So I’m Australian, and here in Australia we have schools for gifted children, where admissions are based purely on standardised test results. Near the end of primary school you go to a special place to take a test, and the test is designed to measure logical thinking and mental flexibility rather than academic experience. And if you score highly, you go to a special school with smart students of all different backgrounds.
And I liked Spider-Man Homecoming in large part because Peter Parker goes to a “magnet school”, which I’m told is the American equivalent. And it doesn’t have any dumb jock types; the school bully is a little Indian brat with rich parents. It felt like a more modern take on high school tropes than all the high school movies where nerds wear bow ties that feel like the writer grew up in the 50s.
Anyway, half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy from queens could make it into a gifted school in our world, based purely on academic achievement. I’m aware that the American system is less fair and money plays a much bigger role, but I thought there was at least a chance that a genius kid could beat the system and get into a good school with good grades.
Do magnet schools exist? Is it all just lies by the rich?
Sick burn but decades of teaching the entire class at the worst-performing student’s level has produced a generation of illiterate young adults and is probably partially responsible for the rise of Trump. Different students need different levels of learning. If you take a kid with a mind for rocket science and force them to learn the basics of algebra three years in a row because their classmate doesn’t care about learning, that smart kid is gonna die inside and you get one less rocket scientist in the world. And then that kid is gonna become an Elon Musk fan and use Grok to AI generate child porn or something. That’s the current state of America.
I sure hope magnet schools exist.
The base principle you outline is applicable to most of life, even when washing your knickers most people know to separate the whites from the coloureds. That sounds a bit racist, maybe a better metaphor is when you make cheese you must remove the pure curd from the inferior whey to prevent contamination of the master substance. It went a bit Nazi that time, maybe stratification based on imposed intellectual criteria always goes a bit to the right.