I had terrible work habits. Not sure how much I regret that because I could learn when I needed to and managed to skate through every level of school doing what seemed to me to be less than the minimum. School work in general was too easy for me. I should have been skipped grades but my parents were worried about me having friends. Bad decision: I needed the challenge and that was obvious. So I largely wasted school. Thing is that’s definitely one thing that would be different now and I’m not talking about more homework but about the internet. Back then I had to look things up in an encyclopedia or deal with those hideous textbooks that taught math or chemistry through a dense filter of poorly chosen words and examples. Now a bright kid can learn advanced math and programming languages for free. I had to take a big book called Fortran and try to figure it out on my own, which I have to say really wasn’t any fun. Intro computer science books were incomprehensible because the subject began in college then. Stats was especially annoying: it relied on computation before we could compute with any ease! Learning chemistry and physics is much easier when you can see animations and thus how the calculations generate the reality. And frankly, I think even back in the 1960’s the understanding of what are now basics like general relativity and quantum mechanics was not that widespread and it was treated more as something rarefied for the few.
The tools available now blow me away. Even when my kids were little, the amount of extra instruction for talented & gifted kids consisted of, well, the entire state budget for it was about the cost of maintaining 2 highly compromised kids in school with their aides. I used to argue, “Don’t you realize one reason China et al are succeeding is they put resources into the kids who will generate a return for society?” I wasn’t and am not against special education - my wife has an advanced degree in it - but rather that when we skimp on educating the brightest that’s the same as not maintaining or not building the infrastructure needed to generate a better future.