Separating kids into streams within the same school doesn’t work, because school is about enculturation, and the kids are still together at recess.<p>Separating gifted kids into “magnet schools” <i>sort of</i> works, but they’re just getting the same <i>teachers</i> they’d get anywhere else—we don’t really know how to select for teachers that can teach gifted kids any better, so we just select for teachers with impressive resumes.<p>You know what works? Academies. Specifically, military academies, though technical academies sometimes do too. Places where the students and teachers are of a selected population, not by natural talent, but by their driven-ness to grow and succeed. <i>Those</i> tend to product functional, intelligent, mature and mentally-healthy adults. And the difference is simple: in an academy, <i>bad grades</i> are stigmatized <i>by the students</i>, while <i>good grades</i> (and hard work to <i>achieve</i> good grades) are not. Everyone wants to be “the smartest kid in the class”, and popularity generally correlates with how well you do in the classes (i.e. everyone wants to be friends with the most-competent kids.)<p>The one core flaw of the academy model is that this constant mutual pushing of one-another to succeed, leaves students little time to actually get to know one-another or indulge in any outside interests. Hobbies aren’t actively discouraged, but you can only have one to the degree that it doesn’t interfere with your pursuit of top grades; so nobody ends up pursuing heavy-time-investment hobbies, since few others would, so even if one can make time themselves, there’s nobody to share it with. Since academy students are so busy working their asses off, they also essentially treat their fellow students as “coworkers” (interfacing with them only to accelerate their own productivity), skipping right over the stage where they treat the children in their own classes like friends, bonding over shared interests and the like.<p>Not sure if there’s any in-between, though. Give kids the time and opportunity to create their own subcultures with their own definitions of success, and all the problems of regular schooling re-emerge.