How School Taught My Smart Friend Not To Try
By teaching to the ‘average’.
When I was a kid, I had a friend at school who was really smart, like really really smart.
Return readers might wonder what I (not real smart at all) and James had in common, well by about the middle of primary school we had both worked out something about school.
It didn’t work well for us.
When I say James was smart, I mean it, really smart, so naturally most people would expect a smart kid would thrive in an academic environment, right? But it wasn’t.
For James, school was more like a prison, and his intelligence was what made school suck for him.
In our early school years, James used to dive deep into his schoolwork. He would stay up late, not because he was struggling, but because he was so engrossed in what he was learning. He’d write intricate stories and solve math problems faster than the teacher could explain them.
But instead of being rewarded, he got punished by the system.
As the years went on we went over the same material. And James was bored out of his mind. He’d already mastered the subjects, and there was nothing new to challenge him.
