>>13365492This. I was a smart kid, maybe not smart enough to study university topics at age 11 (although who knows if school had actually pushed me...), but I was consistently well ahead of my class and would spend most of my time zoning out, do zero homework, and then ace the exams because I got the concepts after listening to them for like 5 minutes. But I was never allowed to advance a grade. I recall asking one of my teachers in grade 4 about this and apparently they "didn't do that anymore" and that I had to just do the work at my grade level. Similarly, at the university level, nothing was really that challenging, in fact I ended up skipping many of my classes and studying a few days before the final exams for several of my classes, but the real work of university was doing oodles of projects, labs, and homework assignments. Even if I was the smartest man alive I don't think I would physically be able to complete the totality of the 4 years of university work in 1 year, at least without living like a slave working 100 hours per week during that time. I was never given the chance to simply challenge final exams, in fact the idea of doing that was beaten out of me in public school where I literally have had teachers pull me aside and tell me that I had to act like I was working harder to "set a good example for the other kids". These child progidies are absolutely probably quite intelligent, but they're lucky that they actually had educational systems that wanted to nurture their growth.
