<p>The biggest fallacy used in discussions of whether accelerated learning for prodigies is warranted is to see where they end up vs. everyone else. That is, if the kid in the article is in the top 1/1000 of a percent versus what he can do as an 11-year-old, then he must also be in the top 1/1000 of a percent as an adult. If not, people conclude that the acceleration was a mistake and/or the kid was a fraud.</p>
<p>People develop at different rates. If people are ready and need to be engaged academically, then it is damaging in a lot of ways, psychologically as well as academically, to hold them back. Keep in mind that the expected rate of learning in school starts out veeerrrryyy slow, then speeds up gradually from elementary school until college. The main reasons is that most kids cannot reason abstractly, and they have a small attention span. For “prodigies”, this is not the case, so they learn just as fast at 7 as they do at 17.<br>
Granted, I acknowledge there are social concerns about advancing a kid. That is why it is best to find a magnet school which allows people to go at their own advanced pace. There is a tradeoff, but people at the edges of ability may find it is worth it. </p>
<p>And as for the game people play of whether prodigies really end up “ahead”, a lot of jobs don’t carry with them outward recognition for being the smartest in their field. And as people said, other qualities, such as political savvy, may be important. I mean, are the supreme court justices the smartest judges there are? If the kid decides that he doesn’t like the lab and becomes a successful patent lawyer, does that mean he really wasn’t a prodigy and shouldn’t have been advanced because it didn’t result in a Nobel Prize.</p>
<p>Being a prodigy isn’t a choice, and it’s not manufactured it. By attempting to slow them down, you don’t make them in a “normal” very bright kid, you just make them bitter and frustrated.</p>