They certainly do know how to handle high intelligence.  But it&#x27;s for the benefit of everyone else, other than the intelligent students.<p>I recall in Kurt Vonnegut&#x27;s <i>_Sirens of Titan_</i> how people on Earth were handicapped, to counter their strengths.  The most intelligent people had to wear earphones that constantly emitted annoying sounds so that it was harder for them to think clearly.  That&#x27;s very much like the way GLaDOS was handicapped in the <i>Portal 2</i> backstory by attaching Wheatley to her--a personality core that was designed by the best scientists to be the worst possible idiot, to constantly feed her bad ideas.<p>The US educational system piles gratuitous additional work on the smartest students.  Rather than just graduating, how about graduating while taking a bunch of AP or IB classes?  The system accommodates them by digging additional official channels, rather than allowing them to become self-directed autodidacts or entrepreneurs.<p>I know that when <i>I</i> was a kid, I would have totally wasted any additional free time I may have had outside of classes, but it&#x27;s very possible that some of my classmates in all the various &quot;X&quot; sections might have taken part-time jobs, or started low-capital businesses, or educated themselves on topics the school could never teach.