Today I Learned...

Implicit in my post on intelligence versus wisdom is the idea that kids need to be educated alongside other kids with roughly the same intelligence and maturity level. And I stand by that. First of all, it's flat out easier to teach kids who know about the same amount and learn at about the same rate than kids that don't. Until we have an excess of good teachers, we have to consider the efficient use of the ones we have. Second, being noticeably smarter, dumber, less mature, or more mature than your classmates can lead to a lot of problems. At the very least it's isolating. It also means you don't get practice for the inevitable time you are the smartest/dumbest in the room.*

But cyrstalpyramid raises an excellent point in the comments of said post, which is that if you're surrounded by people like you all day, you tend to assume all the people you don't see are like you as well. This leads to all sorts of problems- not understanding why poor people eat junk food when it's cheap to eat well, without understanding the non-economic costs of doing so, and how being poor increases those costs. Calling to close payday lenders without investigating whether the alternatives of the people who use them are worse. Being shocked by the existence of people who aren't outraged by the pornoscanners. Not understanding friends who take substandard housing because their parents can't afford to loan them a security deposit. And a complete inability to understand political arguments you don't agree with.

Faced with people who are making such wrong decisions and lacking the empathy to determine why they are doing it, political discourse breaks down. I can't think of a single thing I like about Sarah Palin, but it bugs me when my mom dismisses people who do like her as Palin-bots, because doing so shuts down any chance of learning what it is these people get from her.

So we need to educate kids mostly with other similar kids, because it's more efficient and most likely to produce an environment where their effort controls the outcome, which is essential for development. But we also need not only expose them to kids dramatically unlike themselves, we need to do it in such a way that they connect with and empathize with the not-them children. This is one of the strongest arguments for sports and arts in schools that I can make.

*Animal behavior tangent: when puppies with large size differentials play, the big one usually lets the small one win at least occasionally. Part of that may be to keep the little puppy interested, but it's also hypothesized that the purpose of play isn't just to get stronger and better at hunting, it's to practice the social skills needed for both winning and losing. And honestly, if we just told gifted kids "pretend to lose so you can practice losing gracefully," I wouldn't have a huge problem with it. My preference is to put the kids in situations where they'll naturally have a decent win/loss ratio, but if you can't do that, honestly admitting what you want from them is the next best thing. The problem arises when we imply they're doing something wrong by being smart. And of course the fact that we would never tell a kid to throw a football game so he can practice losing.