By Donna Hay
Me too. Why? Because he skipped high school, and at age 16 he is a Junior in college with a stellar GPA, majoring in philosophy and minoring in math, expecting to enter law school by age 19. Unusual? Yes. Impossible? No.
America did not always have a lock-step age approach to education. In the 18th and early 19th century, after finishing the education in those small, rural, often one-room schoolhouses, with perhaps some time to gain work experience, young teens would enter college. Of the first twelve American presidents, most, like Thomas Jefferson, graduated from college at age 19. And this was from none-too-shabby schools like Harvard and William & Mary. Others skipped college and went directly to law school, like Andrew Jackson, when law school was more of an apprenticeship than a specific legal curriculum. Education was comprised of gaining a body of knowledge and skills, not wandering through 17-plus years of life in a social group of identically-aged children.
TIME Magazine's 2006 article "Dropout Nation" reported that America's high school graduation rate is only about 65-70%, a rate that has remained the same for over 30 years, despite a doubling in our spending per student and vigorous educational reform. It further cited how the Gates Foundation found that fully 88% of dropouts surveyed had passing grades in high school; more respondents named boredom than struggles with course work as the reason for leaving. We seem to think that a single curriculum per grade should fit every student. Our system is failing many children. And for our brightest students, the system can feel like a "mental jail" where they are not free to be challenged scholastically as they want and need.
TIME's 2004 article "Saving the Smart Kids" commented on how Americans don't seem to have any problem with teenagers who show genius in sports or entertainment, but we have a deeply ambivalent relationship with intellectually gifted kids. It mentioned that grade skipping is not only easy and economical but also, based on decades of research, positive -- a 2001 study found that 70% of children who skipped at least one grade thought it was positive, and most wished they had skipped more.
The same article describes how our greatest fears about acceleration are not pedagogical but psychological; we seem to worry a lot more about children's socialization than their education. Research has found a lot of those fears to be unfounded: accelerated students are nearly as likely to participate in extracurriculars as nonaccelerants and rate no differently on personal-adjustment scales. With the wealth of research findings like these, TIME questioned why so many American schools actively discourage grade-skipping.
So how did it work for my son? He started college at age 14, where he thrived being with 150 intellectual peers, who were not all his exact age. He has retained old friends and made many new ones. He is more involved with school clubs and activities than ever before. It was not a path we had planned for, but it has been an ideal path for him.
Curiously, few parents or educators know that these programs exist, and fewer still realize they have been around for decades. Much research has been done, and the overwhelming conclusions are positive. The majority of children who attend these programs were unhappy at their previous age-appropriate school and are thrilled at the educational challenge of the new school; they are often the happiest they had ever been. Most see it as a way to avoid the boredom, ostracism and even bullying they had suffered before, to finally experience the freedom to stretch intellectually with a dizzying array of course offerings. Many of these children look at a college course catalogue in much the same way pre-schoolers look at the candy offerings at the check-out aisle.
There are four college programs for children aged 15 and younger at entrance:
All four programs have strenuous entrance requirements, much higher than the requirements at the university itself. Generally, SAT scores must be at the 85% level, and/or IQ scores at the 98% level. Some have a transitional year before entering the mainstream university classes, and some have a provisional quarter where the children "try it on" to see if it fits before making the decision to leave their old school.
There are many programs that accelerate a year or two, and many colleges that will accept individual young scholars. What sets these four programs apart is the extremely young age at which children enter their programs (usually 11-15), and that they are designed for a group of accelerated students, not individuals.
Peer groups are important, and many of these students feel finally accepted, and not ostracized, because of their intellectual gifts and unusual needs for scholastic challenge. While these programs are not the right choice for all highly gifted students, the majority of their alumni conclude that it was the only choice for them that would have allowed them to reach their potential as scholars and as people.
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Mensan Donna Hay is on the board of the Early Entrance Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles. http://www.earlyentrancefoundation.org