Parts of your story resonate with me deeply—I remember that exact same busywork feeling in 1st grade; I could have been given much higher-level work then on all fronts—but I also clearly had a different experience too. In 3rd grade I was moved to an advanced program, Rapid Learner, and while I still could've been pushed much harder in Math, I think I was much more satisfied in the other subjects, and I wasn't overworked, to my memory. But then in 6th grade, I entered International Baccalaureate, and frankly, it was awful. Yes, it was higher level material, but they gave a crushing amount of homework, to a stupid degree. I hold no doubts that it was deeply unhealthy, both in the sitting required and in the sleep deprivation caused. I slept <4 hours/night 5 days/week for 6+ years (summers excluded). It was not good! And Math. Was. Still. Easy! (Even tho I was in the 1-year-ahead class.) Of course, the unhealthiness of it all wasn't entirely IB's fault. Some % of it was my fault for being a perfectionist nerd and some % goes to my parents for not forcibly sanding off those perfectionist edges and otherwize allowing it, but the majority definitely lies with the schools. You didn't need to do what I did to pass, but to get perfect straight As (as I did for all 7 years)? Most if not all of the top students were not sleeping well. As implied, 12th grade was different tho. Because of a combination of us getting trained for so many years and them simply giving us less work, 12th grade *was* easier. Significantly less sleepless nights (tho still some) and more fun. Also, Math finally got hard! By my choice, I chose Further Level—the only one in my class to do so—and struggled! Now, much of that struggle was because that class at my school was mostly self-taught, and I just, y'know, didn't self-teach, but that isn't the point! Also, Trace, you'll love to hear that Further Level, formally Further Mathematics Higher Level, was discontinued that very year because so few people took it! (Only ~300 people worldwide each year to my understanding.) Ahaha. I was in the last batch.
Anyway, all of the above is to say: I absolutely agree that students need to be and should be challenged, but the predominant portion of that challenge should not simply come from the greatness of the time required.
Also, seperately, how do you think that your educational excellence meshes with libertarian/rightist school choice? Are they perfectly compatible? Complementary even? (If people get to choose their schools, then they can choose the excellent ones.) Obviously you want excellence from non-religious private, religious private, charter public, non-charter public, and all else, but private schools are easier to effect, right? Or just small schools (which tend to be private)? Curious about your thoughts.
Absolutely. Our goal is not "more time spent in class" so much as "time spent better."
When it comes to school choice, my basic response is "it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." I do think our goals are both compatible with and complementary to school choice, but at the same time we're committed to establishing a clearly distinct cluster and working with public schools wherever possible. Private schools are the best testing grounds due to relative regulatory flexibility, while the goal is and must be to make excellence as accessible as possible (particularly to kids whose parents would never think to send them to private schools, or would never be in a position to do so).
Also, I should note that in secondary school it was possible to get 2 years ahead in Math, but this was not encouraged and perhaps even discouraged (unlike 1 year ahead, which was easy to do). I had 2 friends who did it regardless, but both of them had math-advanced Asian fathers who clearly drove it (and my parents didn't do anything like that), so me jumping ahead like that was simply never going to happen, especially since it would've seperated me from my friends.
I'm incredibly excited about this new project. I experienced the same myself. And there is an interesting clip of Joe Rogan speaking with Brett Weinstein about the same experience I had in school. I got the "bright, doesn't apply himself." Sitting in a chair doing rote work wasn't what I was designed for. I had a teacher in fourth grade say I would never amount to anything. Today I am the editor of a weekly newspaper, the founder of my own publication and a relatively successful YouTuber.
When I get really into something, I can dive in and focus for hours. I did incredibly well at university when I went back as an adult. Today that allows me to focus on long-form journalism pieces. In fact, when I am in the midst of working on one of these pieces I almost get a feeling of guilt, like I'm slacking off because I'm so happy in the midst of deep research and writing.
I'm putting in my two weeks notice in two days at the day job because I was able to build this publication into a sustainable living, allowing me to focus on deep dive journalism and data analysis.
In journalism, I adhere to a very important fundamental - it's up to me to convince the reader why they should care about what I'm writing about. It has occurred to me that school rarely ever felt that need. It's just "do this because." When I care about something, I will put in 110% effort. But I've also built my life around minimizing doing things that I don't see value in. It doesn't have to be fun. It does have to be valuable. (I finally learned spreadsheets when I wanted to easily track my personal and business financials.)
