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Here is the most recent cover story from Time. It questions the present allocation of educational funding, wondering whether enough is invested in the brightest of students. Here is a taste:

American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

That is really a jaw-dropping statistic, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been in a public school more than once in the past year. And of course it makes me sound heartless, but allocating so much more funding to the mentally retarded than to the mentally gifted is just…retarded. It is simply a bad investment. When it comes down to it, all of us, especially the disabled, have the greatest interest in the geniuses of the world.

The brightest among us are the ones who invent the technologies that make our lives earlier, who pick the most productive of companies to invest in, and who find ways to deliver products at cheap prices to billions of customers across the globe at once. Much of the wealth around us can be attributed to the ideas that originated from very innovative men and women, and were shared and capitalized upon with others.

Without the vast resources produced by the world’s geniuses, we would never be able to support the disabled to the extent we do. As I see it, we owe it to the mentally retarded among us to invest more in our most gifted of children as they will be the most productive in the future.

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