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Belgian boy Laurent Simons heads off to university aged 8.

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BravoV:
Poor kid, this is even much worst than publicity stunt, its purely child exploitation, Dutch authority or child protection agency should start an investigation.

TK:
Apparently the parents want him to graduate at a certain age (trying to beat some sort of world record?) and the university is saying that he needs 6 more months to complete all the tests.

The parents are withdrawing him so he can go to start a PhD program in the US

Poor kid, let him have a childhood!  In 15 years he will be on par or just a little above the average person, him alone will not change the world. Not worth the sacrifice.

EEVblog:

--- Quote from: Avacee on December 10, 2019, 07:15:30 pm ---Update: depending on your interpretation he's either dropped out or his parents had a sulk and withdrew him because the university said he still had too many exams to sit before his 10th birthday and the parents really wanted him to be the first under 10 to graduate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50734000

--- End quote ---

Quote from his father:

--- Quote ---"If a child can play football well, we all think the media attention is great. My son has a different talent. Why should he not be proud of that?"
--- End quote ---

WTF, who's stopping him or telling him he shouldn't be proud of what he's done already?
Insane.
The parents have had a dummy spit and taken their bat and ball and gone home.
Sure, it might have been the kid that spat the dummy over not being able to graduate before he was 10yo, but it still falls on the parents in that case for not going "hey, don't worry, another 6 months is no big deal"
Good on the university for not pandering too much toward this, it makes a mockery of the degree, and acknowledging that doing the course in 10 months would not sufficiently develop "insight, creativity and critical analysis".

Berni:
Yep the university had a special exception for him as there is no way you could do the amount of work needed to get an engineering degree in such a short time. Possibly for the university to get lots of press coverage and free advertising.

Also just because you can quickly pass exams does not mean you are smart. For a lot of school this just means you are good at memorizing stuff, especially for the first 10 years of education. Passing a history of geography exam is purely just about remembering things you read in the textbook. If you have good memory then you can finish a semester worth of history in a few days. For things like math yes its a lot more difficult, but if your ability to remember and quickly recall something is fine grained enough then you can just memories all the common steps for solving math problems. Physics is just again memorization of formulas with a sprinkle of math tacked on the end to calculate things.

The engineering highschool i went to tried implementing more relaxed attendance rules (Before this you needed written and signed parental permission to miss class since students are under 18). I used the new relaxed rules to miss class a lot, since it was more fun spending the useless class in a bar than wasting time sitting in class and not listening anyway. Yet not long after the rules ware revoked because of complaints from students (and there parrents) that never miss classes. The argument being they still get the same grades and everything despite them putting in effort to attend every single class. :palm:

Being forced to sit in boring classes was a big problem for me because i have major attention span issues when i find something uninteresting. Learning it from the textbook 1 day before the exam, passing the exam with an okay bit not great grade and then forgetting 90% of what i learned in the next week was the way that worked for me. I have sort of 'selective memory' where i rapidly forget uninteresting things, so learning a boring subject over the course of a month in 1 or 2 hour spans of time did not work for me. I was perceived as pretty smart, but im not really, i was just optimizing for the least effort route trough this school thing.

Yansi:

--- Quote from: Rick Law on November 25, 2019, 03:45:56 am ---Having higher IQ helps both in education and income, so from my perspective having higher IQ increases the potential of being happy, but it is not a guarantee to happiness and the probability of success is probably lower than average due to nature's cruel game.

--- End quote ---

I disagree. Higher IQ usually leads to depression, certainly not happiness. Success, sure, maybe.

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