Eight Year Old Physics Student Admitted to College 644
paris writes to tell us that The Korea Herald is running a story about Song Yoo-guen, the youngest university student that Korea has ever seen. At eight years old Song is already talking about building flying cars and defying Newton's law of gravity while others his age are attending the first grade. He completed his elementary, junior-high, and high school curricula in just nine months, something that usually takes 12 years, and has been admitted as a freshman to the physics department of Inha University.
flying cars? (Score:3, Interesting)
Lacking (Score:1, Interesting)
How can he be a college student if he can't communicate with adults? If his parents forced education on him, which the interview doesn't really say they due but you can only guess, isn't that a form of child abuse?
proof that K1-12 is a crock of pooh (Score:2, Interesting)
Kids can learn faster and do it all well, its just the system is designed to make
robots and YES MEN.
The system cannot handle dynamic progress per student, its a FORD assembly plant.
Maths can be sped up 50 fold, first 5 years is ridiculously slow/low tech. Kids can learn 8 years in 12months.
History - that takes more effort/knowledge of the earth, tho skip the bit about remembering dates and its faster.
Languages - well , the whole language can be broken down in 1 4hr lesson into a massive 1 foot sized flow chart and rules, the rest are just like learning C++, all the verbs and nouns and functions.
That's a really intersting question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not so fast.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Do these kids just max out at age 10 and eventually are equalled or even surpassed by their peers later on down the road? How are they when they are say 25, 30, 40?
Now that is what I really want to know. The final form of the adult.
Re:Annoying (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lacking (Score:3, Interesting)
How did his parents raise him? (Score:5, Interesting)
Poor kid (Score:5, Interesting)
- Jesse McNelis
Where are the older ones? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:happy for him (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:1, Interesting)
I skipped a few years of high-school and was a bit of a prodigy, although probably not at that level. Now I'm in my 20s and just learning some of the things I missed out on. From my personal experience, I'll say it sucks, and I feel bad for the kid. One day he's going to resent his parents in a major way.
Re:ah well (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Like many other kids... (Score:2, Interesting)
In order to socialize in modern society, you almost have to be up to date on the latest entertainment. Otherwise, you would have to talk about something serious or important like whether or not public education is even useful.
Besides, how many of us are are socially retarded ourselves?
Re:That's a really intersting question (Score:1, Interesting)
Your question has been studied (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, people make the mistake of treating the brain's functional power as a linear equation (something like),
Where the implicit assumption is that the scalar factor m is equal between all people, and the initial condition Po is the soul source of variation in function. So for a kid identified as very smart (a high Po), we reach the false conclusion that following this relationship above, the freakish gap in funciton will remain constant. We ignore that m (which for simplicity's sake I am treating as a simple scalar) is just as significant and allows for what we observe in nature.
geeze... give the kid some respect (Score:1, Interesting)
-cha lee ucsb, ca
Re:OK I give up (Score:3, Interesting)
Self-teaching, working with peers, and generally being a lot more adult about the whole thing are an important part of college life. I don't think an 8 year old has enough life experience to make it through without serious support, but just my $0.02.
Re:OK I give up (Score:5, Interesting)
Prodigies usually attend universities near home, so that they can still live with their family. The quality of the school is secondary, as they can always move on later if they outgrow it. My university won't even let students live on campus below a certain age, and they probably aren't socially ready for it anyway. One of my best friends from undergrad started taking classes at 12 and entered as a freshman at 14. She wasn't allowed to live on campus until sophomore year.
In a way, I'm glad to not be in that category, as its quite difficult for such students. Their intelligence at school is well advanced of their social development, and nobody treats them normally anyway. Our society is set up so that things only line up for regular people.
Re:Flying cars are nice but.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Bored gifted kids... (Score:1, Interesting)
In case I am bored (at school, university, etc), I should just learn an other (non programming) langugage. (Although learning new (real) laguages is what I hate most, as it is none of my "natural gifts"). That way I have something to do against the boredom while actually improving "social skills".
Apart from beeing "forced" to communicate with people, a positive side effect is that I am constantly reminded how "normal people" feel when they have to work real hard, trying to figure out real simple stuff life maths,
Btw. At the moment I am bussy learning Japanese as my 4th foreign language while working in the R&D Department of a huge Company in Japan and getting drunk with my collegues very often...
