> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science.
I think in this example you are vastly overestimating the “average genius”, in comparison to those rare few who truly push the boundaries. We tend to do this because of the way our brains estimate things of significant scale, like the fact that keeps floating around social media about how bad most of us are at having a concept of the difference between thousands, millions, and billions.
There are many valedictorians (of the order of some per thousand) but few Ramanujans (of the order of tens per billion?), and gearing an overall education system specifically for those few could do a disservice to a great many others at every level below. Ramanujan was not the result of an effective education system anyway: like a lot of other world changing minds he was largely self-taught. Perhaps there is room to encourage more investigation to the side of the curriculum a lot more than we currently do, but the problems that stop other "Ramanujan"s, that could so easily have scuppered Ramanujan himself, are usually not caused by the education system but by other societal problems (death & disease, racism, sexism, caste or class biases, etc.) not giving them a chance to explore & self-learn or have useful access to education & other resources at all. Addressing those problems will help a much wider chunk of the population, as well as reducing constraints for the truly exceptional geniuses¹ amongst them.
----
[1] And of course those non-geniuses who luck out and have that one brilliant idea. Their contribution is often vital for progress too, and I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are true geniuses!
I think in this example you are vastly overestimating the “average genius”, in comparison to those rare few who truly push the boundaries. We tend to do this because of the way our brains estimate things of significant scale, like the fact that keeps floating around social media about how bad most of us are at having a concept of the difference between thousands, millions, and billions.
There are many valedictorians (of the order of some per thousand) but few Ramanujans (of the order of tens per billion?), and gearing an overall education system specifically for those few could do a disservice to a great many others at every level below. Ramanujan was not the result of an effective education system anyway: like a lot of other world changing minds he was largely self-taught. Perhaps there is room to encourage more investigation to the side of the curriculum a lot more than we currently do, but the problems that stop other "Ramanujan"s, that could so easily have scuppered Ramanujan himself, are usually not caused by the education system but by other societal problems (death & disease, racism, sexism, caste or class biases, etc.) not giving them a chance to explore & self-learn or have useful access to education & other resources at all. Addressing those problems will help a much wider chunk of the population, as well as reducing constraints for the truly exceptional geniuses¹ amongst them.
----
[1] And of course those non-geniuses who luck out and have that one brilliant idea. Their contribution is often vital for progress too, and I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are true geniuses!