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11:47am August 19, 2014
shippyfairy asked: hi--I enjoyed your exgifted posts and was wondering if you have thoughts more on the concept of early college that you briefly mentioned? (i'm familiar with Simon's Rock, but know there are others.) I'm curious both about your experience there and your more general thoughts on the educational role of early colleges and their effects on young people.

So… my take on SRC in particular is that it is a horrible idea.  At least, the way it’s implemented when I was there, when people I know were there long before me, it’s a place that simply should not exist in the manner that it exists.  Basically it takes high school age students, and gives them the freedom normally given to college students.  There’s no real attempt to notice that they’re not as mature as college students and it becomes a free-for-all from hell.  Oh also people don’t realize this, but it incorporates both high school and college level curriculum, it’s not just college level stuff.  It blends the two so that people can catch up.

Bullying is rampant, and the bullies are not your average bullies.  They’re people who will orchestrate the most elaborate schemes in order to fuck with your head.  I’ve seen them do it to other people, I’ve seen them to do it to me, and you would not believe the things I’d seen if I told you about them.  You’d say “Nobody would go to that extreme just to hurt someone.”  But they would, and they do.  I still have bullies from SRC who have not seen me since I was 15 years old, have not had any contact with me of any kind since I was 19 years old, I’m now 34 years old and they are still invested in screwing me over as much as they possibly can.  That tells you what kind of wonderful people end up there.

When I encountered the autistic community, I started meeting people whose lives were a lot like mine, for the first time in my life.  What was my first thought?  It wasn’t “OMG, wow, I’m meeting people who understand me.”  It’s “My ‘friends’ [the people who bullied me and pretended to be my friends and I didn’t know better yet] have set up this elaborate network of people who claim to have things in common with me, so they can laugh at me when I fall for it.”  It took me over a year to get over that notion.  That tells you everything about the bullies.  When I did start making real friends, I always was there cringing, when I was feeling bad, when I was vulnerable.  I was always there waiting for them to jab me right in the stomach right where I was vulnerable.  And when they didn’t do it, that’s when I realized that none of my 'friends’ from college were friends at all, they were just bullies.  Because real friends don’t kick you when you’re down so they can laugh about it.

I would say that many if not most people who go there are neurologically atypical in some manner.  Some in a way that comes with a diagnosis, some in a way that doesn’t.  Even people with extremely obvious conditions don’t always stand out there.  When I went there, the school nurse was a psychiatric nurse.  None of this is necessarily a bad thing, but if you ever hear anyone from there saying “Well so-and-so didn’t stand out as unusual,” you have to realize exactly how unusual the people there are.

Also, despite anything you might have heard, it’s not a school for the gifted.  It’s a school for people who want to leave high school early and take college classes.  There is no IQ requirement, and no particular test score requirement to get in.  I was given an IQ test a few months after I left and I did not qualify as gifted.  So the idea that everyone there is gifted is false.  But a lot of people there are.

I don’t like the idea of early-entry colleges, but not for the reasons you might expect.  I don’t like the idea of a school system.  I think that learning ought to be for everyone.  I think that instead of a system of school where you progress from preschool to kindergarten to grade school to middle school to high school to college, there should simply be places of learning where anyone of any age can go and learn anything they want from people willing to teach it.  If you’re a 60-year-old and you want to learn to read, if you’re a 5-year-old who wants to learn astronomy, those things should be possible.  Learning shouldn’t be age-segregated and the “best stuff” shouldn’t be left to those considered especially “intelligent”.

That’s why I don’t like anything that even resembles gifted programs.  Because what they always are, is programs where amazing learning opportunities are offered, but only to people who measure up in some way.  Only to those who pass the test, only to those who pass the interview, whatever the line they draw in the sand.  And that’s not okay with me.  Good learning opportunities should be available to everyone, and it’s often people with more difficulty learning who stand the most to benefit from the stuff that right now is only available to those considered gifted.

(And yes it’s possible to be gifted and have learning disabilities.  In some cases it’s even possible to be diagnosed with giftedness and an intellectual disability at the same time — it happened to my brother, don’t ask how, I don’t know, it’s just what he told me.  He said they told him “You’re both gifted and retarded,” those are the words they used.  I was labeled gifted from the ages of 6 to 15, and I was also autistic and hyperlexic among other cognitive impairments, I was even diagnosed autistic before they took my gifted label away.  So it’s very possible to have both a label of giftedness, and something that makes it harder to learn in school, at the same time.)

Anyway, I don’t believe in these places because I don’t think they actually fix the problems of the school system.  They just separate out a chosen few and give them access to better learning.  And that pisses me off.  Everyone needs access to better learning, and the school system as it’s currently set up is horribly broken.

School should be a place where anyone of any age can go and learn anything, and where students help each other learn rather than competing with each other.  And until we have that, I’m not going to be happy with anything that comes out of the school system.  Especially not anything elitist.