I am 21 years old and live in New Zealand. At my schools, sexual harrassment was not such a big problem and I wasn’t harrassed at school. Ffrom what I’ve seen mentally disabled kids are are more likely to experience school sexual harrassment/humiliation. The times I most remember witnessing sexual harrasment at school has been against mentally disabled children (against 2 boys in primary school, and several times against one girl at high school) who were harrassed by a number of guys. In the high school incident it was in my drama class, I was in a group of about 15 boys. Me and the girl with Down Syndrome were the only females – I didn’t know what to do. I felt sick, sad and angry, and really sorry for the other girl. The teacher wasn’t around. When the teacher came back she told me she was glad I had been in the boys’ group because some of boys had been hassling the other girl in previous classes. I realized that she had put me in that group because she expected me to stop them harrassing her! I was shy and 14 years old, and the only girl in that group – I am angry that the teacher expected me to sort the problem out instead of taking responsibility for it herself. Now I wish I had done something. But in that situation it was ultimately the teacher’s responsibility to make sure the harrassment stopped.

Now I have some more sympathy for the guys who harrassed her – they would never consider what they had done ’sexual’ harrasment or abuse, even though it was sexualised and meant to humiliate her. They thought the girl they harrassed didn’t understand that they were pretending to be her friends but actually were making fun of her. I know she understood that – I know she was embarrased, scared, knew what they were doing was wrong/inappropriate, knew they were laughing at her. She told one to stop, and he didn’t. After drama class I saw her crying, she wouldn’t tell me why. At the time I thought she was angry at me for not doing anything, but now I think perhaps she was angry that she was humiliated in front of me or that I had seen her crying.

My context: I’m a child of massive privilege and very educated, wealthy, white, creative, healthy, worldly, supportive parents. I went to elite, expensive private schools from ages 3 to 23, graduating from Wellesley College with degrees in Cognitive Science and Education. I traveled extensively throughout four continents before I turned 20, including a “year off” in Kenya when I was 19. Sure, my IQ is high. Nature? Nurture? Some of both, obviously, but wealth certainly factors heavily in the regression analysis. Patriarchy blaming feminist who knows she’s been colonized against her will? You bet.

Since graduating feminist cum laude, I have been an elementary teacher in elite private schools, been a Peace Corps Volunteer, been a bilingual elementary teacher in a massively overcrowded (2500 kids K-5) underfunded urban public school, taught undergraduates majoring in elementary education, and earned a doctorate in literacy education. And what have I chosen to do now that I’ve “grown up?” I teach 6th and 7th graders in an urban charter school because it is where I feel I can strike the best balance between trying to affect meaningful change while staying sane and raising my own family.

I have read every comment with interest, but think Roar summarizes my own position best: “First, every kid deserves a meaningful education. Kids who learn fast deserve it. Kids who learn slow deserve it. Poor kids deserve it. Rich kids deserve it.” To me, that is a no-brainer, and no one who believes otherwise should be allowed to teach, or set public education policy, or vote on educational issues, or even comment on blog threads pertaining to questions of educational access.

However, actually providing that meaningful education to every kid requires a staggering committment of precious resources: time, energy, money, empathy, intelligence, but most especially the patience and flexibility to see each chid as a unique person with unique needs. Not just from teachers and other education professionals, mind you, but also parents, lawmakers, taxpayers, and every member of our proverbial “village” raising our children.

And honestly? Our patriarchical society is not willing to make that committment to ALL our children. The infrastructure isn’t there. The political will isn’t there. Perhaps there aren’t ever going to be enough resources to make it happen, ever — idealistically, I’d like to believe that’s not true. But realistically, the patriarchy has convinced me that perhaps the sacrifices required might be too great. Regardless, as things stand now, the patience and flexibility and vigillance required to ENSURE it happens for individual children is only available to certain people — mostly the ones with money, tenacity, information, lawyers, contacts, access, or whatever other cultural and economic capital they can leverage.

So when Twisty proposes revolution, what I think she is saying is that we need to recognize that our current educational system is failing too many students and then truly commit ourselves to developing a system that legitimately meets all students’ needs. Sadly, homeschooling is not a fair or comprehensive guarentee of providing universally meaningful education, for many reasons some commenters have explained above. To me, the various sub-threads about “gifted” education vs. “special” education or public, private, and charter schools all point back to the essential point that as things stand now, our society has NOT figured out how to set aside and distribute the resources necessary to provide a personally meaningful education to all children. *THAT*, to me, is the crux of the dilemma, and yes — IBTP.

