/pt/ – Petrarchan

On a related topic which is maths prodigies: A 17-year old recently disproved an unsolved mathematical conjecture, which makes her one of the youngest mathematicians to solve a major open problem. https://www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah-cairo-solved-a-major-math-mystery-20250801/ Now, what stands out to me is that--apart from the genetic endowments you have to have, to succeed in such a field at so young an age--she was home-schooled. She knew calculus by 11, and in many schools, ALGEBRA isn't taught by that age. Confining brilliant kids alongside dullards is one of the worst things about our modern society. Some people have more ability and they should be encouraged, not levelled down. Reading this, I was stunned by the way that established institutions react and treat her, even after she is a confirmed prodigy: >The math world is also adjusting to the fact of Cairo herself. After completing the proof, she decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping college (and a high school diploma) altogether. As she saw it, she was already living the life of a graduate student. Now read this: extraordinary..... >Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions. >Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree. You can be a genius, it doesn't matter: pencil-pushers will always try and grind you down. They perceive geniuses as a cancer and see themselves as the immune system which is there to flatten them down to the level of the great mass. It's not spelled out but I infer from the article that her parents were extremely supportive, which is important. Especially because many of the Asperger's syndrome-types attracted to mathematics are the kind who ARE easily discouraged. Parents who make sacrifices for their kids will get rewarded when the kids have a far better career and live much better lives. Lewis Hamilton's dad sacrificed a lot so his son could race go karts; now he and his wife are living very well indeed. To your post's questions, I never believed the idea that kids have to wait till a certain age because kids are so different from another in their ability. I could apparently read when I was quite young, certainly before 6 or 7. I would have thought children who can't read by then are intellectually disabled, but then again, I hardly ever deal with children so I have no way of knowing what's considered normal.

>>6734

On a related topic which is maths prodigies: A 17-year old recently disproved an unsolved mathematical conjecture, which makes her one of the youngest mathematicians to solve a major open problem. https://www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah-cairo-solved-a-major-math-mystery-20250801/ Now, what stands out to me is that--apart from the genetic endowments you have to have, to succeed in such a field at so young an age--she was home-schooled. She knew calculus by 11, and in many schools, ALGEBRA isn't taught by that age. Confining brilliant kids alongside dullards is one of the worst things about our modern society. Some people have more ability and they should be encouraged, not levelled down. Reading this, I was stunned by the way that established institutions react and treat her, even after she is a confirmed prodigy: >The math world is also adjusting to the fact of Cairo herself. After completing the proof, she decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping college (and a high school diploma) altogether. As she saw it, she was already living the life of a graduate student. Now read this: extraordinary..... >Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions. >Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree. You can be a genius, it doesn't matter: pencil-pushers will always try and grind you down. They perceive geniuses as a cancer and see themselves as the immune system which is there to flatten them down to the level of the great mass. It's not spelled out but I infer from the article that her parents were extremely supportive, which is important. Especially because many of the Asperger's syndrome-types attracted to mathematics are the kind who ARE easily discouraged. Parents who make sacrifices for their kids will get rewarded when the kids have a far better career and live much better lives. Lewis Hamilton's dad sacrificed a lot so his son could race go karts; now he and his wife are living very well indeed. To your post's questions, I never believed the idea that kids have to wait till a certain age because kids are so different from another in their ability. I could apparently read when I was quite young, certainly before 6 or 7. I would have thought children who can't read by then are intellectually disabled, but then again, I hardly ever deal with children so I have no way of knowing what's considered normal.

>You can be a genius, it doesn't matter: pencil-pushers will always try and grind you down. They perceive geniuses as a cancer and see themselves as the immune system which is there to flatten them down to the level of the great mass. Reminds me of picrel. I have similar stories as I'm sure many others here do as well. I'm no one-in-a-generation genius but I continue to seethe at just how much schooling has taken away from me even decades later.

Also my dumb little anecdote about reading for this thread was I started extremely young at around 2/3. Only through the good sense of my immigrant parents was I granted to read more advanced books on my own time than was allowed by the school system. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was told they couldn't read more "advanced" books (what little there was even offered in those dogshit libraries) than the other students for no other reason than to follow the guidelines. I do have to say that this seems to be a rather American preoccupation and no European I've told my stories to really believes me. They feign shock, but I can tell on their faces that they truly deep down don't believe what I say...

