wide range of personalities as well. Plus the highly gifted are very different from the low end gifted. Somewhere it was established (in Wisconsin or nationwide?) that kids deserve an “appropriate education”. This applies not only to those whose special needs are at the low end of functioning but also to those who function at very high levels. The acceleration is likely as close as we come to appropriate. We usually can’t give these children a peer group for lack of numbers in any location except perhaps the largest cities.

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This is an excellent point, but it doesn’t go far enough. There is actually more variation of ability within that top 1% than within the next 20%. This might seem non-intuitive at first, but think about it. Gauss, DaVinci, von Neuman, Stefan Banach (look up his life’s story!), Kovelevskaya, et al. are all in the same “top 1%” as the average very strong high school kid who can ace her classes and SATs. Really? You think they are in the same universe?

Unless you were a profoundly gifted (>+3sd) kid yourself, have one, or have at least worked with some, it’s very hard to understand how ill-suited the standard “age cage” of school is for most of these kids. This is not the top 1%. This level of talent really starts at the top 0.1%.

47

The following post is on-topic in its entirety, although it may not seem to start out that way:

I think it is important to know more on the background of Ted Kaczynski before reaching the conclusion that academic acceleration turned him toward becoming the Unabomber. An article in the Atlantic in June 2000 describes in some detail Kaczynski’s experience as a subject in a psychology experiment run by Harvard Professor Henry Murray, in which the students were subject to “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive attacks” on their personal philosophies and beliefs. You can find this article by googling “Harvard and the Makings of the Unabomber.” The author, Alston Chase, suggests that the experiments by Murray would not be permitted under current restrictions on human subjects. Murray had previously worked with the OSS and was apparently trying to develop a profile of a spy who would be resistant to interrogation, if captured. Chase also describes general education at Harvard in the era when Kaczynski was a student there as “The Culture of Despair.” You really need to look at the article to understand what Kaczynski might have gone through, totally aside from accelerated academic work.

One could say that if Kaczynski had been older than 16 when he started college, he would perhaps have been more resistant to the Murray experiment, or not agreed to participate at all, and that he would have been better able to put the readings in “The Culture of Despair” into perspective.

But no one now (or then) sends a son or daughter to college thinking that the student might run into the kind of experiment that Murray was conducting. In fact, I don’t believe that any such experiments can run on college campuses now. The reactions to the Milgram experiment at Yale and the Stanford prison experiment have put paid to that kind of study. There would be no way to get human subjects clearance. I suspect that the readings in “The Culture of Despair” have been moderated somewhat, or possibly students have more experience with despair pre-college, or both.

In any event, my point is that the outcome for Ted Kaczynski was a result of multiple influences, only one of which was parental pressure to accelerate academically.

It is very difficult to know how to bring up a profoundly gifted child. These students tend not to fit exactly anywhere (barring a whole-family move to Nevada, for the Davidson Institute), and parents have to do the best they can to respond to the child’s nature and interests, as their environment allows. I don’t blame any parent for whatever choices the parent makes.

Raising the specter of the Unabomber is not helpful in the conversation about radical academic acceleration. If you read the Atlantic article, I think you will see that Kaczynski’s actions were the product of an unusual confluence of circumstances.

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Regarding the Unabomber, where is the radical acceleration? He started Harvard at 16. Big deal. I started at an Ivy undergrad at 16, one of my better friends started at 15 at a different Ivy (receiving a simultaneous BA and MA either before or just as he was turning 20, summa cum laude), and my best friend was salutatorian (at yet another Ivy) at 20. Steve Hsu is a fairly well known blogger (and physics professor) and he graduated CalTech at 19. And none of us has mailed any package bombs. At least not yet…

(A few decades ago, schools were much more willing to let kids skip grades, and no one thought twice about sending a 5 year old turning 6 to first grade, either. Even lousy schools (like the one I attended) typically had IQ test results for their students, so they often had another piece of information to justify accelerating certain kids.)

