I applaud this family, and am glad for Ahaan's sake that he isn't just shipping himself off to college, but is going to still have his support structure.
I was homeschooled, along with my two sisters, my entire educational career until college. We all started taking college classes early, my older sister correspondence at 14, my twin and I correspondence at 15. All of us took classes at local colleges before starting 'real college'. All of us scored high on our ACTs, all of us got scholarships to college.
My parents didn't really push us, we were just smart. We had childhoods, I was a starter on the basketball team, and played college soccer for a year. I also read 10+ books a week, played way, way too much Civilization and Total Annihilation, and did plenty of volunteer work, especially at our local public access station.
For my sisters, going to and living at 'real college' worked out well, they both succeeded in their own ways (my older sister graduated with two masters a few days after she turned 21, my twin sister received a lot of recognition from professionals in her field before graduating, was salutatorian, etc), whereas I didn't do so well being away from home and the support structure. I'm lazy, and I thought could just not do assignments I didn't want to and do well enough on other assignments to make up for it. Long story short, my GPA dropped enough to lose my scholarship, and I decided that the private college experience wasn't worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for.
So I moved home, finished my bachelors from the state university in town. Snagged an internship and then got a job offer from that company, essentially during my junior year for a full time job, contingent on finishing school.
My point in typing up this story is not to say that I am or was awesome. My point is that I am pretty sure that Ahaan Rungta is a pretty smart kid, his parents probably pushed him less than you think, and that as long as he and his family figure out how to navigate the maturity journey, he'll be fine.
>My point in typing up this story is not to say that I am or was awesome.
Are you sure? Being a smart fellow, you must know that your experience is not evidence that this young man was not "pushed" too much and that he will "be fine."
That said, my suspicion is that Rungta's early achievement is not cause for concern about his social development. Conducting research, for instance, is an intensely collaborative experience that he will probably have, and would provide ample opportunity for interacting with people of many ages. He probably will be fine.
Well, of course, all of us deal with pride and so part of my motivation to type up the story is that I'm proud of what I've accomplished, yeah.
> Being a smart fellow, you must know that your experience is not evidence that this young man was not "pushed" too much and that he will "be fine."
Of course my experience is not evidence of someone else's experience. However, I have experience being homeschooled, and entering college early, so I think I have a degree of ability to relate to Ahaan Rungta's situation that others in this thread do not. I think my contribution to the thread is to provide a counter-point to those who were decrying his parents for pushing him too hard, or depriving him of a childhood, which can only be provided by personal experience.
Additionally, I think my story demonstrates the variability of how children, within the same family, respond to environmental and parental stimuli. My sisters were fine starting school early, I wasn't so much, and if I would have lived at home during my first year of college, instead of in a dorm four hours away, it would have been different.
I won't speculate on your motives, I'd just like to point out that the story you've related simply doesn't provide a counterpoint to the idea that rapid academic advancement might lead to developmental problems or result from undue pressure. All of the accomplishments you cite could be expected of a precocious student, and could go hand in hand with adjustment issues (and seem to have done so in your case as a college student).
I'm not claiming that the subject of this article should be expected to have such problems (see my other comments), only that your story doesn't serve its stated purpose.
Hm. I feel that I've written poorly, because I don't understand why you're making your argument from my writing. I feel like you're just restating my argument without the personal experience.
My point in writing was entirely to say that I've been through a similar journey, as have others in my family, and (while I didn't mention this originally), I have friends who have done the same thing. Thus, I have observed this situation from several different perspectives.
Based on what little evidence I have from this article, Ahaan Rungta's family is taking the course of action that has the best probability of a positive outcome. However, as my own story and that of my family illustrates, some kids will do fine and others won't, coming out of essentially the same circumstances.
Will Ahaan Rungta be fine? Depends on what you mean by fine. I mean that he's likely to graduate from school no more messed up than any other college student, and that his family seems to have positioned themselves to do that the best.
To whatever extent your comment was intended to contribute to the discussion, I apologize for any misunderstanding. To whatever extent it might have been motivated by pride, I wish you luck, for your sake and those around you, in overcoming this tendency. Beyond that, I think this conversation is now of too little value for us and those reading to continue.
> Well, of course, all of us deal with pride and so part of my motivation to type up the story is that I'm proud of what I've accomplished, yeah.
What's there to be proud of? Seems like your "accomplishments" are pretty mediocre, and not anywhere the level of your siblings. More like a story of wasted/neglected born-with talents (smarts).
You have an impressive background! If I may ask, how did (do?) you manage to read 10+ books a week? Was it sheer determination, or were you a fast reader? I know that quantity of books isn't necessarily indicative of any knowledge gained; however, I would love to work through my reading list a little quicker than my current rate.
I don't have as much time as I used to, having a job, marriage, and child now, so I don't currently read 10+ books a week (I'm more at 2 or 3 a month now).
But when I was a kid,
- I usually read a book or two a week as part of school,
- We typically were done with 'school' by lunchtime, and so I had a lot more free time than other kids.
- I stayed up late reading quite a bit
- We lived 15 minutes outside of town so I read in the car a lot (driving or in parking lots during my siblings' activities)
- I read a lot of not-intellectually-demanding stuff like Star Wars, Star Trek, or similar novels mixed in with more serious history.
- I used to read at about 600-1200 wpm (depending on the test), which is on the higher side. It's a skill on top of natural speed, I'm now out of practice, and I top out around 500.
I skim a lot on fiction, I admit. I also read chunks of words instead of individual words when I am really going, which diminishes comprehension, and so I don't do that when I am reading theology or philosophy or something I want to deeply learn.
My brother is similar, he has a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf completely full of books, the books being double layered, the outer layer jutting out like he has no other space left to put his books. I find he reads more like game of thrones and historical fantasy than Star Wars or Star Trek though. He isn't married and he still reads, now on his phone.
With all due respect, and while you might very well be smart, your story is pretty normal. The MIT alumni I've meet (for which selection bias surely is a factor) has been quite beyond that and very much overachievers (in a positive way).
That said, going to college early usually isn't a good idea. People are quite "age sensitive" in that age so you're missing out on a lot of the social stuff. Regardless how good MIT is the rest is still "only" knowledge. I can of course imagine worse things though.
Oh, I'm not really that smart, so really, not much respect is due. :)
I agree that going to college early isn't a good idea for the peer socialization aspects. The intellectual ones, I think it's fine. But every kid is different.
I went to college early (14, graduated 18). I've spoken with a lot of similar folks over the years, and the biggest takeaway for me was that everyone's experience and needs were different.
Some people were pushed by their parents, but mostly it was people who were bored with the normal experience and found an out. Out of that set, maybe about half regret it, and wished they had slowed down and enjoyed high school/childhood more.
People tend to assume that folks who go to college early would be socially awkward, but that was not my experience. The social/emotional intelligence distribution was pretty normal.
