Have you ever been inside a school? The stupid kids don't gather around to bask in the glow of the gifted kids. They DO gather around them and call them 'faggot' and trip them in the hallway, especially if they are smart but not athletic.
Do you think bullies are limited to the "stupid" kids? Let me tell you something - that's not the case at all. There is a good distribution of smart kids who just like to mess with others as well.
That's a failure of the school administration and disciplinary processes, and separating kids from each other based on perceived or measured intelligence is not going to solve it. Bullies are going to find a target whether there's a geek there or not. This is an argument for strict enforcement of anti-bullying policies, not isolating groups of kids from each other.
As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
Yet another reason to concentrate those smarter kids so that the people with the most potential don't have it wasted by being forced to go to a school with a failed administration.
In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
What stops the "smart kid school" from developing the same administrative problems as regular ones? Are "smart teachers" actually better at managing behaviour of pupils? Personally, I feel that the bullying problem might be less about individual teachers, and more about how the whole system is constructed.
There's simply much fewer bullies and problematic behavior in smart schools. It's not that the administration is better, it's that the administration doesn't have to be.
Imagine you are a great principle/counselor/teacher. You can work anywhere, because you are great at your job. Do you choose to go to the school with the superintendent that is nearly illiterate and completely incompetent at the district where the kids regularly assault each other and the staff? Or do you choose to go to the school where the kids love to learn, love to read, love to study, and respect their teachers and their school?
Only if you confound "dumb kid" and "problem kid". Certainly, get problem kids out of the equation, but that doesn't mean there isn't some benefit to different cognitive classes coming into contact with one another.
If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.
Have you ever been to the DMV? The next time you go, look around at the other people you are in line with. That is 'the rest of the country' that you are talking about. They aren't especially functional or reasonable.
You are getting dangerously close to personal attacks, which I believe will detract from your otherwise reasonable points. I think the discussion on HN is one of a few places where you could get appreciation for the problems in the educatiom system and it would be a waste to end it in heated emotional attacks.
And what exactly about them isn't functional or reasonable? I was at the DMV the other day; there were people from all walks of life and they all looked functional and reasonable.
