This resonated with me. Growing up I always felt like an alien around other kids, my mindset was just so different. I put a lot of effort into fitting in though, which I think helped somewhat. Even so, I very nearly dropped out of school and could quite easily have gone down a dark path (likely ending up homeless or in prison or worse). Luckily I went to one of the best public schools in the country and ended up with some pretty good teachers, but I learned as much on my own as I did from school, and had things been different I might have lost patience. As it was I nearly ended up stuck on a remedial track for most subjects on entering High School (due partly to the fact that I just didn&#x27;t do homework, 20-some years later after discovering that I have ADHD a lot more things make sense). Somehow at 13 I had the maturity to realize I needed to fix that and luckily the school system rewarded my efforts (ultimately I graduated with special honors among a handful of top students in my class, and entered college as a sophomore).<p>I imagine a lot of other folks who are just as smart as I was but didn&#x27;t luck out with the same circumstances have been severely let down by the system over the years. Things just aren&#x27;t setup for people who learn differently, or at a different pace, or have a different form of cognition than the archetypal student that everything is built around. Which ends up ill serving a lot of students across all intelligence levels.