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Eight Year Old Physics Student Admitted to College
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.
he will grow up to be socially retarded.
Many studies have shown that rushing kids through grade levels without adequate peers will result in socially developmental retardation and, in some cases, detoriation.
Small price to pay to get the brain for the society as a whole.
As an English teacher in Korea, I can assure you that this isn't unusual. Most of my students go to school from 8 am to 8 pm every day, and come home to study. Missing out on developing social skills and never learning how to have fun is the norm, rather than the exception. That aside, you're absolutely right that putting this child in University is not at all the best thing for him. Until Korea's voracious appetite for over-education calms, there will only be more of this. Someday they'll notice a correlation between time spent learning/working to their suicide rate.
That said, many schools are phasing out school on Saturday over the next two to three years.
If you can find it, "The Prodigy" by Amy Wallace is an excellent one, though out of print now. It details the life of William James Sidis, who lived around the turn of the 20th century. This guy was smart beyond all fucking belief. Among other things, he was speaking at 6 months, had taught himself Latin by 3 years, spoke 7 languages fluently by 7, lectured about 4-dimensional bodies at Harvard at 11, and graduated from the same at 16. And a shitload of other such feats.
He wrote some academic papers and books under pseudonyms that went wholly unnoticed and un-cared about, even with such topics as postulating black holes well before anyone else. He never had a girlfriend. Never had sex. Never really had much in the way of friends at all. From his twenties onward he completely denied any special intelligence and only worked in manual labor types of jobs, most notably as a calculator operator, wherein he would do all of the calculations in his head and so have most of the day free. The press would openly mock him whenever they could find him.
His life's passion was collecting streetcar transfer tickets.
And the scariest part: it's non-fiction.
In South Korea, one language dialect is used to speak to peers and another to speak to those who are older.
And it is much more difficult than simply injecting a 'sir' into the sentence.
I visited South Korea for about a decade when I was a kid and can still speak fluently to peers--but I don't dare speak Korean to elder Koreans because I'd end up royally pissing them off by not using the proper dialect.
Isn't it amazing how the phrase "lacking in his ability to communicate with adults" takes on a whole new meaning when given the context?
This reminds me of a similar situation we have with lack of context regarding the words and phrases used in the Bible or other religious texts. Yet people try to infect others with their misinterpretations and start wars when others disagree with them.
Depends. Some go on to lead lives of great note. Mozart would be one. He was truly a prodigy in the classical sense of the word, that is a child (meaning pre-teen) that can truly excel in something at an adult level. Many don't, and you never hear about them because of that, unless you dig through psycology jounrals on the topic. Also probably depends on if the kid is really a prodigy or not. There are all kinds of precocious kids that perform well above the norm and develop quickly. However it's very rare to find a child that truly and fully not only performs at an adult level, but excels at it.
In fact I'm not really sure that there ARE any child prodigies on record that aren't a prodigy in mathematics or music. Admittedly this isn't something I've given a lot of study to, but whenever I've been shown a prodigy in another field, they don't meet the criteria. It's a teenager or young adult that achieved something eairly, or a child that's exceptional, but not up to excellent adult standards.
I imagine that will play a role for this boy. If he's just very smart, he may find that being thrown into the adult world is simply too much for him. If he's a true prodigy, then it shouldn't be any problem, intellectually at least. If that's the case, teh big factor will be emotional development. Growing up is hard for most of us, and he's going to have it much worse. It has to be amazingly difficult to have the intellectual capacity of an adult but the emotions and needs of a child.
but to be fair, it's also possible that he got scooped up by some secret government / military / illuminati type organization, and is currently reading your post and giggling insanely. the fact that you can't find anything out about him doesn't indicate a damn thing!
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.