re: A 14 year old is about to graduate from Southern University

quote:

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I never understood “skipping” a ton of grade levels. It creates socially awkward people and what in the grand scheme of things does it help the person? Traded 10 years of being around his peers and developing social skills that he can still get a phd later.

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I don't think it is the skipping of grades "creates" social awkwardness. A percentage of people are just socially awkward without regard to how they function intellectually. My experience has been that some are also as much advanced in their social skills as academic skills. As a parent of a gifted child who also first attended classes at a university at 11, she just preferred to interact with adults by the time she was 9 or 10. By 18 she was participating in presentations of research projects of her university at national conferences. Other bright kids we knew were building wind tunnels at 12 and using them to measure the energy created by passing automobiles, but also socially gregarious.

The pertinent issue seems more about whether academics becomes the sole focus of their lives. The push to graduate college very early feels like a bragging rights thing.