What I’ve seen working in practice is grouping the highly gifted with older ‘merely’ gifted kids (combining 1) and 2)). If the latter group is 1 in 100, there would be enough of them to form a class even in a smaller city (Say a city with pop 200,000 & 2000 births per year means 20 gifted kids per cohort).
The gifted ones tend to focus on learning and have similar inclinations to the highly gifted so it works out socially, as long as overt competition is kept to a minimum.
That probably works better at the elementary and middle-school-age ranges (I'm thinking pre-calculus, pre-high-school work). Once you get to traditional high-school level, I think even the 2 years older "merely gifted" kids will be holding back the younger truly exceptional.
100% agree that it's way, way better than the current state of the art which seems to me to basically be "as long as they aren't causing trouble, we're happy to have them bored in class and pulling up our standardized testing results..."
Yes, agree about the increasing difference. At the high school level, it’s often better to group more highly gifted students together. They are generally able to live further away from their parents so population size is less of a problem by then.
This is actually a common practice in several Asian countries. There are a couple national-level magnet schools and (highly) gifted classes within those schools where these kids are taught and trained by special teachers and curriculum specialized to their talent—math, science, language.
It’s likely that excessive desire for educational “equality” despite adverse consequences in some other countries squanders the potentials of many such kids.
Yeah I wonder how much "grading schools & teachers by standardized testing" has discouraged advanced learning programs (because they want to juice their scores). The future historians will condemn this age for holding back talented kids.
The gifted ones tend to focus on learning and have similar inclinations to the highly gifted so it works out socially, as long as overt competition is kept to a minimum.