Lastly, to something in the center's post: I had a similar experience in Japan. I taught English for a summer with the Guy Healy program. Part of the Guy Healy philosophy was to group individuals based on ability. But one school couldn't be convinced of this, an insisted on group mixing. It was the worst of the summer sessions we ran. Ability ranged from one kid who lived a couple of years in New York and who I could speak to like a child from America - to kids who could barely speak a few words. Both were extremely frustrated, for opposite reasons.
It was also the only school that was disappointed with the results. Everyone else saw a tremendous amount of growth in speaking ability (it was less teaching than fostering language use and fluency). The teachers refused to see that their own insistence on mixed groups caused the problems.
Anyway, I am extremely supportive of this and subscribed to the center and the discord. I plan to watch for other ways I can help in the future. So excited about this!
Glad to have you onboard! Thanks for sharing your experiences - I think there are a lot of us out there who share this sentiment, and I'm excited to see everyone come together.
As a "smart kid" who felt bored, and married someone similar, and have a preschooler who seems kinda smart, I think the problem has another dimension.
Little kids don't get rewarded for doing things.
My early precociousness was because I wanted to be grownup but wasn't allowed to do that in any form other than reading books. When I see the little geniuses my friends are raising, I see high energy sensitive kids who aren't allowed to do much around the house autonomously other than read books and solve puzzles. I see them be behind socially and spatially and they just double down on books early on.
And there's no downside to this at first. You're ahead on cognitive milestones and your parents get bragging rights, and you also sit still a lot making it a lot less work for your parents.
I think the hatred for busy work isn't a virtue. In hindsight it feels like the problem with it is it doesn't give you dopamine hits of feeling smart.
Anyway. I do still see what you bring up as a real problem - if a kid is ahead, they aren't allowed other ways to challenge themselves, and there are many ways to ensure they stay engaged in school and don't get into the habit of zoning out and learn how to work and accomplish hard things long-term (something i struggle with to this day). The problem is schools don't value them, mostly because the "science" doesn't account for these children. An underrated reason i think this is an issue is because the average IQ of teachers is getting lower and lower and they can't empathize with smart kids anymore.
I wish you luck, and look forward to see what you bring up. I think early childhood isn't looked into deeply enough to figure out what factors lead to smarts and how these things pan out long term.
I look forward to seeing this project succeed. Best of luck.
I'm curious what your position is regarding the role of values in education. Currently I am reading Pete Hegseth's book in which he discusses the progressive drive to excize what he terms the "Western Christian Paideia" from the American K-12 public education system. While I'm not a Christian, I'm finding a lot of things in the book with which I agree. The book covers the topic of excellence, claiming that the pursuit of excellence is possible only in a culture which strives toward some divine ideal.
Interestingly, there is a Hebrew term (*chinuch*) that is roughly equivalent to the Greek *paideia* in the sense that it encompasses a much broader scope of endeavor than "education" - things like moral formation, etiquette, and how to curb one's base inclinations.
In your view, is excellence in education purely a question of academic skill, or do you believe it should encompass aspects of moral formation?
Moral formation is a part of the development of excellence. Does it require a Christian root? No. Is it part of the picture? Necessarily yes. The first focus for me is getting the mechanics in order, though.
I'm so happy you've decided to do this! You can have a huge impact on the stagnant educational discourse -- at exactly the right time too, with tech changes making it easier to try different approaches.
I remember in year 12 at school (≈12th grade) thinking "Wait, you can actually learn stuff in here?" Up until that point, school had felt like a Kafkaesque monkey prison where I was forced to color in bananas for 8 hours before I could go home and learn to code.
This is needed, and I think you'll find that you have broad support. You certainly have mine.
I was a bright student who benefitted from from access to some advanced classes, but I was mostly stifled in school. I'm looking at my baby sleeping, and I want her to excel if she has the ability and drive. More broadly, I want American schools to enhance rather than hinder good students.
Congratulations! I’ll be excited to see what you achieve with this new project. Much like others in the comments, your story resonated with me (though my high anxiety and overwhelming need to please adults kept me from being too bored in school at least).
Something I’ve thought about a lot since I graduated high school is the reality of what happens to extremely bright kids whose parents either are disinterested in their children or lack the resources and experience to best guide them.