>Cairo grew up in Nassau, the Bahamas, where her parents had moved so that her dad could take a job as a software developer. She and her two brothers — one three years older, the other eight years younger — were all homeschooled. Cairo started learning math using Khan Academy’s online lessons, and she quickly advanced through its standard curriculum. By the time she was 11 years old, she’d finished calculus. Khan Academy completely BTFOs conventional schools for self-directed learners, awesome. Even a lot of private schools would not let you accelerate as much as she would need to be accelerated.

I know that the typical experience in mainstream schooling is in the range between "meh" and "negative" so I just want to expand on it a little bit by sharing my experience as a person with good transcripts. tl;dr School was good to me; I was good at school: it didn't really prepare me for life. My parents both trained to be schoolteachers. My dad had to quit a few years in because the pay was so low it was criminal (he spent his career in a government job) and my mom quit to raise us (she went back to teaching when I was 11 or so). I would describe their parenting philosophy as "Prussian" -- adamantine rules, occasional harshness, and overbearing duty. When I was 18 and I met my wife (shut up I know) I was shocked that her family said "I love you" so frequently. My parents' view was basically that correct outward behavior is the only thing that matters and everything between your ears is mere commentary. I am the youngest of three. My oldest brother chafed at it but my middle brother has a gentle temperament and just conformed to it. I imitated my middle brother in most things, but I'm also exceptionally stubborn. My middle brother is basically the only person in my family who says "I love you." I was always very good at school, and I mean "school." I was good at all the skills that the un-schoolers sneer at. I literally never missed a day of school. Zero sick days in 12 years. I was my school's valedictorian. In late high school I figured out that I could still get As even if I deliberately got stuff wrong so I would turn in mid-terms etc. with 10% of the answers empty. But I ran out of road in college because I was leaving the hyper-structured environment. Nobody really told me what to do for college so I just applied to the one my brother went to and I wrote my application directly on the mailer they sent me after the SATs. My parents weren't tiger parents and they didn't care about anything beyond public HS because nothing beyond that was explicitly commanded to them by the state. I don't even think they even asked me if I was applying to college. They just kind of picked up the plan based on what I had been doing to imitate my brother. College is basically where my life of folly began. I had been trained for a command-and-control structure but I didn't really have a sense of what college was supposed to be for other than hanging out with cool people and doing fun stuff. Classes were still easy and I did well academically. But by the time I applied to grad school (what else but more school?) I was starting to pick up that other people were still being groomed and other people were being told how to write "Personal Statements" etc. I was baffled by all of the invisible curriculum that was not obvious from the surface. I was far outside of of my command-and-control structure and I was just operating on raw processing power. Let me tell you -- ZERO professors like teaching grad school to someone who is just a bright 22 year old with a lot of questions about the fundamental premises in the field. I didn't really have a "correct" research path because I hadn't been groomed in undergrad, and I hadn't been groomed in undergrad because I didn't really think that the classes were anything other than classes, and I only thought that because everything about my upbringing taught me to attend to explicit, overt commands and conform to them. So grad school was an absolute mess because I tried to deal with my shortcomings by studying harder (lol I was the only person in my program who was doing 110% of the readings) when I should have been sucking somebody's dick in office hours or something. Obviously I have never had a warm supportive relationship with an older person to guide me -- neither parent nor mentor. I was absolutely crushing things like my exams but my professors had no idea what to do with me because nobody wanted to explain how the profession worked in explicit, overt terms. I understand that the last paragraph makes me sound spectrumy, but I assure you that I am not. I got through by doing some deft political maneuvering. I will agree that I needed more social-and-emotional education when I was a teenager -- it might have been nice if I had anyone in my life who cared about who thought of me as better than a behaviorist pigeon. I have a family and I have the job that I went to grad school for, but now that I'm in the position of being the adult in the room I'm blown away at how badly my upbringing aligned with the challenges I faced merely attending higher ed. I think that the bottom line of everything I want to offer is that the anti-school people have some really good points about the classroom environment and what is demanded of students. I gave the classroom everything it demanded of me, but that's a really far cry from the kind of development that an actually flourishing adult needs.