Isn't it amazing how many five year olds go off to school as bright, curious, trusting ("gifted and talented") kids, and in a year or two become dull, angry little aliens?

Parents who expect the government schools to provide high quality academic education for smart children will always be frustrated. It's simply not offered. Those parents need to understand that the public schools are intended to offer only a minimum level of academic learning -- nothing more. In fact, the employees are not even academically oriented beyond the minimum level.

Despite their claims, they don't even recognize talents or gifts. So, when the school employees say,"We can't do anything for your gifted child," they aren't kidding. In fact, officially, they are not designed to. The official egalitarian attitude says, "We want everyone to be the same," and, unfortunately for those who are gifted, same means mediocre.The truth is that "gifted and talented" programs are fast-track indoctrination courses, not real academics.

The public school system has four purposes:

1. Economic: to keep children out of the job market until they're grown, to provide jobs for adults; and to provide child care for working parents.

2. Social: to indoctrinate children to the culture (originally it was to protestantize Catholic immigrants, but now it is for social engineering, mixing races -- they call it "diversity," when it's really homogenization.

3. Political: to teach attitudes such as political correctness and consumerism.

4. Academic: offer a minimum body of skills and knowledge.

Parents are not well aware of the first three, but those are performed fairly well by the government schools. "Gifted and talented" programs are simply more intensive indoctrination courses, not real academics. It's that fourth purpose -- academic -- that lets most parents and children down as the schools are getting worse all the time by watering down the content and lowering standards, while increasing the social and political agendas.

The schools not only can't offer Johnny what he needs, but they don't know what he needs, are not interested in finding out, and couldn't provide it if they wanted to.The typical employee of a State Dep. of Ed. would say: "Our interest is in seeing that everyone reaches our learning standards."

What they leave out is how incredibly low those standards are, and that they are intended to be low. Under these circumstances, bright kids, and even many average ones, become "behavior problems" because they are so bored, disrespected, misunderstood, and know they are being warehoused.