I could go on… but the takeaway is that there is no evidence I can see of truly radical acceleration for the Unabomber. In any event, equating Kascynski’s education path with his propensity to mail letter bombs is the sort of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that used to be taught in high school. Murray’s experiments might be a more logical “cause,” but people are so inherently complex that who can say if there is any true “cause” that we can understand?

Getting back to the topic, I can’t emphasize enough how inadequate typical schools can be for truly gifted kids. I certainly cannot fault the parents of this young kid in St. Petersburg for choosing this path. Certainly not without knowing more about the situation than is revealed in the typically sensationalist media piece linked. His dad is a Greek Orthodox priest - they are likely not exactly rolling in money - and I bet they are doing the best they can to deal with what ultimately is really just a gift. I wish him the best of luck and I hope he sticks with astrophysics and his quest to find God in the emergent order of the universe.

https://www.pnj.com/story/life/2018/07/25/reaching-god-william-maillis-young-genius-who-knows-god-has-blessed-him/824784002/

49

I agree with SatchelSF. Yes, skipping grades was more common in the past. My mother also started college at 16.

50

My father graduated high school at 15- for context, he’s turning 91- and he actually wasn’t allowed to start college until he was 16, so I think he had to wait a semester to start.

This young man sounds great to me! Thanks for posting that article @SatchelSF .

51

One of the hallmarks of giftedness is asynchronous development. For parents of profoundly gifted children, there is often no clear answer. Their children are driven to learn but they may lag or just be normal in social skills. So the parents have a hard choice. They can choose to feed the child’s academic needs while letting the social piece sort itself out. Or they can try to normalize the kid’s school experience as much as possible, and possibly frustrate their mental growth. Either way, these kids will never be typical.

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So I guess were saying that its better to send your kid to an average college with average students who have nothing in common with your child, who are not learning math at a depth of say… Caltech (much less depth in fact) instead of a private boarding school that caters to profoundly gifted children where he would be with other kids his own age and when he becomes old/mature enough to attend a school like MIT where he would be in the environment that would befit him…OK if that what you think is the best answer, I absolutely disagree.

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There are too many “it depends” to say what is the best possible route for each kid and each family. Remember that most families have other constraints (e.g. money, other family members’ jobs and schools, etc.) that affect what options that they have.

A few years ago, there was another kid who was learning stuff so quickly that his parents sent him to community college at 8, from where he graduated (AA degree) at 11, transferring to a state university at 12 to graduate (BS degree) at 15. Based on current public information, he seems to be doing fine, despite not going to “a private boarding school that caters to profoundly gifted children” or a college that some here think would “befit him” better than a community college and state university: http://moshekai.com/PageTwo.html .

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I’m not saying kids can’t cope, they cope through a lot worse then what were talking about, make that far worse and turn out fine. I’m talking about a better approach.

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I don’t know whether I was merely gifted or “profoundly gifted.” I know that I could have gone to college and done perfectly well at 14, but I didn’t want to do that. I was lucky in several respects. First, the area in which I was most interested – literature – offered effectively limitless opportunities for self-study that was not a whole lot less rich than studying with a teacher. The fact that my grade-level classes were something of a joke didn’t stop me from becoming very well-read, and staying with my age-group allowed me to do things that were collaterally enriching – like acting in plays, and trying to direct them – I would probably have had trouble doing in college. Secondly, my parents, my school, and my community had enough resources and enough flexibility to keep me stimulated. I took many courses out of grade level, especially in 9th and 10th grade, and I was allowed to take my grade-level math courses without ever actually attending class. I spent a year abroad. I studied four foreign languages. I skipped two years in Spanish and three (the first three) in French. I took a 300 level course at a local university before anyone had heard of dual enrollment.

We thought about sending me to boarding school, but I thought that sounded awful.

I was with @CU123 : I didn’t want to go to the local public university to get a BA at 17 or 18; I wanted to live as rich a life as I could in high school, intellectually and otherwise, and then go to Yale (or someplace similar). I was awkward enough as it was; I didn’t think girls would like me any better if they were all 4-7 years older than I.

I did great, by the way, though my mid-20s, then fell back into the pack. I wasn’t preternaturally skilled at parenthood, or doing the 50,000 things you need to do to build a great career as an adult.