It’s not just the lack of nepotism opportunities that disadvantages kids like this, it’s the fact that these kids don’t even learn what is possible for themselves unless they are able to find mentorship elsewhere (and how likely is it that the kid will be sent to a school that can offer them that if their parents are already disengaged and/or struggling). For all the talk of privilege and oppression in leftie education movements, extremely smart kids with directionless/absent parents are often left out of the conversation (as these are the kids most hurt by the removal of merit-based gifted programs and ability grouping).
I suppose my point is, just because these kids are getting straight As in school does not mean they are being adequately served by the education system or set up for success in higher education and their career. I hope mentorship will also be a big part of the excellence conversation for all children who would benefit from it.
Obviously I support this and wish you the best I this much needed initiative. Keeping smart people back causes unhappiness and crimps their maximum potential.
The question I have for you concerns AI. Frontier LLMs are now smarter than almost any teacher; certainly they would never claim that Mercury is hotter than Venus (the first time I ever remembered a teacher being flat out wrong when I was 7 or 8). They can be completely personalized, and will soon be more engaging. It seems to me the question of how to incorporate AI into teaching and addressing the various philosophical questions concerning the relevance of human connections it raises should be a central aspect of education discourse in 2025 so I am curious on your own perspective on this.
My story is exactly like yours. I was despondent over how bored I was in school. I read the most books of any kid in Seattle in the 1986 Read-a-thon, in second grade (212 books). My teachers asked if I was bored and I politely said no. I was not stimulated until high school. My K-12 school in Seattle, Bush School, did not believe in letting anyone know that some kids were smarter than others. And they believed in red shirting. I paid a huge price.
I like your idea very much and I will follow your work with energy and excitement.
However, be careful comparing excellence in sports to academic excellence. Last night, I learned that the Eagles defensive linemen are three inches taller and almost 100 pounds heavier than their counterparts in the first Super Bowl game nearly 60 years ago. There has been a lot of change! The same is true in several other sports. Competitive sports focus on excellence beyond anything else.
However, academic excellence is a far more complex issue. Not only has the amount on knowledge in nearly every subject grown enormously, but our culture has shifted from valuing high performance from just a few individuals (almost all men and white) to an attempt to educate almost all its members. I am less interesting in the gifted student, who often finds their way into a decent education in this country (not true in other countries where I have taught) than the poor quality of education offered in most American schools. Freddie deBoer is right; all the reforms I've seen in forty years of teaching never improved the academic performance of the average or below average student. You will have plenty of work ahead.
Your description of your childhood is shockingly similar to mine --- I was also a precocious kid, I learned to read very young, I was also pretty bored and understimulated by what my reasonably affluent suburban schools had to offer academically, and I even also skipped seventh grade.
I think we had a pretty different reaction to acceleration though. It was sort of fascinating to see you say that you had such a positive experience right after skipping seventh grade. I'd describe eighth grade as my *worst* experience in school, and it's not that close. This was all for social rather than academic reasons: that clueless little 11-year-old boy just had no way to relate to middle-schoolers. Things got somewhat better through high school, but not that much better. My grades were good, but my social life wasn't.
I've met a few other people in my life who skipped grades and many of them have pretty similar stories. (Anecdotally, the women I know who did this had an easier time with it than the men. I'd love to see some actual data on this!) It would have made a huge difference to me if, instead of just sticking me in a higher grade in the same school system that wasn't really meeting my needs, there had been some way to put me in a class with other kids who could work academically at the same level but who were also my age. I wish you and your cofounder all the success in world with what you're working on! It would make me so happy to know that other kids have better options than I did.
There has been a culture of excellence at my prep school for over a century. It is available right now to anyone whose parents can shell out at least $69,370. (Roughly 34 percent of the students are on need-based scholarships.)
Is there a less costly way of providing a culture of excellence?
One of my major motivations in this is recognizing that asymmetry in education -- no matter what people do with public education, the most motivated wealthy parents will always have options. I'm confident there are less costly ways -- a lot of the most compelling models I've seen focus specifically and directly on minimal cost. A lot of it, in my opinion, involves a clarity of focus and of goals that schools have mostly left muddled.