Out of everything, the common denominator was supportive parents.
What do you mean by "supportive parents"? I think that eludes some. You can be supportive without really being helpful. Can anyone provide some context as to what that support looked like?
Yes, that is tough to define. "Enabling" might be a better way of phrasing it.
I wasn't a completely functioning adult at that age, in a lot of ways. I did not know college was an option, I just complained to my folks that I was bored (like any bored kid). They really helped find things to keep me occupied, and eventually found the college option for me.
In addition, the typical stuff you might expect was also important. For example, paying for college would have been very difficult for me (getting a job at 14 would have been too much on top of everything else). Getting to/from campus was also difficult, and I was too young to live on campus or drive. I also had to deal with all of the normal teenager BS (hormones, depression, etc), in addition to going to college, and they helped (as I expect most good parents do).
Sorry if that doesn't answer your question, the circumstances varied a lot depending on the individual.
Not being destructive, to start with. Providing a stable environment. Being aware of the options available in life and having the resources to take advantage of them. A true desire to see your child succeed and find themselves, rather than using them to fulfill your purpose or goals. Showing them the success and happiness your own life brings you.
My observations are similar, the kids have to want to do the work and it's hard enough that parental support is essential. It's too hard otherwise. The University of Washington has a program that brings in 12ish early entrants each year. The program's process seems to be repeatable and although the staff have a strong liberal arts bent they produce students in all fields including at least two YC founders.
Children can do a lot more than they're given credit for. My 4-year-old demanded music lessons when his older brother was playing cello. He started on both cello and piano.
Entering kindergarden, in music class the teacher had a keyboard, asked the children who could play. A little girl banged out chopsticks. Another little boy picked out twinkle,twinkle,little star. My son Andrew raised his hand, and played some Beethoven sonata. The teacher asked him if he knew what that was. He told her.
He's not a prodigy. Has terrible handwriting! The 1st-grade evaluation suggested he had fine-motor issues. Yet he could play 64th-note runs on the piano endlessly. Its all because of regular teaching and fun practicing.
Kids can learn what they put their minds to. But it takes 10,000 hours not only from the pupil but from the tutor. My wife put in the time; Andrew plays wonderfully.
Fun fact: terrible handwriting is correlated with high dopamine levels in the brain, which is correlated with increased brain activity (~ intelligence).
I've hung out with Ahaan at school several times -- some people in the comments here are speculating that going to university this young might make it hard to adjust (socially), but honestly I assumed he was like ~20 (i.e. just like any other college-age dude). I had no clue he had such a neat backstory of how he got to MIT!
Yeah, there was a guy at my alma mater (Olin College of Engineering) who entered at 14 or 15. He was perfectly normal and well-adjusted. I mean, it was a weird cloistered tech school environment, so "normal" and "well-adjusted" are relative here, but I also didn't realize he was so young until he mentioned it.
I mean, sure, you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski, but the vast majority of kids I've heard of entering college early seem well-adjusted.
Occasional? Ted was one of a kind. And apparently, you don't "get" someone like him. Allegedly, rather, you "make" that kind of person through government sponsored psychological torture experiments. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...
That's, unfortunately, who a lot of people automatically jump to when they think of "maladjusted precocious children/young adults"
I think there was a RadioLab episode about him as well?
When my (then future) wife was in college, there was some controversy about younger women on campus needing to tell guys who were flirting with them how young they were, because guys in their early 20s would occasionally end up asking a girl out and then finding out she was only 16. My wife agreed with this general sentiment, which led to one of her friends saying "you'd think differently if you were 16!" Her response: "maybe, but that's not for another year."
My younger sister was regularly mistaken for a teacher when she was in 7th grade.
I was pretty obviously an immature punk all through high school, but some people are both academically and socially advanced.
Right now, my five year old son with autism is simultaneously learning the toilet and calculus. Who knows where he'll be socially when he's academically ready for college?
I consider 4 years of my highschool a complete waste of time and would have loved to jump straight into a university right after elementary school. It would have been great to have OCW available at that time and not having to do everything myself including finding relevant books/sources.
Good for Ahaan he escaped it and I wish him the very best of luck @ MIT!
I think I read the entire non fiction section of the local library to avoid my HS boredom. This was before the internet when you can find so much more online.
I felt the same as bitL. I was in PEAK (gifted and talented) since the second grade. When I started High School, one of my freshmen classes was biology. We started the year off learning about cells -- something I had learned about in 3rd grade PEAK and still remembered clearly. I was actually pissed off that I was not being taught something new. From that point on, I didn't give two shits about high school. I scraped by with Cs and played computer games until I graduated.
I did start college a little early my senior year, using a program that let me take half the day off to attend college. But I could have easily been going to college since 9th grade.
As for the social stuff, I actually lost most of my friends in HS -- they all moved to other states, and I had no desire to gain new friends (I had good friends on the internet, that I still have to this day, ~20 years later).
It would be interested to check in with him at 35 to see where he ended up compared to other 'normal' 35 year old MIT grads. Basically does pushing your kid like that from such and early age lead to any significant long term advantages.
I dunno about this... we're not intimate with his family so it seems a little unfair to characterize his parents as "pushing him". For all we know, the opposite may have happened and his parents were "holding him back" and trying to prevent a precocious teen from rushing into MIT at age 14 instead of 15.
As far as the article's text reveals, it says his parents were responsive and not pushy: "Rungta is grateful to his parents and to MIT for being responsive to his needs every step of the way."
Yeah for sure... I attended a school for gifted kids. Those who where a lot younger than the rest of us where always pushed by their parents and their parents always told they where not pushing.
And that is a first hand experience watching 42 gifted smart young children pushed in our education system and over their interessents on behalf of their parents. I attended this school for 6 years.
It was a pain, and as if school wasn't boring enough ( school is mandatory where I live ) you had to consider every word you wanted to say as a 16/17/18 year old when there where 9/10/11 year old depressed and ADHDish, but extremely smart kids around you the whole time.
In the end I am a hundred percent sure every kid can study MIT classes at every age. Most of the stuff is rational trivia. Also beeing gifted has nothing to do with your grades or your ability to follow classes or lectures. Because that's something your parents could've pushed on you, but for sure you are allowed to be happy that they didn't.
"I am a hundred percent sure every kid can study MIT classes at every age." Every kid can {Watch a lecture: sure, Study: perhaps, understand: Nope}. Humans have varying levels of intelligence and Ahaan is far more intelligent than most. Disregarding his capacities does both a disservice to him and to everyone else.
There are a lot of state-by-state laws around homeschooling. Basically, some states make it easier than others as far as what rules apply. Some parents have to have their curriculum approved by a state board, others have mandatory checkins, and some have no requirements at all.