Re:Do they really graduate ? (Score:1, Interesting)
When you're a lot smarter than others (for example confirmed to be in the top 2% of the population) and combine this with:
- being smarter in something that the environment around you and you yourself aren't able to pick up on and guide early on (for example among other things extreme abilities in non-mathematical pattern recognition and simultaneous tasking)
- others/tests/you don't notice this before hitting 20 (I still almost managed to get a career out of it in my twenties though, several times, but just almost. In one the testscores were better than anything they had seen and knew of but I failed with least possible margin on a single last hands-on test in a profession with extremely strict admission rules (for which I am extremly glad is the case and so would everyone else who knew what it was), the scores/acceptance thresholds were seperate for each test in case you wondered)
- having had lots of trouble because of all of the above and desperately trying to find something where one can use these abilities or even manage to function "like the others"
- live with more or less constant mental overload of reflections and concepts that seldom can be communicated clearly and substantially unless you're really lucky and it is to someone who has themselves managed to think at least the beginning of it (constucts that could otherwise take weeks or longer to precisely convey), something which leads to the eventual total estrangement from society unless one manages to somehow slow down or disassociate from whatever talent(s) in question
Well if so I think it fair to believe that it's the fortunate ones who are flipping burgers, the rest are either dead from suicide, institutionalised, or barely hanging on by living on whatever handouts society or family gives. This because people get either physically or mentally ill (or both) from trying to cope with such a situation. Myself I've gotten a rather nasty neurological disease for my troubles but surprisingly I still score way too high on talent-specific tests even though it just about kills me.
I doubt any study would account for the persons I'm talking about because it would take an impractical amount of research to discover them. It is not a large group and detailed information of the past (tests that usually would not have been conducted) as well as present ones, possibly all for a relatively large part of a population since the group is so small within let's say the top five percent known, would have to be done to get the figures.
And no they don't graduate, those that graduate got caught and guided early enough (not that it means they can't burn out but that's different). However once in a while someone manages to pull themselves up by the hair and become some sort of out of the blue authority/instigator, a sliver of hope but it's there and not neccessarily something they will get recognition for while alive.
By the way there is a slight implication in your post that you are or have been a teacher or otherwise employed at high-school. If that is the case do not take this post as a deperate challenge to helping any and all students; it is too much to demand of anyone or any system, and in addition who it is that suffers this outcome is almost entirely natural/accidental as far as I know.
Re:Flying cars are nice but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
On my own observation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Perhaps the reason we have less Eulers today... (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is though, that many of us "smart" people have been exposed to most of the different subjects before we came to a point in our lives where we decided to become "computer geeks" (or whatever else) and didn't really find them all that fascinating.
You can't teach "life" in an institution. As a matter of fact, I felt that I got to know life better by being away from school. School instills an artificial sense of reality that tries to replace natural instincts and curiosity with social dogma of the school crowd.
A historical account of the greatest thinkers shows that it is school that often gets in their way, in some form or another.
A broad education is really pointless to those who are not interested. Stop trying to make everyone the same.
skipping K1-12 might be good for string theorists (Score:3, Interesting)
Come to think of it, this could be the best possible thing for an aspiring string theorist. The kind of mathematics he'll need to understand string theory could completely replace the standard K1-12 curriculum, at least the one I went through anyway.
Pre-School and Kindergarten could introduce little kids to logic and set theory. Concepts like 'true', 'false', 'and', 'or', and 'not' should be fairly easy to teach to children of this age group. It might even be possible to do this indirectly through other actities.
Elementary shool math could be replaced by an gentle introduction to number theory and abstract algebra. Getting kids familiar with the concept of fields (i.e. Q, R, and N p) by K5 sounds like a reasonable goal since in the classical K1-K5 classes, the topics covered in math would include addition, multiplication, division, exponentiation and roots anyways. Why not do them a favor and give them more precise definitions? It'll come in handy later.
Middle school math is basically an introduction to polynomials and planar geometry, and the current high school curriculum struggles to expand into higher dimensions. Why not replace all of this with a proper introduction to linear algebra? Teach kids how to work directly with inner products and cross products instead of bothering with angles and classical trigonometry. Introducing high school students to calculus and statistics seems the current standard, but wouldn't college level physics classes benefit from a freshman class that was already familiar with differential geometry and probablity theory?
