I came across a post by Perry Marshall yesterday entitled, “The gigantic horrible lie about education” (catchy, no?) and I thought I’d pass it along. It touches on some issues very close to my heart, as I come from a “gifted” educational background and recall very well the stigma attached to those who were and were not a part of this hand-selected group of elite learners. Perry touches on this concept of things we should just know by a certain age, and he insightfully addresses the net effect of these expectations on people who are negatively impacted by them:

If you apply ANY test to ANY group of people, it’s gonna shake down to 80/20. Doesn’t matter if it’s history or math or Pokemon or soccer or belly dancing or model trains, 20% of the people have 80% of the capability.

He goes on to share his thoughts on the conundrum:

There are 6 billion people in the world and every single one is a diamond in some stage of being polished. Life is either going to polish you up or grind you down. And the difference between the two lies in how much hope you have, how much faith you have in the fact that you do carry something special on the inside, that’s waiting to get out. Many give up, not knowing they were only 10 minutes from triumph.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to discover your uniqueness.

Bingo. Read the full article here. Hat tip to @nickreese for the tweet about it.