I don't know if you're beeing sarcastic or not. If so, excuse me please. Anyway you are probably right. I am still not sure about that phrasing. What I wanted to refer to, is that the Stuff you get teached at MIT still isn't any harder or easier than the stuff you can read or maybe already have read in books anyway. When I started college my profs where constantly referring to Tanenbaum, Dijkstra and co. Texts I have read and understood 5 years before I finished school.
Perhaps you shouldn't extrapolate your experience to that of students at MIT (or other universities outside of your country you've not attended, for that matter)?
I'm in the U.S., and I can tell you that having gone to a good, but regular state university for undergrad, and then to much more prestigious university for grad school, the difference between the two was striking. I went from being one of the smarter students in the class, to one of the least smart (or at best, the middle). I expected this university to be better, but it was quite a shock just how much better it was.
Is it possible that what they teach at MIT might go beyond the "trivia" or rote memorization that you describe being taught at your country's schools?
> As far as the article's text reveals, it says his parents were responsive and not pushy: "Rungta is grateful to his parents and to MIT for being responsive to his needs every step of the way."
Sure, he will never say bad things about his parents, especially not in the media. He's from India! As I see it parents (in general) can bend things so that children do not want anything else than what their parents want. This is not to blame the parents - they probably don't know better.
From this story I can't tell what is the case. His parents are maybe the best ever, that not only want best for their kid, but actually let him find out what that is.
It seems he has a passion for learning (at the end of the article): "As he ponders declaring a major next year, Rungta pauses for a moment, and then he lights up. “In an ideal world, I would want to major in everything.”"
Considering the average age of MIT freshman students is 18 years, he'll be starting with other teenagers. I hope that the 3 years difference will not prevent him from having a meaningful social life there. I think that branding him as a "child prodigy" just because he is one will help much. Instead I would like to see news like "Young MIT student has solved such and such hard problem for all mankind".
MIT has always had a few of these "show pony" geniuses around. Two of them sadly committed suicide during my years at MIT. I dont know their minds, but I guess some of their sense of self worth was being a smart ass and marching to to a different drummer. When you are surrounded by thousands almost as smart as you you dont really stand out for being you anymore. MIT people are impresses by you doing something really clever. Also I suspect these guys were very lonely too. I hope Adaan has a sense of self worth built on more than being at MIT.
Some commenters are afraid this kid was pushed way too hard and did not have time to learn proper social skills, play sports, get a holistic education in the humanities.
This all might be true but the article makes it very clear how precocious this kid is. I don't think his parents were trying to push him. If anything they seemed to struggle to get him the things that he needed to succeed.
Some people are just so laser focused on their desires that you just have to let them do their thing. I'm sure if he wants to play sports or learn history, he'll excel at it too.
As long as he did not exclusively learn technical stuff but also got a humanistic education, which we do not know, and enjoyed his childhood, which I think he did, because you cannot perform like that without enjoying it, I think this is pretty amazing parenting.
You could find other reasons to nitpick (Did he do sports? Did he develop social competences by interacting with other kids?), but even if these things are true, which we do not know, there are children, who got a regular education, that are still lacking in these regards and they are not enrolled at MIT at 15.
The thing to remember is that we're all unique, and there probably are a tiny minority of people for whom this is an ideal path, so it's best not to judge until/unless we know the child & family personally. The fat part of the curve absolutely benefit from a varied and diverse childhood & adolescence ... although I'd argue we've [in the US] slowed formal education too far and there's ample room for a) faster academic education and b) a dedicated vocational trades track.
I'm not even sure it matters how broad his education was, if (as you said) he has been happy with his life, but also as long as he is adaptable enough to switch directions if he becomes unhappy with his direction later in life.
Many of us old folk change direction over the years. The key to a happy life in the long run is not to know everything when you are young, or to have picked the right direction from the start, but to recognize when your direction is no longer fulfilling, and to know when and how to change when you are old.
I think a basic understanding of history, culture and how our society works is absolutely required. I think it is our responsibility to prevent at least the worst mistakes we did in the past and preserve at least the best achievements.
We have turned in circles in the past and will do it again if we do not get that we turned in circles.
Not a truism for everyone. The history, culture, and society I learned in school was too Eurocentric / Western and was completely irrelevant to my personal development and sense of identity as a minority in this society.
You have to realize the fact that humans have some really annoying bugs.
a) The first one is the fact that we want (mostly) to help each other and make each other happy. This looks benign, but combined with b) can be really irritating
b) Humans are bad at empathy. You might enjoy humanistic education or sports and so you automatically think that everyone else does too.
This probably worked fine for our ancestors (getting torn apart by a cave lion is something no-one would like) but kind of breaks in modern society.
Different people like different things, keep that in mind.
I think a bit different about humanism. I think a basic humanistic education is more like a drivers license for society. Know nothing about WW2? Well, you should not be allowed to vote, because it could turn out really bad for all of us. Democracy can be really dangerous without proper education.
What does all technical excellence mean as long as the Middle East is a clusterfuck? Most really big problems have little to do with technology.
The reality is that most people that vote do not know all that much about anything materially helpful from a geopolitical standpoint (many politicians themselves included I'll assert) and are basically low-information, single-issue voters that get pandered to in elections, unfortunately. While some arbitrary criteria is needed to keep people voting on issues that they have no information about (although I argue many 15 year olds are better informed than many 51 year olds, the average 15 year old is definitely not while we have some debate on the 51 year olds), establishing some "knowledge test" or something similar for voting is how we lose the basic foundations of democracy.
What really needs to be done particularly in the US is increased voter motivation because low turn-outs are not helping anything at all here. People don't want to talk politics out of "politeness" or something other passive policy and the country continues to have trouble talking about hard issues without leading to emotionally charged methods of "argument" that have led us to the current state of things with low voter engagement and politics devolving into a minstrel show of democracy.
Are you truly proposing a limit on voting rights based on educational achievements? I think that is a road that will lead to an elite class in our society, limiting political power to those who grew up in poverty or had other struggles.
We already have enough problems with an elite class within our economic power. Lets not extend that elitism into governmental processes as well.
c) Most humans just won't "do it". As a child, student, teacher, and parent I've realized that most tasks really aren't that hard, and by far the greatest hindrance to expedient success is an irrational unwillingness to "just do it".
Why is exclusively technical education bad? Who cares if he doesn't know much about politics, art, or geography? All that matters is that he loves what he's doing.
Because we live in a democracy and I want to be sure that people how have actual power over me know some basic facts about politics, art, geography and history.
Ah yes, good point. Coming from a fledgling democracy, I'm not used to thinking about these kinds of things. I don't see art being useful for decision-making though.
So many people praising this brainwashing I can't even believe it. I'm ready for the downvote but please comment to why it is not the case. That's a pretty story but if their parents went on teaching him something else than physics everybody would go on their horses and scream for child abuse.
What choice did the kid have? None. Dude didn't go out and was full MIT mode from the age of 5.