An math education up to this point would be sufficient to start teaching high school graduates M-theory [wikipedia.org], especially if the physics program was accelerated at a similar rate. If this is where Song Yoo-geun is at 8 years old, I am thoroughly impressed.
I'd guess that Song Yoo-geun's math education was sped up about 64 fold commared to the public education system in the US, so a 50 fold increase sounds like a reasonable goal.
Re:ah well (Score:2, Interesting)
These kids usually burn out fast, and very few make lasting contributions to their field. We will never hear of this kid as an adult. Mark my words. I think that's a function of a number of things, foremost among them is the fact that behind most of these kids are insane, high-pressure parents. Some of them are loving parents, but very few are good for their kids. Also the kind of thinking that wows people as an eight year old isn't necessarily the kind of thinking that gets you through college, and it almost certainly isn't the kind that writes a PhD dissertation in physics, or revolutionizes one's field.
Being freakishly intelligent is as much a handicap as a blessing. If anything, it gets in the way of your education. The idea behind Gifted & Talented programs was to recognize this and provide these kids with stimulating educational opportunities matched to their particular gifts. In practice, however, many schools have turned these either into functionless shells or programs apparently designed to reward the kids with good grades with something interesting to do. These are the programs we need to deal with these kids...not rushing him through the entire regular curriculum in months. (Speaking of which, why even pretend you're trying to educate the kid? You couldn't physically run through 13 years of coursework in nine months.)
Re:Flying cars are nice but.. (Score:1, Interesting)
To be honest that sounds like any bright 8 year old that is interested in science. I know I did lots of drawings of flying cars when I was that age. Mind you, at that age we were told that we'd have flying cars within a decade and we are still waiting.
Re:OK I give up (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ah well (Score:1, Interesting)
When I was 10, my parents were told that I should skip the remainder of my schooling, and be entered into a fast track program to finish my remainding curriculum and then head off to college. Meaning I would have finished the normal curriculum at around age 11 and be attending college at 12.
My father refused, and insisted that I finish school just like other kids? Why? Because he had been one of those children himself who went off to college early. His reasoning was fairly simple: No matter how intelligent you are, you must be able to relate to your audience/peers. Learning social skills cannot be taught in courses, it can only be learned through interacting with others.
And I can tell you, social skills have always been my weakness. Even now, I'm am somewhat "crippled" in my ability to empathize with others. I just do not feel emotions in the same way others do. But I can tell you, had I attended college at 10, I would have been even more stunted in my social abilities then now.
Attending school is not just about extending and enhancing your intelligence. It's also about learning social skills that can only be learned by interacting with others. Unfortunately, the recognition of how important this is only comes through wisdom and experience.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Or he was indeed a true genius -- and was just effectively ground up by the system. Being research and teaching assistant myself, my steadily growing impression since the late 90s is that university is just one big bureaucracy, but no place for ingenious people trying to work on scientific breakthroughs.
Maybe that's why you never heard of him.
Re:Where are the older ones? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was almost a child prodigy, but I decided to be "normal".
Say what? Thanks to good performances on the SAT at age 10 and 11, in both 7th and 8th grade (age 11, 12 -- I'd already skipped) I had the choice to continue with the typical schooling path or to jump directly to classes at the University of Washington. The Early Entrance Program [washington.edu] is still around if you want to read about it, and has a year of transition, essentially to finish up the loose ends that high school would have tied up.
However, as other posters have picked up, this transition program doesn't magically make kids grow up, especially socially. At some level back then even I knew that being the "cute little kid" in class, having the girls pet my hair and go back to their own, completely incomprehensible lives, would not be what I wanted. For better or worse, I wanted to be normal.
So I went to high school, by choice. I was still always somewhat the odd one out due to being in different classes, but probably not more so than the average Slashdot reader. I was a "normal nerd" if you will. Playing sports, music, and generally learning how to be a social animal were where the true benefit of high school.
Skip forward several years and the interesting bit is that the things that I value most in my life these days _aren't_ what I displayed precocious abilities in. In particular music wouldn't have been such a large part of my life were it not for my experiences in the "normal" schooling system.
