Follow-up insights on rapid educational acceleration

Too little is known about what happens, when they grow up, to youths who reason extremely well mathematically. Few tell their story to specialists in education of the gifted, either in writing or orally. Julian Stanley brought two successful former “radical accelerants” to the November 1993 annual meeting of the National Association for Gifted Children in Atlanta and also provided some information about 12 other mathematically precocious youths. Jane C. Charlton and Donald M. Marolf, the two young adults featured, told the symposium audience about themselves and answered questions. They were amazingly frank, insightful, and humorous about their lives thus far. Both are convinced, and are convincing, that rapid progress through school grades all the way to the Ph.D. degree is the nearly optimal way for persons like themselves to enrich their education and prepare for adulthood. All three speakers agreed, however, that extremely fast educational advancement might not be the ideal curriculum path for some other equally capable boys and girls.