It is better for the kids to praised about what they are doing rather than what they are getting. Personally, I don't care what prestigious thing he got. This kid is amazing for having studied so many things on his own.
The real aim here should be to be engaged and to be learning; which are things this kid seems to be have done plenty of. It is so cool that we now have all these learning resources accessible easily.
It's interesting how this kind of thing makes one think about their own life. I went to a talk by a computer scientist yesterday. He is studying cryptography. You could tell that he was so engaged, getting so much joy from his subject. People were interested in what he was explaining. You could tell that he is just loving every minute of his job. This is the kind of engagement level I am looking for. And by the way, I don't think one needs to be top-level at what they do to get there.
Don't know this kid, or this situation, but to commenters here who seem envious, or young people who are inspired: being a child prodigy expires at age 25. Being known for your youth means that once you aren't young anymore you've lost that. If your identity is wrapped up in being precocious be ready with a second plan.
I don't know how many miss "being known". I think many regret not having so much intellectual stimulation, or opportunities to learn. (Seriously, how many of us, the HN crowd, considered their Primary School intellectually challenging?)
"When Rungta turned 12, his family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, as his parents realized he needed to be in a more intellectually stimulating environment."
My friends in Fort Lauderdale are gonna LOVE this!
I envy this guy so much! I felt delayed by school, which offered slow-paced, and uninspiring environment (learning interesting stuff on my own, after the lessons; at ~15 I started reading academic textbooks in physics and chemistry).
Right now I am very much for adjusting education to students, rather than the other way around (without expecting that everyone gets magically enlightened at the age of 18-19). Especially as the cohort-based learning is a direct heritage of the Prussian education (for teaching soldiers, not - scientists or engineers).
I don't know man, I think there's something to be said about having a childhood. Being from India myself, I know the tremendous pressure parents put on kids to succeed. I hope that this kid wasn't subject to the same.
Agree with you. My wife and I are already arguing over the future of our 3-year-old. She wants him to learn to read and write. I want him to play, have time to be a boy, get in trouble, kiss a girl, and have a care-free childhood.
We're so obsessed with money, and forget all about the one currency that really matters. Time. Time to live.
I'd rather he were average academically, and experience life exceptionally.
"Time to live" for the purpose of "experiencing life" was found to be inconsistent with extracting profit and has been deprecated. In future versions of the iPeasant app, we hope to increase profit-seeking behavior and reduce pesky bugs like desire for freedom.
Up-voted for courageously (and beautifully) expressing a potentially unpopular opinion. Stay strong - it is hard not to feel guilty when other kids in kindergarten can seemingly write essays and do calculus, but in the end, it does not matter as much as it may appear to. And sometimes putting so much pressure may have unintended consequences. I know a few kids from affluent families in my town where their "early prodigies" are now college drop-outs.
I don't know, I think "burn out" is a somewhat loaded term. Personally during either secondary and (much later) tertiary education I simply found it hard to maintain interest in a dubiously presented, dry, fixed syllabus that was executed at the speed of the slowest person in the room by teachers with thousand-mile lecture stares. It was always clear to me that learning something by rote was not an effective use of time... the initial comprehension and applications were the only interesting portions. Thus, I turned to self-directed computing. When I finally went to college, I received a scholarship in the first semester, took a year overseas, then never returned. I'd like to study more, but feel the pedagogy is too alien to deliver solid results (in terms of time efficiency) versus competing life opportunities.
I "had a childhood" in the sense of going to high school. It damn near killed me, and quite possibly would have if I hadn't been fortunate enough to skip a year, or to do a few university-like courses. I look back on those wasted, miserable years and wish I'd had other options - or thought to seize them for myself.
Talk to your child, see what he actually likes. Make sure he knows that he always has a choice - years later my parents told me they thought about homeschooling but didn't think they knew enough to, and couldn't afford a tutor, but they never even mentioned these thoughts to me at the time.
First-time parent of a 4-month old, we're thinking the same way. Me and my wife are both engineering types, and do worry about being obsessively goal-oriented.
“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.”
I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of this young man's intelligence. Yes, the latter is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. I have little doubt that there are many 18 year olds entering MIT's class of 2019 who could have entered at 15 had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing.
These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games, perhaps we would have progressed through life with a singularity of purpose and self-confidence that would have situated us in a better position today. We might have been spared years in our teens and twenties trying to find a sense of meaning in our work, unlike this fellow, who seems to have it figured out.
I won't speculate about his social skills. I've met college students his age running the gamut from borderline autistic to social butterfly. Yes, the sense of "peerlessness" must be a bit alienating, but many of us have had this experience without leapfrogging high school.
> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly.
We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the time. Astronomy club. Chess club. In high school I went to night school with my friends' mom at the university in the big city when I wasn't working to help pay the rent. You just couldn't get the breadth and ease of access to information you can today. It was slow and laborious back then.
But a world like this? Today? Amazing. You don't even have to leave your house. He is lucky. I'm 33 now and I'd kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day. It just wasn't in the cards. Parents, circumstances, life and all of that.
Yes... we'll envy stories like this. More of us could have been this hungry. We just couldn't get there.
Hell Im 23, and even with easy access to information its difficult if you have to work full-time to pay the bills. Ive been working full-time since I was 15, and no matter how many courses I completed or books I read, without financially stable parents there is no way a normal person can do this. Thats why most of us attend public school.
I have full confidence most people are capable, but they would need some exceptionally staunch parents and finacial stability. Plus a lot of drive to accomplish these goals (it is not for everyone).
The obligations and circumstances that get in the way are as challenging as ever. Time is the only constant in our experience. However kids today have instant access to MIT lectures and problem sets. I had to sneak out textbooks on classical mechanics and applied mathematics and that's all I had for years. Technology today has enabled us in so many ways that I envy my children who will get to have what I never did. So cool.
In case people don't know what is being referred to here, it's that in Britain a Public School is something you pay for, and in America (and Australia!) a Public School is funded by the government and not the individual.
I wish I had the drive / focus / interest that you sound like you had when you were at school. I hung around with the wrong people, didn't put enough thought into what I might like to do for a career, valued the wrong things, and as a consequence spent my twenties in lots of meaningless, unsatisfying jobs. I'm in my early thirties now and am lucky in that I've managed to change my circumstances and begin a career as a software developer. But I feel I will never be able to achieve the success I could have if I had only gotten my arse into gear and taken my education seriously when I was 16. Now I find myself spending most of my free time trying to learn things that I should have learnt when I was 18.
> I hung around with the wrong people, didn't put enough thought into what I might like to do for a career
You say that like they're necessarily causal/correlated.
When I was in high school I was clinically depressed, smoked weed every day, shoplifted whenever I could just for the thrill of it, failed most of my classes, and in my afternoons, late nights, and sometimes up to 6am, I was contributing to opensource, writing phpBB mods that thousands of people were using in their bulletin boards. My most popular mod had over 10,000 downloads. They even accepted me into the official mod approval team for a while.
