Dmitri Gaskin drinks code with his cereal for breakfast every
morning. He's a jQuery whiz and a Drupal know-it-all. He
contributes patches for both Open Source projects. In the Drupal
world, he maintains many modules, is on the security team, and is
involved in the upcoming Summer of Code as a mentor and
administrator. Dmitri has given many talks on Drupal and jQuery, in
such places as Logitech, Drupalcon and live on a radio show out of
L.A. When Dmitri isn't coding, a very rare occurrence, he is playing
and composing contemporary music. And attending classes in the 6th
grade. (He's only 12.)
I would have been hooked to video games or PC games at that age. Though I have a excuse I saw computer only when I joined the college. yeh lame excuse :)
Whenever I see a story like this I wish the United States would provide students a far more flexible and natural learning curriculum. For example, the "mathematics" course trek in the US school system alone is one of the most dreadful:
The problem lies in several issues. As one of "those kids" that started college at 11, one issue I have recognized to be by far the strongest is the self-perpetuation of incompetence: high school teachers are usually direly incapable of providing students with the actual modern perspective on the subject they are teaching! Qualification wise, I could have been teaching high school classes three years ago, and I knew a lot of education majors back in my undergraduate days. Usually, it's the people that aren't smart enough to pursue the subject that they simply make do with teaching it instead. Most of the brighter math and physics majors I knew went on to graduate school or a scientific profession; the others usually minored in education. Perhaps it is an unfair generalization, but it does seem to be true from my experiences. Of course, you can all draw the implications that would have on the K-12 education system. To illustrate with a final example, some of the math major / education minor people told me "I hate proofs"! I thought I would cry.
I didn't mean to make this my life's story, but in any case, perhaps it could be argued the current quagmire that is our method of ensuring child "development" is in some way good, simply due to its inherent selectivity. Perhaps the innovative and intelligent and resourceful will escape the K-12 system much like Dmitri did. It's largely luck, though, as it heavily depends on their environment (parents, town, etc.). I considered undergrad to be like my high school. Although I skipped the latter, undergrad was fairly similar in structure (homework, participation, tests, etc.), except that the classes were taught by people who actually knew what they were talking about.
On a final note, what Dmitri or I or the 12-year-old Asian kids (sorry for the stereotype) "do" is not being "super intelligent." It's merely being lucky or fortuitous enough to see the light in a (imho) broken system. Really, when you think of it, nearly everything in an undergraduate curriculum is quite simple if you just read the damn textbooks and do your homework, and in the case of people like Dmitri, be a hacker and play around. In a perfect education schema, every kid would be like that. Every kid would be creative; not shackled and restrained.
