This is a fair point. My older daughter (now 26) was very smart, and easily bored in normal public school. We worked very hard to be able to send her to the best private schools we could find, from age 8 onwards (she ended up at Westminster School in London, then Oxford). She might have also flourished if homeschooled, if we’d had the time to do that.
So, Caplan’s data might not apply so clearly if you and your partner are above about IQ 130 or 140, which means your kids are likely to be close to that (there is regression to the mean, but it’s fairly limited for IQ, which has a heritability in adults of about 70-80%). However, Caplan does address this point in the education book.
I would argue that if you have smart kids, try to find the most selective schools you can that embrace standardized testing and streaming, and that have gifted programs, honors classes, etc. Smart kids love having peers who are smart—and even if it doesn’t make all that much different to their eventual career success, it can be a huge benefit to their day-to-day life quality and sentient experience.
I agree that EAs should support a lot more experimentation in parenting and education, especially in nurturing exceptional talent! I think we are nowhere near optimal in our current educational approaches.
This is a fair point. My older daughter (now 26) was very smart, and easily bored in normal public school. We worked very hard to be able to send her to the best private schools we could find, from age 8 onwards (she ended up at Westminster School in London, then Oxford). She might have also flourished if homeschooled, if we’d had the time to do that.
So, Caplan’s data might not apply so clearly if you and your partner are above about IQ 130 or 140, which means your kids are likely to be close to that (there is regression to the mean, but it’s fairly limited for IQ, which has a heritability in adults of about 70-80%). However, Caplan does address this point in the education book.
I would argue that if you have smart kids, try to find the most selective schools you can that embrace standardized testing and streaming, and that have gifted programs, honors classes, etc. Smart kids love having peers who are smart—and even if it doesn’t make all that much different to their eventual career success, it can be a huge benefit to their day-to-day life quality and sentient experience.
I agree that EAs should support a lot more experimentation in parenting and education, especially in nurturing exceptional talent! I think we are nowhere near optimal in our current educational approaches.