And despite my obsession with coding and working on my career, I was also an adolescent delinquent.
From the more practical side- the time you spent 'wandering' can pay big dividends over those who are more tightly-focused, when you get to a more strategic role. Having tons of varied experience makes you a better communicator, teacher, & leader...
I had this conversation with a co-worker recently. I complained about how I avoided partying in university years and wasted a perfect opportunity to make friends with diverse people from all kinds of occupations. He said he regrets that he partied a lot instead of sitting like me and engaging in creative hobbies and/or learning career-relevant stuff.
We came to the conclusion that no matter the path of life you end up taking, you'll regret missed opportunities. I could have studied hard since 9 years old, skipped high school and be a PhD now or something, but then I'd probably talk with some people and start regretting that I haven't the time to read the books and watch the movies that could have shaped my imagination.
So the real advice is - instead of obsessing over the road not taken, focus on what comparative advantage you got from your experiences. Even if you "wasted" half your life drinking with random people, there's still a lot to learn and use from those experiences. The reason we have brains is to figure out how to make the best of what we have.
Well said! The grass is(and looked) always greener on the other side of the fence.
I decided to become a musician when I was 15 and wasted 6 years pursuing the unrealistic dream. I somehow managed to gave up the dream and became interested in computing in college. I sometimes wish I had become interested in programming instead of drums in junior high, but those 6 years of hustles taught me a lot about team management, entrepreneurship, and how to learn new things. So I don't think I wasted 6 years. As Paul Graham says, you should explore when you are young.
You are absolutely right. It's easy for me to think when I'm 43 I'll be past it. But I'm pretty sure my 43 year old self will think otherwise, and will be very glad he made the effort 10 years ago!
It isn't cause for despair. In the grand scheme of things, none of us is so important and the desire to "achieve" more than we have is, in some sense, a wish to bless ourselves.
There's nothing to prevent you from studying those things today, within the constraints of your spare time. If you find the study intrinsically gratifying, I see no reason you should enjoy it any less because it probably won't result in a professorship.
It's not so much despair but longing for something that never could have been. My parents knew what was wrong with me but couldn't understand it themselves. They thought it would be best to hold me back so that I learned how to socialize. It was a rough education.
When I do have spare time you bet you'll find me working on a problem, reading a paper, or studying. It's almost like regret knowing that I won't be able to dedicate my life to something I love for the mere circumstance I come from.
When I read about stories like this one I can't help but feel happy for them. They're lucky! They got exactly what they wanted and needed! Not all of us can say the same.
I don't know your personal circumstances, but I do know that there are roles for mathematicians to play in many areas outside of academia, and that your age wouldn't preclude these possibilities. If you haven't already, there would be no shame in beginning a PhD at your age (even some successful academics have done so).
We are all lucky and unlucky relative to someone else. I think time used on regret or "longing for what could have been" is simply time misspent, much like you might regard your childhood. Best of luck overcoming this natural tendency.
Life is nothing but an inevitable race to the end. I try to take it slow and steady. Having some regrets is unavoidable! But it makes stories like this all the more sweet. Not all of us had the same chances but someone made it through and that brings a smile to my face.
I've know two really good parents that have claim that if you spend about an hour each day "detoxifying" the children when they get home that they can survive public school. They let their children know that the public school is a manufactured environment, how to combat child peering (where children look to other children for role models), talk with them about their frustrations, and generally spend about an hour discussing ideas of substance.
So far, it seems to work - the children have a certain detachment to the school environment and a mindfulness about them when they talk about their situation.
Good for you! I hope you are/have enjoying/enjoyed it. I made some different choices (savings, but kids and mortgage). It'd be awesome to start a PhD but completely irresponsible of me as I'm the sole income provider for our family at present.
For now I content myself with following my fancies and working on digestible problems in my spare time (devoured ONAG a couple of years ago, graphs, sets, concrete mathematics... found Martin Gardner and enjoying devouring his recreational maths books). When I get the chance in my work I tend to enjoy the maths more than the programming... distributed systems, computer graphics, compilers. But most commercial programming is book keeping.
I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.
I disagree. It's a race to learn as much as you can before your brain loses plasticity.
I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.
Your brain doesn't lose plasticity until you're dead. Ever hear of someone remembering a conversation they had at age 70? The neurons had to form new synapses (plasticity) for that to happen.
Much of that is simply being out of practice. At 35 you generally don't spend that much time learning new things. But, if you go back and get a masters you can get back into the swing of things.
Well there's always antidepressants and stimulants to help with that. In all seriousness, don't become a drug addict but if you're really worried about that there's a decent amount of research going on into improving brain plasticity so i wouldn't be surprised if there are drug treatments to "de-age" your brain in the near future.
That said, most of the "critical periods" for learning are over by the time you hit puberty and the ability to learn advanced knowledge, like the kind taught in college, doesn't decline that much with age so I wouldn't worry about it.
I don't believe there is anything in my comment to suggest otherwise. I was simply trying to capture the sentiment that some feel when reading stories like these. I tend to think this feeling results not from a failure to achieve (after all, many of us have still done admirably), but rather the sense of regret that one misused a period of one's life. I didn't mean to communicate that "life is a race" at all.
Write a book, start a company or a band, volunteer, learn to meditate or Kung foo, do whatever.
It's not a question of being a kid, it's a question of living your life as a neurosurgeon because you decided that sounded cool when you were 8, and never really rethinking it until you had a lot of debt.
Sure, if this is what they really want then great. But, thinking this is a good path and they would be wasting there potential being a raft guide is terribly hollow. Getting out of high school at 15 is cool, starting collage is not a goal just a path to something else.
I take your point, but would rephrase it slightly differently: everybody should want the same thing: happiness, but not everybody achieves happiness in the same way.
To pick up on the racing comments from above, one should keep in mind Tal Ben-Shahar's warnings about the rat race happiness archetype, where one sacrifices in the present for perceived benefits in the future.
We had a new teacher for maths in eighth grade. I remember how enthusiastic he was about set theory. He was so excited to talk about it and reminisced that the first time he saw set theory was in the second year of college.
Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers.
Now my professor in college who teaches operating systems? She could not be more of a downer. You go ask her a question and she says "I can't answer any questions off the top of my head. I am not a genius." Never has she ever said "let's see" or "let's try to figure this out". Her level of enthusiasm makes me wonder why she even teaches at all. She appears exhausted and sad.
To go a little off topic, I want a universal basic income (and universal free healthcare) so that people who don't like the jobs they do or would like to take a break can do so without worrying about money.
Well, I guess my point is school can be boring or interesting depending on the teachers around you. This seems rather obvious. My hypothesis is that teachers who want to teach are likely to be better teachers than those who are just there because they need money.
I was bored, not because of the teachers, but because I didn't have to do much work to comprehend the material.
I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself.
Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.