This is one of the most personally resonant pieces of writing I have ever read. Thank you for sharing this. As a former math olympiad contestant and somebody who studied extensively and benefited deeply from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), I have never before heard someone speak about its curriculum so beautifully.
Because of AoPS, my exposure to and appreciation of mathematics and highly quantitative fields scaled in an immensely disproportionate way to the rest of my learning. I am so very grateful to have been exposed to AoPS by my more high-achieving classmates early in middle school, and the AoPS education ecosystem was a major source of my learning from then up to college. For college, in large part due to the opportunities made possible by my education through AoPS, I had the fortune to study at an institution with comparable or superior resources to those offered by AoPS across a breadth of subjects.
I wonder now if my life might be different if I had access in high school to an AoPS for English literature, an AoPS for history, or an AoPS for the arts/music. On the other hand, I can also imagine that secondary school math education is a unique area where improvements of the magnitude offered by AoPS are possible. Really looking forward to your work in this area.
I agree with all of your Principles. I would be heartened to see them embedded in a new model.
and yet
Excellence accentuates difference. Difference is taboo.
Did you know that the Air Force, as part of the U.S. Armed forces, is exempt from much Federal anti-discrimination law? Those laws were deemed antithetical to the development and cohesion of the best fighting force possible.
Dukes v. Griggs prohibits the use of IQ testing in private employment, unless narrowly tailored and necessary to the work. No such prohibition applies to the military. The ASVAB is an IQ test that sorts military applicants. As you can imagine, different ethnic groups pass at different rates. This is not grounds for a lawsuit against the military. It's a pure meritocracy, and they don't have to care about anyone's feelings or our culture's mass lies about the role of genetics in human performance.
The Jesuits figured out how to run a classroom 200 years ago. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, convince the American left to abandon sleds and adopt the obviously superior cultural technology.
My gifted program taught us logic skills and had opportunities to deploy critical thinking, but that's no different than the average 1850 middle school. I truly think it was pointless, and that other children would have benefited from having leading students in their classrooms. The smart kids would be picked on by some, and venerated by others, and ultimately their status in the class would depend on their status with teachers and administrative staff, and the stories of success communicated about prior students who excelled.
One easy win you could achieve is to reestablish the norm that being excellent is excellent, that praising our best instead of our worst should be the norm. But good luck selling that to administrators who are terrified of the feral Gen X and Millennial parents themselves trained to believe that all problems are social problems and that it's always the responsibility of an institution not to fail a person, rather than the other way around.
The total dearth of lefty Millennial and Gen X leaders highlights their problem. They don't want leaders. They don't believe anyone can be qualified to lead. There's no amount of excellence that would convince them that a person might deserve more power than others. They don't believe in the use of power at all, even benevolently. There's no point in them developing excellence, because excellence is not required, and is, in fact, not desirable.
Excellence, like power, reveals. Excellence would reveal who is not excellent by their standards. Those distributions would confirm what anyone with eyes can see. I understand the desperation to avoid this issue. It is unavoidable. Our education system is very good, maybe the best.
Criticism of American education is similar to criticism of American life expectancy by Euros. They point to the average decline in America in the past decade. Martin Wolf, of the FT, has numerous articles claiming that as a evidence of the U.S.A.'s dysfunctionality.
When I emailed Mr. Wolf a breakdown of life expectancy by ethnicity, and showed him that White and Asian people in America have lifespans equal to Japan or Norway, he called me an idiot for not accepting Black people as part of our population for the purpose of life expectancy. I don't want black people gone, I want policy-makers to address the causes of their lowered life expectancy. But Mr. Wolf was not persuaded or mildly interested. We're all the same to him, apparently. I guess he thinks if you're born Chinese American, you have the average life expectancy. Ultimately, he said his parents were affected by WWII and that he'd never accept any conclusion based on ethnic difference. Ok, I understand this, but Mr. Wolf being wrong for the right reason doesn't make him right. Ethnic differences drive almost every difference in medical care for subpopulations. "Race isn't real", but South Asian and African Africans have elevated risk for heart disease. Refusing to see problems and work to solve them, on their own terms -- pretending a problem is a different problem so that you can use your preferred tool -- is selfish madness.
Either we all become Rawlsians, or the best of us will absent themselves from society, create parallel structures, and live secluded from the mainstream. It's already happening.
