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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.
I thought *all* eight year olds talked about building flying cars? Seriously, I know I did! I swore I'd never have to learn to drive since by the time I was old enough, we wouldn't even have cars anymore. So much for that. And poor, poor child. Pretty soon I bed he'd give anything to be "normal".
K1-12 is designed to keep things slow and to the level of the teachers.
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.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I wonder myself from time to time - what happens to these people you hear of accellerating through school like this? It seems like they must be capabile of some incredible things... do they just end up in some really esoteric sidetrack of acadamia? Are there any books or studies detailing what has happened to past kids like this?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok every once in a while we would hear about these child prodigies that accomplish a lot while they're still young. Rather than put them down so quickly to salvage your own egos, wouldn't it be better to ask for a study to see what happens when they actually grow up?
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.
eTrade SUCKS
I'm from India, and we have kids doing this a lot back there, especially in math. I once talked to a math professor who's met some of these kids and who actually knows what he's talking about, and he says most of the time they are not even remotely qualified to be enter university, even though they might be somewhat precocious. Usually the parents make the kid do it because they are publicity whores, and the university plays along for the same reason.
It seems to be the nature's law that if you're really a genius in some aspect, you must suck at something else.
Did they follow the same methods that produced the genius of William James Sidis? (similar childhood, IQ estimated between 250 and 300)
The poor kid is not going to have much contact with other kids his age. I'm guessing he's going to grow up a bit anti-social and with a lack of understanding of general social rules and rituals.
- Jesse McNelis
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
From time to time we hear about such brilliant minds. But what happens when they grow up? Was anyone from here a child prodigy?
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The last time such a thing happened, it turned out to be a fraud. The fact of the matter is that physics is not like pure math. Raw intelligence is not the only requirement, but knowledge, research background and experience count for more. Plenty of famous physicists with only slightly above average IQ's. This bloke's in for a tough time if he thinks he'll be able to get away with it.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
I suppose so, but I suspect he'd be even lower on the befriend list of other people his own age. Middle school and highschool is pretty socially disfunctional as it is (at least in the US). Being a smart guy doesn't get you much in that environment. In college being a smart guy may be rewarded.
Cow Cube
What person has been ultra-intelligent and socially "cool"?
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?
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.
What I don't understand is how talk of building flying cars and defying Newton's laws makes someone eligible for college. I was talking about building flying cars and defying gravity when I was eight, and no amount of intellectual knowledge will make up for the fact that college education is not designed for 8 year olds.
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.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
and a middling Korean university
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.
Seriously, do these guys ever end up making significant scientific contributions?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Gauss was a child prodigy... As well as Erdos, Pascal, Euler, Neumann, Maclauren, etc.
It is usually a logarythmic curve, where you reach a "flat" at adulthood. The bottom line being that "flat" part being more or less high, and it is true some people will be smarter than other in adulthood, but I saw very bright kid go very high (for their age) and them not rise again, and other start below as normal kid, but getting slowly brighter and brighter until they rise over the former.
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Maths can be sped up 50 fold
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, 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.
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Everything I've seen indicates that this sort of thing is generally (though, admittedly, not always) bad for the kid. Whether he's intellectually ready for college or not, he's not emotionally ready, and in four years (or less, at his rate) he will certainly not be emotionally ready for grad school. You don't have to force him to "be his age" intellectually...you can offer him an intellectually challenging curriculum without forcing him into a situation designed for young adults.
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.)
It's better than the alternative anyways, trust me. As someone who was offered placement into the whole special schools programs, but whose school district and parents where both considerable into poverty preventing such, going to a public highschool for years is pretty useless, and even painful. I got more out of reading a half-dozen good books than a year of that crap. Ultimately I had to drop out and get a job, for financial reasons(like housing and feeding myself through). And now at 22 I'm in secnd year of university, but being a highschool dropout complicates the situation, not to mention the delayed schedule, and the decrease in mental malleability through age. I don't feel sorry for these kids at all, they could have it starkly worse through any alternatives.
I'm not trying to speak ill of her. But I'd expect more from this genius crypto prodigy. I mean Dr. Wagner has more publications to his name and he hasn't really had any press the way she has had [he's been cited I think a few times but that's it].
To be fair I think the press is to blame and not her in this respect.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Well, the point of mentioning the "Chinese Room" is just to make a comparison, but if I were going to go further I'd probably say the "Chinese Room" was the old behaviorist notion in vitalist drag. now, instead of saying there's no such thing as consciousness, Searle says there's a thing called consciousness, but it's such that no conceivable experiment could ever identify it from outside. (This is by definition, by the way: since the Turing Test is defined to be over any arbitrarily long interaction, Searle's argument requires that there be no interaction, no matter how long, that can distinguish between the "Chinese Room" and a "consciousness".)
As you say, sleight of hand: good for getting tenure, but not very informative.
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 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... 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.
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It'll only get worse. Trust me.bundaegi is good for you
The difference is in what questions can be processed. In the Chinese Room, only questions that have been specifically answered in the "stored data" can be answered successfuly. With true understanding, one can take the rule set behind the individual answers, and apply it to any of a wide variety of possible inputs. The theory can further be taken and linked with other disciplines, related to history, to philosophy (where appropriate). It's the understanding of the underlying principles that makes the difference. And again, without knowing what the kid told them, it's entirely possible he doesn't really have more than a cursory understanding of what he's talking about.
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.
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