Haha, this is how I feel too. I had the mistaken assumption in middle school that "if this is all they're teaching me, there must not be that much to know". Then when I got to college I realized that everything taught at the undergraduate level and below constitutes a negligible fraction of everything that has been discovered.
Instead of stretching mundane material that could have been taught in a week or two (calculus, etc.) over a period of years, I would have much preferred taking all of my engineering courses then. That would have left plenty of time in undergrad to learn topics as diverse as representation theory, semidefinite programming, quantum information theory, lambda calculus, etc. Instead, I have to learn these things on my own as a grad student in an ad-hoc fashion. Occasionally, courses on these topics become available, but they pop up at random semesters and you can't take all of them.
Seems like you did the best thing you could have, in the circumstances. When I was bored in class, I didn't study the textbook, I read science fiction novels.
Depending on your institution, it's quite possible that your professor is there for research instead of teaching. It's unfortunate that today an academic who wishes to have job security must do one in order to do the other. Also consider the possibility that she is simply uncomfortable responding extemporaneously in front of an audience (I remember one of my lecturers who could barely do basic arithmetic while at the whiteboard, presumably out of anxiety).
> had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing
He's a minority immigrant that fled poverty and homeschooled himself. Please clarify in what ways this was an advantageous upbringing over say an american native raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family who attends the best public schools, few if any of whom enter MIT at 15.
Well, I think for one is the support of his parents. I don't think "advantages" necessarily have to be monetary ones. Certainly in this case his advantages included his parents and the opportunities that OCW provided. This is not to say that the kid did not work hard either as that is obviously false.
Consider a similar situation where a five year old wants to take college courses through an online program in an american native family that is wealthy, except instead his parents dismissed that idea on the sheer ridiculousness of a 5 year old taking online college courses. Or his mother not taking time from her already limited schedule to continue trying to find material for him to consume. This hypothetical child will be advantaged in other aspects of their life to be sure, but they probably won't be accepted to MIT at 15.
"Having parents", "having supportive parents", "having parents with resources (that can come in multiple forms like time, knowledge, connections, and money) that they are willing and able to use on you", and "having a place that you can live in potentially rent-free whether or you're going to college, working, or need to return to if you lose your job" are things that some don't consider advantages, even though they should. Those things are springboards and safety nets that not everyone has access to.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but did you read the article?
“When I was five years old my mom told me ‘there’s this thing called OCW,’” says Rungta, who was homeschooled. “I just couldn’t believe how much material was available. From that moment on I spent the next few years taking OCW courses.”
For Rungta’s mother, the biggest challenge to homeschooling her son was staying ahead of him, finding courses and materials to feed his insatiable mind.
When Rungta turned 12, his family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, as his parents realized he needed to be in a more intellectually stimulating environment. He also wanted to live closer to MIT.
Later that day, Rungta saw an Indian restaurant in the Student Center that had been closed down. He suggested to his dad — a chef who owned a restaurant in Lowell — that he look into reopening the café. His father soon became the manager of Café Spice, and the family moved from Lowell to Cambridge. Rungta studied in the Student Center every day while his father ran the café.
Reflecting on his journey from Calcutta to Cambridge and the many intersecting moments with MIT, Rungta is grateful to his parents and to MIT for being responsive to his needs every step of the way. “MIT has been my middle school, my high school, my entire education. That’s pretty amazing. Some people think I’m gifted, but I don’t think so. OCW was a gift to me. I was lucky to be born at the time MIT was opening up education to the world and extra lucky that OCW brought MIT and me together.”
If the commitment these parents showed to their son's upbringing and education doesn't strike you as absolutely extraordinary, I'm happy for you. But my own opinion is that they went far above and beyond what any ordinary parents would do, including the vast majority of wealthy parents who live in the suburbs. And it's worth pointing out that we can acknowledge this fact while also recognizing this young man has accomplished something exceptional.
Aside from homeschooling not being possible here - attending a proper school is mandatory, with even a single day of truancy punishable by strict fines for the parents - there is a curious advantage to being a position of having nothing to lose.
Whereas many working class families toil long hours and weekends at minimum wage jobs just to be able to pay the rent on their small house or apartment and so that they don't lose what little they have, those who have fallen upon hard times (particularly through misfortune, rather than their own laziness or fecklessness) have the opportunity of taking greater risks and investing more in themselves and in their future.
It leads to this weird kind of envy where poor natives look at wealthy second-generation immigrants whose parents fled poverty (often becoming the landlords of the poor natives) and wonder where the hell they went wrong.
I didn't read anything about poverty. His father owned a restaurant, and they were able to relocate on a whim, so that suggests their circumstances were far from dire.
“(...) Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games (...)”
I disagree. Altough I would have loved learn more when i had all that free time and no Internet, I don't regret for an second the time spent playing some videogames (Monkey Island, King/Space Quest, Civilization, etc), reading for pleasure (Dumas, Asimov, Dracula, Rowling... Spiderman!) or even watching movies or some TV.
I'm a more complete (and interesting!) person because of all that.
I will never bring my kids up this way, they will enjoy life. Imagine if Steve Jobs was raised this way, we would have no Apple, this kind of one dimensional excellence is for the parents satisfaction.
Good point. Talent may be what separates the top 1% or performers from the top 5% (where that tiny edge matters) but for the vast majority of the bell curve, hard work counts for so much more than raw aptitude.
I think our view of this gets skewed by sports because it really is an edge case where you have to achieve a certain level of performance in a very specific time period because your body isn't in peak condition forever. Talent may mean you pick up those skills faster and hit that narrow target window. That constraint doesn't seem to be nearly as present in other areas to the same degree: if it takes somebody 5 extra years to become a superb programmer, that won't absolutely kill their chances of having a successful career at it even if they needed the extra time to get there.
> Talent may be what separates the top 1% or performers from the top 5% (where that tiny edge matters) but for the vast majority of the bell curve, hard work counts for so much more than raw aptitude.
Perfectly summarized by one of the inspirational banners at my gym (a local independent that caters heavily to student athletes) reads, "Hard work beats talent when talent isn't willing to work hard".
I'm content with my upbringing, but I think it's worth speculating about alternatives from a personal perspective since at one point we may raise our own children. For all we know, this person night have better social skills, personal development, etc. than those of us who had a "normal" upbringing. Normal should be defined by results rather than popularity. Don't you agree?
I do agree. The concerns are legitimate. In fact, most prestigious schools are hesitant to admit students like this young man because they fear for their social development. (Take the case of Bobby Fischer, for instance.) However, I disagree with the presumption that rapid advancement must result in poor social skills. In fact, I have met people who are living evidence to the contrary.
Well put, I frequently read stories like this and wonder if I could have done the same if I wasn't constantly being distracted by family arguments/being poor/being envious of other's situations or wasting so much time on video games. I feel regret almost every single day and constantly feel 1 or 2 years behind the curve. Even now I don't have a singular vision like this kid probably because I get so distracted by real life tasks.