Parts of your story resonate with me deeply—I remember that exact same busywork feeling in 1st grade; I could have been given much higher-level work then on all fronts—but I also clearly had a different experience too. In 3rd grade I was moved to an advanced program, Rapid Learner, and while I still could've been pushed much harder in Math, I think I was much more satisfied in the other subjects, and I wasn't overworked, to my memory. But then in 6th grade, I entered International Baccalaureate, and frankly, it was awful. Yes, it was higher level material, but they gave a crushing amount of homework, to a stupid degree. I hold no doubts that it was deeply unhealthy, both in the sitting required and in the sleep deprivation caused. I slept <4 hours/night 5 days/week for 6+ years (summers excluded). It was not good! And Math. Was. Still. Easy! (Even tho I was in the 1-year-ahead class.) Of course, the unhealthiness of it all wasn't entirely IB's fault. Some % of it was my fault for being a perfectionist nerd and some % goes to my parents for not forcibly sanding off those perfectionist edges and otherwize allowing it, but the majority definitely lies with the schools. You didn't need to do what I did to pass, but to get perfect straight As (as I did for all 7 years)? Most if not all of the top students were not sleeping well. As implied, 12th grade was different tho. Because of a combination of us getting trained for so many years and them simply giving us less work, 12th grade *was* easier. Significantly less sleepless nights (tho still some) and more fun. Also, Math finally got hard! By my choice, I chose Further Level—the only one in my class to do so—and struggled! Now, much of that struggle was because that class at my school was mostly self-taught, and I just, y'know, didn't self-teach, but that isn't the point! Also, Trace, you'll love to hear that Further Level, formally Further Mathematics Higher Level, was discontinued that very year because so few people took it! (Only ~300 people worldwide each year to my understanding.) Ahaha. I was in the last batch.
Anyway, all of the above is to say: I absolutely agree that students need to be and should be challenged, but the predominant portion of that challenge should not simply come from the greatness of the time required.
Also, seperately, how do you think that your educational excellence meshes with libertarian/rightist school choice? Are they perfectly compatible? Complementary even? (If people get to choose their schools, then they can choose the excellent ones.) Obviously you want excellence from non-religious private, religious private, charter public, non-charter public, and all else, but private schools are easier to effect, right? Or just small schools (which tend to be private)? Curious about your thoughts.
Absolutely. Our goal is not "more time spent in class" so much as "time spent better."
When it comes to school choice, my basic response is "it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." I do think our goals are both compatible with and complementary to school choice, but at the same time we're committed to establishing a clearly distinct cluster and working with public schools wherever possible. Private schools are the best testing grounds due to relative regulatory flexibility, while the goal is and must be to make excellence as accessible as possible (particularly to kids whose parents would never think to send them to private schools, or would never be in a position to do so).
👍👍👍.
Also, I should note that in secondary school it was possible to get 2 years ahead in Math, but this was not encouraged and perhaps even discouraged (unlike 1 year ahead, which was easy to do). I had 2 friends who did it regardless, but both of them had math-advanced Asian fathers who clearly drove it (and my parents didn't do anything like that), so me jumping ahead like that was simply never going to happen, especially since it would've seperated me from my friends.
I'm incredibly excited about this new project. I experienced the same myself. And there is an interesting clip of Joe Rogan speaking with Brett Weinstein about the same experience I had in school. I got the "bright, doesn't apply himself." Sitting in a chair doing rote work wasn't what I was designed for. I had a teacher in fourth grade say I would never amount to anything. Today I am the editor of a weekly newspaper, the founder of my own publication and a relatively successful YouTuber.
When I get really into something, I can dive in and focus for hours. I did incredibly well at university when I went back as an adult. Today that allows me to focus on long-form journalism pieces. In fact, when I am in the midst of working on one of these pieces I almost get a feeling of guilt, like I'm slacking off because I'm so happy in the midst of deep research and writing.
I'm putting in my two weeks notice in two days at the day job because I was able to build this publication into a sustainable living, allowing me to focus on deep dive journalism and data analysis.
In journalism, I adhere to a very important fundamental - it's up to me to convince the reader why they should care about what I'm writing about. It has occurred to me that school rarely ever felt that need. It's just "do this because." When I care about something, I will put in 110% effort. But I've also built my life around minimizing doing things that I don't see value in. It doesn't have to be fun. It does have to be valuable. (I finally learned spreadsheets when I wanted to easily track my personal and business financials.)
