Thanks for sharing your experiences, though I'm not sold on your conclusion.
There are plenty of students who, when bored or unchallenged, underperform to the point where they are initially mistaken for having an intellectual disability. For these students to have no support throughout school seems like a recipe for these students to "get lost" earlier in their life rather than after high school (where it seems to happen in my anecdotal experience).
On that note, I'm particularly interested in what, if anything, helped you to pull yourself out of the hole: were there any identifiable experiences that helped you find a "sense of direction", for lack of a better term?
I still contend that creating an institutional gaggle of smart kids is wrong. It's equivalent to creating a school just for black kids; it's merely form of segregation. I hope they stop doing it, for the sake of society in general.
As for me, I was correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder after many years of misdiagnoses. Now with proper treatment I don't have mood swings, take rash actions, or go into months-long dark, suicidally depressive states. But I also can't output 2 weeks of project work in 3 days with 8 hours of sleep anymore. I'll take the good with the bad though. Overall, the death of my father was probably the main catalyst for improving myself.
There are plenty of students who, when bored or unchallenged, underperform to the point where they are initially mistaken for having an intellectual disability. For these students to have no support throughout school seems like a recipe for these students to "get lost" earlier in their life rather than after high school (where it seems to happen in my anecdotal experience).
On that note, I'm particularly interested in what, if anything, helped you to pull yourself out of the hole: were there any identifiable experiences that helped you find a "sense of direction", for lack of a better term?