>I feel regret almost every single day and constantly feel 1 or 2 years behind the curve.
I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm guessing you're pretty young. The older you get the less a year or two matters matters.
By the time you're 30, no one (not even yourself) will notice that you are 2 years behind your peers (based on whatever metric you're using). In fact, the older you get, the harder it is to measure what being 2 years behind even means.
And, just think about the huge variations in life span. Say, for example, George finished college 2 years later than Bob. However, George lived to 90 and was able to do productive work right up to the end, and Bob died at 78. George had an entire extra decade, even though he had a slightly later start.
Looking back on your past and feeling regret can be depressing, I too used to look back at all the wasted hours I could have spent being productive (especially when I think about how much I played video games...).
However, I think it's important to be able to look back at everything and find the positives as well. I think you should take pride in where you are and where you come from. This kid has his story, and so too you have your own, just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad, it's just who you are, and that in itself holds a lot of value.
I'm only 21 but relatively recently I lost this regret and I'm just living life as it comes. Things are going well enough for me and I strive to do better. I know I could've done muuuch better given the right circumstances but i don't care anymore.
Losing these regrets have made me much much happier and I enjoy a lot more of life now.
EDIT: and no, I didn't mix up b and d when i was 5 years old. I was able to read fluently and to write pretty well. Who cares if I wasted my youth on videogames, I'd do it again.
Thanks so much for your comment. I am quoting it and sending it to my wife because we have differing views on how much time the kids should spend playing computer games (me=almost none).
I was raised in an environment (and at a time) when there were no games like this and I filled the time doing other interesting things that were not only fun but lead to me being able to earn a good living after college.
There is a lot of benefit to the singularity of purpose at the same time there are a lot of side effects. To give you one example, homeschooled kid lacks good social skills, which are more important to success in life than mere intelligence or knowledge.
Definitely not the case, and I wish this tired cliche would go away already.
My homeschooled sister is far more social than I am (I did the normal school thing), although we're both fine at it. Homeschoolers probably have a lot more realistic socialization opportunities, as it's all based around common interests and skill levels, just like the real world, rather than being packed together with a bunch of people whose only trait in common with you is their age.
Stereotypes like this are broad generalizations and generally not representative of the facts... sort of like saying that all Blacks are criminals, all Muslims are terrorists, or that Gays are child abusers - none of which are generally true.
Most of the homeschoolers I have known have excellent social skills, and further, even the few "creepy" homeschool kids that are really awkward socially tend to grow out of it completely within a couple of years of college.
I wonder how does one learn social skills at a place where socializing is explicitly forbidden for about 85% of the time.
Also, you get to interact with only about 20 other random people of the same age with the same skill set (by definition). For 10 or so years. Very realistic, totally happens in real life.
I mean, schools are terribly inefficient at teaching skills/knowledge, but they are clearly even more terrible at teaching social skills.
You talk to teachers, ergo learn the meaning of accepting someone's authority.
You learn to share common resources in the classroom with your peers.
You stick to a schedule and respect other people's time by doing things in a timely manner.
You learn to have fun safely, you learn to deal with people more capable of you (intellectually and physically). I could go on.
They all seem like pretty good social skills to me.
Computer games can stimulate curiosity so labelling computer games and other child-related things as "hedonistic" might imply that they contain zero inherent value, which I think is a serious oversimplification.
According to my parents I could read at age 3, I can certainly remember petitioning my father to be allowed to read The Hobbit when I was 5. My mother got into trouble when I started school because the teachers didn't know what to do with a 5 year old who could read and write!
I was taught by the "look and say" method, now not used in British schools at least. They teach phonics now. Interestingly my daughter is dyslexic and struggled horribly in school to learn by the phonics method. It was when I started teaching her the old fashioned way that she picked it up.
There are people who have a hard time learning to read and some who never manage it despite making every effort. Why is it so hard to believe that there are people at the other end of the spectrum who are able to learn to read as an infant?
No, I'm not saying it's unbelievable. More that some of the comments here seem to be assuming that the kid was just pushed quite hard, but there seems to be more to it.
This isn't normally distributed. Would you find someone learning to feed at 18 as surprising as someone learning at a week old? Reading at this age is certainly unusual.
What I like is he came to America to go to MIT. That great mind is now an American mind, and with his family origin, I would hope a world thinking and sympathetic mind. Perhaps he can do good in this world.
The school system is really best for the kids-in-the-middle, i.e. not the best fit for the really talented, as the case with this MIT kid here, neither is it for the D/F students. Public school was originated in Europe for training workers if memory serves me right.
Since Bush the public education system is more geared towards to the D/F students nonetheless, i.e., the no child left behind policy, a road to hell. This might have something to do with Bush, who is about a D student himself.
A solution I would like to see, is tax-relief for home-schooling families, they don't use the public education system so why pay for the school district property tax? This looks like a win-win for the family and the nation in the long run.
Human races compete and evolve, focusing on the left-behinders are so against nature, yes they should be taken care of, but the focus really should be on the other side.
> Public school was originated in Europe for training workers if memory serves me right.
Actually, no. The idea is associated with Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightment and stuff like this. This was years before workers had to be educated. It was actually about humanism and liberty from the catholic church.
This seems to have been drawn from the same statistical distribution of many stories that center around this idea that "MIT students are smarter than students anywhere." The ideology of MIT is that you should go to MIT daycare, then MIT kindergarten and all the way through to the PhD and beyond, and if they had enough people in that pipeline they wouldn't bother taking applications from anywhere else.
That idea is definitely one of the things holding Boston back in terms of startups -- you definitely see research labs at MIT that don't hire postdocs from Stanford or Cornell because they only want to hire MIT people. There are plenty of MIT grads who are mediocre at best but many local startups (particularly those started by MIT grads) don't realize this and often make up all sorts of excuses about why things went wrong.
In contrast (but not contradiction) with your experience, as an MIT undergraduate math major applying for PhD programs, my advisor warned me that the math dept. doesn't admit their own graduates. I applied anyway and indeed was not admitted (which was fine since I was admitted to UW-Madison, where I most wanted to go).
I did my bachelor's from ages 14-18; there's some things that you can't really do (frat parties) but most of the social opportunities are open to you. It helps to make friends if you are in a group-centric major - I was a chemist, so lots of long hours in the lab with cool people. There's been some questions about whether the parents push too hard in these sorts of cases; for me, I was definitely motivated more by my own desire to get out in the world and start getting real things done. This isn't always a productive desire - I wish I'd taken the time to learn more about the stuff that grew to interest me later (math/CS), instead of blitzing through all my chem requirements. I guess for other people doing the same thing the only advice I'd have is that while the cliche is that life is short, it's really longer than you think it is at that age and you shouldn't feel like you need to rush in order to maintain a position in some sort of race. It's not bad to progress fast, just make sure it isn't at the expense of finding what you really love to do.