It is also true that many pursuits in life, such as my chosen path, require a level of social/emotional/personal stability and maturity that young kids simply don't have. I'm 24 now, and a second year medical student instead of the math post-doc I might have been had I chosen differently, and medicine is one of those areas where being young would have worked against me. Because of all this I feel that I made the right choice way back when.
Re:What happens to these kids? (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair I think the press is to blame and not her in this respect.
Tom
Re:OK I give up (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what your highschool experience was like, but mine did involve a lot of regurgitation. Tests can test a number of things:
Different tests require different levels of understanding and different levels of analysis and synthesis. I once had a history class that, while we were asked open ended questions about why things happened, we were given points only for mentioning the points which the teacher felt were the "actual" reasons (which he often told the class the day before). It turned history from something that should have been about understanding the interplay between different events and personalities and situations into a mere regurgitation of facts.
Even in math or science, high school requires very little in the way of understanding. If you can remember the worked solutions and just plug in your new numbers or variables into them, you can succeed admirably. I knew a lot of people in highschool who started having trouble in math only when they couldn't memorize the examples in entirety.
Mere regurgitation with a slight amount of variation (a la simple regex) is enough to get you through highschool quite easily.
As a slight bit of an asside, several of the people in the PhD program I'm in have mentioned that the only way they made it through some early classes was through understanding the concepts and being able to rederive the formulas quickly. As you progress in your education further, the amount you can get by just on memorization decreases considerably. However, there is a large chunk of it where regurgitation and rote memorization will help you a lot more than real understanding. With any luck, college will present this boy with an opportunity ro prove that he can actually think. So far, there are no gaurentees.
Re:OK I give up (Score:3, Interesting)
As you say, sleight of hand: good for getting tenure, but not very informative.
Re:Annoying (Score:2, Interesting)
My brother in law is 16. He wakes-up at 6.45 and leaves home at 7.15 to get to school by 8AM. He studies until 6PM then goes to after-school class until 8PM then has another 3 hours of after-class to do his homework (supervised). He comes back at quater to midnight (thankfully his school is only 45 minutes away from home). He sleeps 5-6 hours a night. How long could you go on like this? To me, that would amount to mental torture. I can't go without sleep for very long... or I'd just walk around like a zombie for the rest of the day, being rubbish at my job.
Let's go back to my brother: If he didn't study like that in middle school, he wouldn't have gotten in a good high-school. If he doesn't study now, he won't get into a good university. If he doesn't get good university grades, he won't get into Samsung (or whatever it is he wants to become... Samsung is every Korean's dream of a good job).
You know where it all stops: When (if) you get a good job, then you can breath. If you don't get a good job, there's always suicide.
When does it start,though? How hard is it to get into a good middle school or primary school? or a good kinder garden?
Pre-natal english lessons with speakers against the mother's belly aren't unheard of. That cruel operation [detnews.com] supposed to give kids a more agile tongue so necessary to speak english is also something practised in Korea. Peer-pressure leading to stupid diets and crave for plastic surgery or women injecting engine oil in their face or intentional self-mutilation [nationmaster.com]... Yes, it is all happening in Korea. The whole society is going out of control. I'm telling you, parents don't understand what their kids are becoming. How could they when they only see their kids for 1 or 2 hours a day? But somehow, they know it's for their own good and that things will turn-out ok... or not.
If you've never been immersed in the Korean society, you won't get what's happening. Let's just say... it's not about the kids being a bit overworked and needing some Prozac and Councelling help, it goes much deeper than that.
Want something to chill out and help you sleep [womennews.co.kr]?
It'll only get worse. Trust me.Re:OK I give up (Score:2, Interesting)
It may not even be pure regurgitation. Remembering back to when I was that age, I understood a hell of a lot, but as I grew up I realized that there was a lot of nuance and finer detail that I was lacking. And like I said, the kid's comment about flying cars and anti-gravity shows that level of thought process. Yes, he's a very verbal kid (assuming the translation came across correctly), and that's a very pretty definition of anti-gravity. But it's also the statement of a child who just thinks anti-grav is soooooo cool, and hasn't really integrated the whole thing into a more wholistic understanding of the world around him.