56

@CU123

You lost me there. Which school are you thinking of, because I can tell you that there is no boarding school - NONE - that even comes close to this description. In the context of >+3sd kids (starting at approximately 1 in 1,000), the typical boarding student at even the most selective school will be quite unimpressive, at least on intellectual measures. There are genius kids of course at boarding schools, but not very many at all. It would be bad for business, among other reasons. And no boarding school is going to admit an 8 year old (which I think is when he started high school), anyway.

Getting back to this kid, I found another article that confirms what I suspected - the family does not have the resources to do anything other than the path they’ve chosen:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/college/The-genius-At-age-11-he-s-graduating-from-St-Petersburg-College-then-it-s-on-to-astrophysics-_170144439

Like I said, it’s not always easy to deal with gifted kids even substantially below this kid’s apparent abilities, but it looks like this family is trying to honor the gift they’ve received.

57

“i just hope that these genius kids get to live out their childhood and enjoy it.”

I’m pretty cynical about this…I want everyone to be happy all the time, but one person’s happy childhood may look different from the next. One kid making mud pies and another kid building lasers might both be in the best environment for them, and either one might be miserable despite being in the best environment.

I wasn’t a genius, but I was very nerdy, and the single best experience of my teen years was being in the Jeopardy! teen tournament when I was 15 and sharing a long weekend with other übernerds. THAT was my chance to be a “normal teenager,” being myself and connecting to my peer group. I was not normal in “normal” environments like a party or a soccer game or English class. In those spaces, I was a weirdo.

58

The bottom line for me is that there’s no easy, obvious answer for kids like this. Support them academically and you risk missing out on opportunities for development in other areas. Put them with same-age peers and not only are they likely to be seriously bored but they’re not likely to fit in socially anyway.

As @SatchelSF notes, the boarding schools appropriate for the merely gifted, like Andover, St. Paul’s or Cate don’t want to be responsible for an 8 year old living with 14-19 year olds. Living at home while attending college or a school for the gifted seems like a good choice, particularly if it allows them to participate in same-age peer activities like sports, clubs or volunteering.

My discomfort wasn’t necessarily with the path this family has chosen but with the hullabaloo over the whole “youngest to…” thing. I think it frames education as a competitive sport instead of a way of supporting the growth of this kid and others like him.

Some profoundly gifted kids seem to do quite well later while others burn out. It would be interesting to see a study of the factors that push kids one way or another and how kids who end up later performing at the level of the just really smart end up feeling about themselves and their lives. Are the majority of them happy to have a more average life or does that feel like failure after all the early fuss over their prodigious talents? I imagine such studies have been done-has anyone seen the research?

59

Let us all not forget the case of Sufiah Yusof. She went to Oxford at 12 as a prodigy. She doesn’t speak to her family. She was a prostitute and is now without money

I think it is absolutely wrong for a multitude of reasons to send an 11 year old to college including the example of Sufiah

60

Agreed @collegedad13 about 11 being too young to go to college, but this kid is not “going to college” in the sense that people normally think of it. He’s going to be living at home, at least for the next two years, and completing his degree at USF, which is relatively local. Every day his dad is going to drive him to school. This is sort of what parents do for their merely gifted kids - driving them to someplace where they can take classes that are appropriate for them. I did it for my kid (taking high school classes 10 miles away at the end of the elementary school day) and you probably did the same for your own kids.

Again, there are no easy answers here. One of the big issues is that “normal” schools are not set up for kids outside the mainstream for the most part, and they tend to be pretty inflexible. As I’ve said before, what is fast for some kids is interminably slow for others; mindless homework is more geared towards leveling the grade distribution (“everyone gets a 20% participation bonus!”) than actually reinforcing and extending understanding; and, of course, more effort always seems to go into raising up the weakest kids academically than to help the strongest to reach their potential. In an ideal world, education resources would be allocated on an individualized basis, but in the real world we live in the tension between efficiency and efficacy always means that the outliers are going to be given short shrift.