I think fundamentally the problem is we are trying to fit everything into an industrial, and authoritarian, model of schooling. Students can't be trusted to self learn so we put them into a room, atomize them, strip away almost all of their freedom and force them to learn at the pace of the slowest learner in the group. It's little wonder that acting out is a constant problem.
Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping away at some of the problem don't generally do much about the structural problems in schools and clearly amplify some of their existing biases.
I do not have children but I have given a lot of thought to how terrible our schooling is. I would never want to subject my children to 20 years of what I went through. But the presence or absence of traditional gifted programs is nowhere near the top of my concerns.
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