In the course of homeschooling my twice exceptional sons, I participated on some email lists and did volunteer work for The TAG Project and hobnobbed with some of the industry insiders for the field of gifted education and assessment. Here are some things I learned during that period.
1. Testing and Assessment
The development of the Stanford–Binet (Intelligence Test) initiated the modern field of intelligence testing...
What I originally learned and cannot find a ready means to fact check is that Binet wasn't trying to develop an intelligence test. He was trying to develop a school readiness test in an era when some kids didn't have a birth certificate and no one knew their exact date of birth, so age couldn't be used as a cut off and France was seeing a marked difference in readiness between city kids and rural kids.
City kids were generally more familiar with things like standing in line and waiting for a bell to ring to signal the start of something, so probably even for children born the exact same date, they were more prepared for attending public school. So they wanted a means to determine who was ready for school to promote academic success.
Intelligence testing is rife with myriad problems which I've already written about.
IQ tests are tools useful in the hands of a qualified professional. Taking an online IQ test is basically nonsense for funsies and not a meaningful result.
In one discussion, someone gave an example that if you asked their young child "Who discovered America?" the kid would natter on about how Columbus came to the Americas, which he believed to be India, on X date but it wasn't called the Americas until a few years later when Amerigo Vespucci traveled here etc etc etc ...um, what was the question?
A child like that is obviously uncommonly knowledge and the depth of their knowledge cannot be assessed with some multiple choice question which they may not know how to answer "correctly" because they don't know what my oldest son scathingly calls "the teacher's password."
My son calls answering questions like that "Guessing the teacher's password." because there is exactly one socially acceptable "correct" answer -- "Columbus discovered America" -- and you just have to somehow know what that answer is supposed to be which may have at best a loose relationship to reality and cannot be determined from reading in depth on the topic of history.
My son frequently had no idea what that "teacher's password" answer was, in part because he was a voracious reader and knew too much, and it's one of the reasons he hated public school and did not have impressive grades. He was 11 years old when he finally got assessed by a professional which revealed a different story.
He was a B student in public school, his brother made straight As and when I pulled my sons from public school and enrolled them in a charter school to homeschool them, the guy in charge assessed both my kids and informed me my B student and problem child was the really challenging high IQ kid whom they would have trouble providing adequate curriculum.
Both my kids are twice exceptional and have a surprisingly similar profile of strengths and weaknesses, though somewhat more exaggerated for my okder son, yet one was the perfect public school student and one was "a loser" that teachers kept referring for testing or just bluntly said with zero assessment "Put him on Ritalin." because he made everyone crazy.
IQ Tests are tools useful in the process of assessment by a qualified professional and if you have merely taken a test without it being part of being assessed by a qualified professional, I don't really want to hear you glibly quote a number at me because you don't have a meaningful number.
So even if you believe intelligence tests really truly assess intelligence -- which I'm skeptical about -- a stand alone test is wholly insufficient even if you are the correct nationality, ethnicity, social class etc etc etc for the inherently biased test in question.
Tests can be useful and meaningful for determining things like school readiness, appropriate placement of a student and appropriate curriculum for a particular student based on where they are currently, but I have significant issues with the idea that you can meaningfully boil human intelligence down to a single number pegging their inherent potential and current abilities relative to that of all other humans.
2. Education and Training
Education teaches you how to think. Training prepares you to adequately perform a specific task or qualify for a particular job.
The world -- or at a minimum the USA -- seems to have forgotten this because most Americans now believe college is job training. And then we wonder why everything is so awful.
I'm not the only one saying this. You can find, say, YouTube videos criticizing the fact that historically education was described as preparing you to be a good citizen as an adult who knew your rights and how to exercise them.
And now people routinely take out huge student loans imagining that a college degree guarantees a successful, well-paid career while we act shocked that there's a glut of degreed individuals and many are waiting tables while living in mommy's basement and essentially a slave to the need to pay off their student loans.
Abraham Lincoln had very little formal education, yet passed the bar exam and became a lawyer and eventually became president. He is described as having been taught to read and write by a relative and as largely self taught.
The ability to learn is older -- as it is also more widespread -- than is the ability to teach.- Margaret Meade
During Lincoln's time, the average education level for women, who were typically homemakers, was between 2nd and 4th grade. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had a 12th grade education and was considered to be difficult and excessively opinionated fir a woman, so much so this almost certainly contributed to her son locking her up in an insane asylum after her husband's death.
3. Socialization
On that note, I will briefly mention the universal criticism of homeschooling "What about socialization?" where the word "socialization" gets a lot of unrelated concepts wrapped up together with it.
Socialization is related to Mary Todd Lincoln being declared "insane" for being out of step with social expectations for a woman of her time. Socialization is why city kids in France were outperforming rural kids in terms of school readiness.
Socialization is about learning the ropes for a particular social system, how it works, what is expected of you and how to navigate it and fit in. It's also strongly related to societal problems like racism and sexism where group think actively keeps certain patterns of behavior alive, even if they are actively harmful to both individuals and society.
It has nothing to do with "having social skills" or getting your social and emotional needs met. Furthermore, learning to fit in with public school cliques, which get dragged in movies like Mean Girls, has nothing to do with successfully pursuing career success or a happy marriage or any reasonable metric of life success as an adult.
My father was extremely successful as a career soldier. He retired from the Army and never figured out how to re-establish a successful career outside of that context.
In the prison system, someone who has been incarcerated for many years and has adapted to life in prison and can't function outside of it is called "an institutional man."
Learning the ropes for one particular social setting can be not only wholly unrelated to success outside that context, it can be counter to it.
If your child is coming home in tears from school, being bullied or otherwise traumatized, their ability to appropriately socialize will likely dramatically improve if you remove them from ongoing daily social trauma.
4. Liberal Arts
A liberal arts education currently has a terrible reputation as worthless, in part because when done properly this is a real education and not the job training most Americans currently expect from a college education. So people joke that a liberal arts education qualifies you for a job in fast food.
It actually qualifies you for some of the most powerful positions in the world because it teaches you how to think, how to make good decisions, and important details about life and law and culture essential to running things, but, no, you don't graduate and get installed as CEO the next day.
But all high level jobs have a fairly long process for getting there. Most urban planning degree programs are Master's programs, which means you typically have an undergrad degree in something else, often a Liberal Arts program or something geography related.
Urban planning requires substantial knowledge and preparation. The entry level jobs for the field trend towards being "tech support" of some sort for the people making the serious decisions. Good Liberal Arts degrees are viewed as valuable for this profession.
Saint John's is an elite school offering a rigorous liberal arts education based on a Great Books curriculum. It has an excellent reputation and reading about it may help adjust your view of Liberal Arts, so named because they are expected to liberate and empower you.
I used to say on homeschooling lists that I was giving my kids a humanities education, defined as educating them in how to successfully navigate life in spite of the inconvenient inescapable fact of their own humanity and that of other people.