Lastly, to something in the center's post: I had a similar experience in Japan. I taught English for a summer with the Guy Healy program. Part of the Guy Healy philosophy was to group individuals based on ability. But one school couldn't be convinced of this, an insisted on group mixing. It was the worst of the summer sessions we ran. Ability ranged from one kid who lived a couple of years in New York and who I could speak to like a child from America - to kids who could barely speak a few words. Both were extremely frustrated, for opposite reasons.
It was also the only school that was disappointed with the results. Everyone else saw a tremendous amount of growth in speaking ability (it was less teaching than fostering language use and fluency). The teachers refused to see that their own insistence on mixed groups caused the problems.
Anyway, I am extremely supportive of this and subscribed to the center and the discord. I plan to watch for other ways I can help in the future. So excited about this!
Glad to have you onboard! Thanks for sharing your experiences - I think there are a lot of us out there who share this sentiment, and I'm excited to see everyone come together.
As a "smart kid" who felt bored, and married someone similar, and have a preschooler who seems kinda smart, I think the problem has another dimension.
Little kids don't get rewarded for doing things.
My early precociousness was because I wanted to be grownup but wasn't allowed to do that in any form other than reading books. When I see the little geniuses my friends are raising, I see high energy sensitive kids who aren't allowed to do much around the house autonomously other than read books and solve puzzles. I see them be behind socially and spatially and they just double down on books early on.
And there's no downside to this at first. You're ahead on cognitive milestones and your parents get bragging rights, and you also sit still a lot making it a lot less work for your parents.
I think the hatred for busy work isn't a virtue. In hindsight it feels like the problem with it is it doesn't give you dopamine hits of feeling smart.
Anyway. I do still see what you bring up as a real problem - if a kid is ahead, they aren't allowed other ways to challenge themselves, and there are many ways to ensure they stay engaged in school and don't get into the habit of zoning out and learn how to work and accomplish hard things long-term (something i struggle with to this day). The problem is schools don't value them, mostly because the "science" doesn't account for these children. An underrated reason i think this is an issue is because the average IQ of teachers is getting lower and lower and they can't empathize with smart kids anymore.
I wish you luck, and look forward to see what you bring up. I think early childhood isn't looked into deeply enough to figure out what factors lead to smarts and how these things pan out long term.
I look forward to seeing this project succeed. Best of luck.
I'm curious what your position is regarding the role of values in education. Currently I am reading Pete Hegseth's book in which he discusses the progressive drive to excize what he terms the "Western Christian Paideia" from the American K-12 public education system. While I'm not a Christian, I'm finding a lot of things in the book with which I agree. The book covers the topic of excellence, claiming that the pursuit of excellence is possible only in a culture which strives toward some divine ideal.
Interestingly, there is a Hebrew term (*chinuch*) that is roughly equivalent to the Greek *paideia* in the sense that it encompasses a much broader scope of endeavor than "education" - things like moral formation, etiquette, and how to curb one's base inclinations.
In your view, is excellence in education purely a question of academic skill, or do you believe it should encompass aspects of moral formation?
Moral formation is a part of the development of excellence. Does it require a Christian root? No. Is it part of the picture? Necessarily yes. The first focus for me is getting the mechanics in order, though.
I'm so happy you've decided to do this! You can have a huge impact on the stagnant educational discourse -- at exactly the right time too, with tech changes making it easier to try different approaches.
I remember in year 12 at school (≈12th grade) thinking "Wait, you can actually learn stuff in here?" Up until that point, school had felt like a Kafkaesque monkey prison where I was forced to color in bananas for 8 hours before I could go home and learn to code.
This is needed, and I think you'll find that you have broad support. You certainly have mine.
I was a bright student who benefitted from from access to some advanced classes, but I was mostly stifled in school. I'm looking at my baby sleeping, and I want her to excel if she has the ability and drive. More broadly, I want American schools to enhance rather than hinder good students.
Congratulations! I’ll be excited to see what you achieve with this new project. Much like others in the comments, your story resonated with me (though my high anxiety and overwhelming need to please adults kept me from being too bored in school at least).
Something I’ve thought about a lot since I graduated high school is the reality of what happens to extremely bright kids whose parents either are disinterested in their children or lack the resources and experience to best guide them.
