Nick,
I am not only talking about artistic students, but other gifted students. It is a hit or miss in any system, a parent would have to try to find a fit for their child. The child does have a better chance if they are gifted in language, science or math. Albert Einstein was not a particularly brilliant student. In his case he had something internal that kept him in the pursuit of science.

It seems to me that your son actually should have been allowed to start working when he was very young. If I understand correctly, he had a talent that was not being exercised and he became frustrated and bored.

What if he had been permitted to leave school at 12, and start working as a visual artist? He would have been able to exercise his talents, earn an income, gain recognition for his skills (instead of being derided for not expending effort on schooling he did not want)? Wouldn’t he have been happier?

This notion that people shoud receive book learning until they are 18 – 25 is a recent innovation that has more to do with the failed social engineering of the 1890′s – 1940′s progressive movement.

If I understand you, you would like options for artistic people? How is that not served by a private school system? And why wouldn’t vouchers work for that?

Nick

I would say part of no1. is true and I would like to qualify no 2. Although I would like to say that when the public schools were providing the equality of opportunity(I use this statement in a comment on another post), it did not for most blacks during Jim Crow. Also, the school districts were more local.

1. Some students would fall through the cracks in alternative school systems.
2. Our current system has provided equality of opportunity that other systems would not provide.

If that’s an incorrect representation of what you’ve said, please let me know. Otherwise, I don’t think I’m representing what you have said incorrectly.

Second, I do care about those children. But, leaving a horribly failed system in place because the replacement may not be perfect is something I can’t get on board with. The reality, whether we like it or not, is that some children will be failed in any schooling system we put in place. The goal is to reduce that number to the lowest possible. Our current system does not do that.

I have already stated what I think makes a gifted person. I did give my view what I thought of vouchers and I think if we had them, millions of inner city children would still suffer. Or course you would know more about that than me.

“Even if that were proven accurate, vouchers would decrease the number of students chained to those failing schools. That’s important.”

This is already happening in some school systems. Believe me when I say, it would be the same parents involved now in getting the best for their child, would be the same one in front of the line for vouchers. You all do not know how parents scuffle for the best schools in the public schools. They have the best Home and School associations and bring in resources, while some other schools languish because of the lack of parental involvement. Believe me those same schools will not change, because of vouchers. The parents will run away as fast as they can and the others will be left behind. You may not care about those children, but I would hope that somebody cared about them.

Are you talking about the nice suburban schools, or the ones in the inner city? Right now we have a sort of school choice, but it’s based on where you [can afford to] live. I think the kids in Washington DC wouldn’t consider the public schooling system to be serving them.

That’s completely outside of the point that our public education system is largely designed to make people into docile workers. But the schools in Washington DC can’t even accomplish that.

I’d also point out that many successful people probably consider themselves successful despite their public education, not because of it.

Our public university systems work well. What distinguishes them from our public K-12 system? After all, both have bureaucracy, regulation, etc. Yet, one works well and the other doesn’t.

VRB, I wonder why you appear to believe that the government can somehow improve schools when they have proven so dramatically incapable of it? Every story we have of a school that turned around or an individual student served well (like the one above) is a story of individuals acting outside of the government plans and standards. Rather than trying to bureaucratize that, we should be empowering individuals. One way to empower individual is through competitive services.

If you don’t know what stimulates or motivates a gifted student, creating a school still would not be a solution.

Brad,
I think your concept of gifted is different than mine.

I agree with you, with the exception of one point. You claim that vouchers will “never” work, because the current school district is rather homogeneous.

What I would take issue with is the idea that after a voucher program was implemented, that the district would remain static. I think competition would lead to specialization, and that a school targeted toward catering to gifted kids might spring up to service all the gifted students in the district.