I'd be willing to bet that Rungta watched and consumed with great joy Walter Lewin's Physics 8.01 videos. I'd further bet that he mentioned them in this interview with MIT News, only to have his comments omitted from the piece, because Lewin is, in MIT's eyes, persona non grata. Of course this is just conjecture. I just said I'd be willing to take the bet.
I find his drive and his parent's support commendable. Being someone who has not been homeschooled and does not know anyone who has, I am extremely curious about it.
-How does one go about replicating this kind of success? Or even moderate success. In typical schools, you have some measure of whether your child is "succeeding". How does one go about doing the same for home-schooled children.
-How do you go about providing the structure that schools provides towards increasingly complex material which will keep the child engaged and learning at the same time.
Not having children myself but watching my brother's children, I can see that the structure provided for children is extremely important, even for simple things like when to have food, go to bed, practice music etc.
Are there any good resources for raising home schooled children and providing structure?
Extremely important in what sense? What are the specific benefits you see to having a rigid structure? I have a little sister who is in my estimation smart, but spends every waking moment (when not in school or finishing up homework) on her iPad playing video games and watching Youtube videos. I sometimes wonder if a little bit of prodding on the part of my parents would help her find other hobbies.
I personally feel like I suffered from my parent's laissez faire attitude.
I plan on doing something like this for my kids as they get older. I already randomly watch open courseware type stuff offered from various universities and I've always noticed they have decent seeming English and Math sections too. So why not sit my kids in front of it too?
I don't think anyone is really happy with public schools these days. I object because of a Christian background. Yet my non-church going (atheist?) in-laws asked me once about "non-religious" based home school programs for their kids since they knew I would be home schooling. I really had no idea what to tell them.
Even with all the positive support from parents this kid is an extreme outlier.
Terrence Tao supposedly knew numbers from Sesame Street at age 2, but I do not know of any avid kid readers at age 2.
I know plenty of kids ages 3-4 who know the alphabet but none are actual readers.
In fact I know plenty of kids who "read" a book at age 3, but they are not reading the way we adults are they are imitating the reading process.
Anecdotally I was a relatively early reader at age 5 (reading whole scary Grimm's tales) but my mom keeps insisting it was age 3 when I know it was not.
So if he really was reading at age 2 and half that is showing advanced potential.
I think this was a great story and I hope to hear more like it. It has been one of the "promises" of the Internet that smart children could get access to as much learning as they can handle, breaking the bottleneck that was the availability of local resources.
Of course not everyone cares, or wants to learn all they can, but for those who do it is important to give them that opportunity. And it is in that context that I think the availability of course ware will help us guide smart, motivated, kids before their boredom leads them into an ill advised adventure.
This is awesome. As someone who can't wait to graduate college so I can teach myself stuff through OCW (there's some irony there), I am glad it's available. It's a really great project.
I would love some guidance on how to take advantage of OCW w/ my kids.
I don't want to reproduce Ahaan's story. My father was a biology teacher and always had tons of text books we could just kind of grind through growing up. I'm not doing the same for my kids at this time- mostly for lack of resources.
Just skimming through the OCM content- I don't see material in physics or science that can be used to introduce kids to the scientific method. It mostly looks like baptism by fire.
Truly impressive accomplishment. My congratulations.
And now imagine that you actually do not need MIT. In comparison to what you have done, it is another rigid institution with a more or less rigid structure.
I hope the educational landscape will keep changing, giving more alternative bodies to aquire high end knowledge, e.g. through hacker spaces, virtual/internet based platforms, etc.
I just don't understand how a 5 year old can comprehend a college level course.
How does he know enough math to follow along any scientific course? How can he be well enough versed in literature to follow along a liberal arts course, or history to comprehend a sociology course?
Well, the first-level answer would be "work backwards"...
...as soon as you don't understand the math, google it, then keep doing that until you start understanding things (though this is probably more what a 7yo would do, not a 5yo)
The math will be a prerequisite so the university will handle making sure he has taken a high enough math. Honestly the hard part about college courses is motivation to study and do assignments not comprehension, so if he is motivated enough he'll do well.
He seems to have tremendous breadth of curiosity, it will be interesting to see what he ultimately ends up specializing in. MIT is a big place, and trying to "major in everything" will almost certainly not turn out well.
I have 3 friends from Bangladesh whose parents received their US green cards in 2000, 2002 and 2003. They had all applied for them in the early 1990s. I rarely hear of this happening anymore, so I imagine the process was more straightforward back then.
Well Ramanujan only needed one textbook to enable him. The tru e potential is in allowing everyone to get atleast a momentary ,fleeting glimpse of the worlds that the geniuses have opened up for us.
The problem is mostly that parents and teachers have expectations for students beyond what most of them are intellectually capable of. There is also an excessive emphasis on empty credentialism. Both problems could be tempered via a recognition that people are not blank slates, some people like Ahaan are simply smarter than others, and the average high schooler should not be compared against him.
I think most people have a hometown that, even if they leave, always know they can go back to and make a simple life for themselves.
I can imagine it being hard to grow up in a place where you have a pretty reasonable expectation of never being able to return to and live in on your own terms, unless you manage to stay the top 1% of the 1%.
I doubt it. The Massachusetts age of consent is 16, so there's no legal barriers by his Sophomore year. I haven't been to MIT but, for the college campuses I'm familiar with, it's harder to avoid getting laid than it is to get laid.
I was homeschooled, along with my two sisters, my entire educational career until college. We all started taking college classes early, my older sister correspondence at 14, my twin and I correspondence at 15. All of us took classes at local colleges before starting 'real college'. All of us scored high on our ACTs, all of us got scholarships to college.
My parents didn't really push us, we were just smart. We had childhoods, I was a starter on the basketball team, and played college soccer for a year. I also read 10+ books a week, played way, way too much Civilization and Total Annihilation, and did plenty of volunteer work, especially at our local public access station.
For my sisters, going to and living at 'real college' worked out well, they both succeeded in their own ways (my older sister graduated with two masters a few days after she turned 21, my twin sister received a lot of recognition from professionals in her field before graduating, was salutatorian, etc), whereas I didn't do so well being away from home and the support structure. I'm lazy, and I thought could just not do assignments I didn't want to and do well enough on other assignments to make up for it. Long story short, my GPA dropped enough to lose my scholarship, and I decided that the private college experience wasn't worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for.
So I moved home, finished my bachelors from the state university in town. Snagged an internship and then got a job offer from that company, essentially during my junior year for a full time job, contingent on finishing school.
My point in typing up this story is not to say that I am or was awesome. My point is that I am pretty sure that Ahaan Rungta is a pretty smart kid, his parents probably pushed him less than you think, and that as long as he and his family figure out how to navigate the maturity journey, he'll be fine.