It’s not just the lack of nepotism opportunities that disadvantages kids like this, it’s the fact that these kids don’t even learn what is possible for themselves unless they are able to find mentorship elsewhere (and how likely is it that the kid will be sent to a school that can offer them that if their parents are already disengaged and/or struggling). For all the talk of privilege and oppression in leftie education movements, extremely smart kids with directionless/absent parents are often left out of the conversation (as these are the kids most hurt by the removal of merit-based gifted programs and ability grouping).
I suppose my point is, just because these kids are getting straight As in school does not mean they are being adequately served by the education system or set up for success in higher education and their career. I hope mentorship will also be a big part of the excellence conversation for all children who would benefit from it.
Obviously I support this and wish you the best I this much needed initiative. Keeping smart people back causes unhappiness and crimps their maximum potential.
The question I have for you concerns AI. Frontier LLMs are now smarter than almost any teacher; certainly they would never claim that Mercury is hotter than Venus (the first time I ever remembered a teacher being flat out wrong when I was 7 or 8). They can be completely personalized, and will soon be more engaging. It seems to me the question of how to incorporate AI into teaching and addressing the various philosophical questions concerning the relevance of human connections it raises should be a central aspect of education discourse in 2025 so I am curious on your own perspective on this.
My story is exactly like yours. I was despondent over how bored I was in school. I read the most books of any kid in Seattle in the 1986 Read-a-thon, in second grade (212 books). My teachers asked if I was bored and I politely said no. I was not stimulated until high school. My K-12 school in Seattle, Bush School, did not believe in letting anyone know that some kids were smarter than others. And they believed in red shirting. I paid a huge price.
I like your idea very much and I will follow your work with energy and excitement.
However, be careful comparing excellence in sports to academic excellence. Last night, I learned that the Eagles defensive linemen are three inches taller and almost 100 pounds heavier than their counterparts in the first Super Bowl game nearly 60 years ago. There has been a lot of change! The same is true in several other sports. Competitive sports focus on excellence beyond anything else.
However, academic excellence is a far more complex issue. Not only has the amount on knowledge in nearly every subject grown enormously, but our culture has shifted from valuing high performance from just a few individuals (almost all men and white) to an attempt to educate almost all its members. I am less interesting in the gifted student, who often finds their way into a decent education in this country (not true in other countries where I have taught) than the poor quality of education offered in most American schools. Freddie deBoer is right; all the reforms I've seen in forty years of teaching never improved the academic performance of the average or below average student. You will have plenty of work ahead.
Your description of your childhood is shockingly similar to mine --- I was also a precocious kid, I learned to read very young, I was also pretty bored and understimulated by what my reasonably affluent suburban schools had to offer academically, and I even also skipped seventh grade.
I think we had a pretty different reaction to acceleration though. It was sort of fascinating to see you say that you had such a positive experience right after skipping seventh grade. I'd describe eighth grade as my *worst* experience in school, and it's not that close. This was all for social rather than academic reasons: that clueless little 11-year-old boy just had no way to relate to middle-schoolers. Things got somewhat better through high school, but not that much better. My grades were good, but my social life wasn't.
I've met a few other people in my life who skipped grades and many of them have pretty similar stories. (Anecdotally, the women I know who did this had an easier time with it than the men. I'd love to see some actual data on this!) It would have made a huge difference to me if, instead of just sticking me in a higher grade in the same school system that wasn't really meeting my needs, there had been some way to put me in a class with other kids who could work academically at the same level but who were also my age. I wish you and your cofounder all the success in world with what you're working on! It would make me so happy to know that other kids have better options than I did.
In the parlance of the proletariat, "hell yeah!" And good luck to you, Trace. I'll be pulling for you whilst also trying to build something new.
There has been a culture of excellence at my prep school for over a century. It is available right now to anyone whose parents can shell out at least $69,370. (Roughly 34 percent of the students are on need-based scholarships.)
Is there a less costly way of providing a culture of excellence?
One of my major motivations in this is recognizing that asymmetry in education -- no matter what people do with public education, the most motivated wealthy parents will always have options. I'm confident there are less costly ways -- a lot of the most compelling models I've seen focus specifically and directly on minimal cost. A lot of it, in my opinion, involves a clarity of focus and of goals that schools have mostly left muddled.