God bless,
Shelley Goodman

Is it, crap. Give the kid every possible opportunity, and let her sing over chemistry. And give anyone who gives her grief for it hell in return. Life is unfair anyway, but that doesn’t mean we should sit back and actively perpetuate it.

And the teachers use “gifted” identification as one characteristic to recommend the Honors English classes in middle school that allow one to progress to AP English by senior year of high school. So while AP courses are not limited to gifted-identified students, they are functionally restricted to them, unless the parents know well enough to push to have pre-requisites ignored for thier kids. The parents need to be gifted in advocacy, if the kids were not identified gifted!

Now, if you are gifted enough not to need any instruction in the subject, I’m certain you can take the AP Calculus exam, if you even know to register for it – the school only announces the AP exams in the AP classes, and only offers the reduced price for low-income students to the AP classes students (Yup, my child once qualified for that – cut the prices in 1/2 that year, from totally unreasonable to a week’s grocerys for 4 unreasonable).

Of course, our schools also pride themselves in how they can avoid (i.e. break) state education mandate and federal special education law…. but they are far from alone, in this state or this country.

First, every kid deserves a meaningful education. Kids who learn fast deserve it. Kids who learn slow deserve it. Poor kids deserve it. Rich kids deserve it. What I see from Edith is the suggestion that somehow gifted kids should accept their lot in life and be bored for 12 years and wait for everyone else to catch up. It is I guess a kind of punishment they deserve for what she imagines is solely a product of their socioeconomic class. I’d suggest instead that learning is a basic human right. EVERY kid deserves access to it. And, you really haven’t spent much time around kids if you think every middle or upper middle class kid is equally bright.

It isn’t okay as V suggests to tell the school that they must just meet the child’s needs with same age peers because for some kids that just can’t be done. Contrary to what some suggested, many gifted kids get absolutely NOTHING from their school systems. There is no federal mandate or funding to provide gifted education. We were told that our eight year old child would be kept with same age peers except he’d spent the entire school day on a computer in the corner of the room taking high school classes. Realistically most elementary school teachers can’t teach high school so what other options are there if we require kids to stay with same age peers? While I never would have understood why someone would put their 10 year old in high school, I get it now. This is a difficult situation without a lot of great options and it can be a matter of choosing a least worst.

I think it is really missing the point to see this as a problem of acceleration. While in elementary school with same age peers, I experienced harassment on an ongoing basis. There was a regular “game” of confining girls under the bleachers and of taking them into the bathroom and pulling down pants. In middle school bra snapping was the big thing. And, in high school it moved on to date rape. That has nothing to do with acceleration and everything to do with sexism.

Oh and last thing, for the folks who suggest that homeschoolers are somehow not doing their part by sending their kids to school. It reminds me of the sign at the Humane Society that says “the animal you drop off is not your donation”. Further, why is this charge only leveled about where we send our kids to school. What about other things in your life? Do you single out people who live in middle class neighborhoods, shop in middle class neighborhood stores, have their kids enrolled in middle class neighborhood sports programs? I mean really, shouldn’t they be only doing things in lower economic status neighborhoods in order to contribute?

You know, in a lot of ways I hated my (single-sex, very hoity-toity and snobbish, highly traditional) boarding school BUT reading some of the horror stories here I’m suddenly really grateful I never had to go to public high school. It sounds like a nightmare. At least at my school the idea that girls are intelligent was taken as a given. We were EXPECTED to excel. Anything else was unnacceptable.
(Which of course creates it’s own problems for less gifted students)

One word of caution, since I’ve seen many people advocate boarding school – it’s not for everyone. How well kids adjust depends a lot on how attached they are to their parents. It can do a lot of damage to parent-child relationships, and if handled poorly can leave the kids feeling like their parents just don’t want them around. A lot of abuse can happen at those schools – I was sexually harrassed by my housemistress for years. For a kid who is shy or lacking in confidence it can really screw them up. If the parents take that route, they need to do a lot of checking in with the kid to make sure that she’s coping and they also need to make it absolutely clear to her that if she wants out they will in fact come and rescue her. I knew a lot of kids who were miserable and felt like their parents knew and just didn’t care, whereas in fact the parents had no idea what was going on. Bullying can be hard for parents to spot when they’re not around every day.
Academically boarding school is usually great, but I just want to make it clear that there are potential pitfalls and that parents need to pay really close attention to the kid’s emotional wellbeing. Things can go bad really quickly if the parents aren’t paying attention.