This is one of the most personally resonant pieces of writing I have ever read. Thank you for sharing this. As a former math olympiad contestant and somebody who studied extensively and benefited deeply from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), I have never before heard someone speak about its curriculum so beautifully.
Because of AoPS, my exposure to and appreciation of mathematics and highly quantitative fields scaled in an immensely disproportionate way to the rest of my learning. I am so very grateful to have been exposed to AoPS by my more high-achieving classmates early in middle school, and the AoPS education ecosystem was a major source of my learning from then up to college. For college, in large part due to the opportunities made possible by my education through AoPS, I had the fortune to study at an institution with comparable or superior resources to those offered by AoPS across a breadth of subjects.
I wonder now if my life might be different if I had access in high school to an AoPS for English literature, an AoPS for history, or an AoPS for the arts/music. On the other hand, I can also imagine that secondary school math education is a unique area where improvements of the magnitude offered by AoPS are possible. Really looking forward to your work in this area.
I agree with all of your Principles. I would be heartened to see them embedded in a new model.
and yet
Excellence accentuates difference. Difference is taboo.
Did you know that the Air Force, as part of the U.S. Armed forces, is exempt from much Federal anti-discrimination law? Those laws were deemed antithetical to the development and cohesion of the best fighting force possible.
Dukes v. Griggs prohibits the use of IQ testing in private employment, unless narrowly tailored and necessary to the work. No such prohibition applies to the military. The ASVAB is an IQ test that sorts military applicants. As you can imagine, different ethnic groups pass at different rates. This is not grounds for a lawsuit against the military. It's a pure meritocracy, and they don't have to care about anyone's feelings or our culture's mass lies about the role of genetics in human performance.
The Jesuits figured out how to run a classroom 200 years ago. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, convince the American left to abandon sleds and adopt the obviously superior cultural technology.
My gifted program taught us logic skills and had opportunities to deploy critical thinking, but that's no different than the average 1850 middle school. I truly think it was pointless, and that other children would have benefited from having leading students in their classrooms. The smart kids would be picked on by some, and venerated by others, and ultimately their status in the class would depend on their status with teachers and administrative staff, and the stories of success communicated about prior students who excelled.
One easy win you could achieve is to reestablish the norm that being excellent is excellent, that praising our best instead of our worst should be the norm. But good luck selling that to administrators who are terrified of the feral Gen X and Millennial parents themselves trained to believe that all problems are social problems and that it's always the responsibility of an institution not to fail a person, rather than the other way around.
The total dearth of lefty Millennial and Gen X leaders highlights their problem. They don't want leaders. They don't believe anyone can be qualified to lead. There's no amount of excellence that would convince them that a person might deserve more power than others. They don't believe in the use of power at all, even benevolently. There's no point in them developing excellence, because excellence is not required, and is, in fact, not desirable.
Excellence, like power, reveals. Excellence would reveal who is not excellent by their standards. Those distributions would confirm what anyone with eyes can see. I understand the desperation to avoid this issue. It is unavoidable. Our education system is very good, maybe the best.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1822296863879450861
Criticism of American education is similar to criticism of American life expectancy by Euros. They point to the average decline in America in the past decade. Martin Wolf, of the FT, has numerous articles claiming that as a evidence of the U.S.A.'s dysfunctionality.
When I emailed Mr. Wolf a breakdown of life expectancy by ethnicity, and showed him that White and Asian people in America have lifespans equal to Japan or Norway, he called me an idiot for not accepting Black people as part of our population for the purpose of life expectancy. I don't want black people gone, I want policy-makers to address the causes of their lowered life expectancy. But Mr. Wolf was not persuaded or mildly interested. We're all the same to him, apparently. I guess he thinks if you're born Chinese American, you have the average life expectancy. Ultimately, he said his parents were affected by WWII and that he'd never accept any conclusion based on ethnic difference. Ok, I understand this, but Mr. Wolf being wrong for the right reason doesn't make him right. Ethnic differences drive almost every difference in medical care for subpopulations. "Race isn't real", but South Asian and African Africans have elevated risk for heart disease. Refusing to see problems and work to solve them, on their own terms -- pretending a problem is a different problem so that you can use your preferred tool -- is selfish madness.
Either we all become Rawlsians, or the best of us will absent themselves from society, create parallel structures, and live secluded from the mainstream. It's already happening.