Yeah I actually did do the GATE program. Like 4-6th grade or somewhere in there. Why, what's the conspiracy theory?
It's on a scale from "Nothingburger, you 'gifted' kids just want to feel special" to "MKULTRA PROJECT MONARCH PROGRAMMING".
I personally am in the category of those who think there was something to it. It didn't have to be anything as extreme as like, X-Men, but there were active projects in things like education at the time, and with the rise of standardized testing, I do see the government (and/or private entities) being willing to put money into school type and curriculum experiments. If nothing else, it would explain the suspiciously-high number of these programs that came out of seemingly nowhere and how they were rolled out so quickly.
Think about it. It's almost impossible to change school curriculums these days (both politically and financially), so how were these schools/districts able to do it so quickly during this time period? Where did the money and the curriculum come from?
As an example, look at the "Core Knowledge" curriculum.
If you look it up, it says it was created by the "Core Knowledge Foundation" (
founded 1986).
The Core Knowledge Foundation was born from Core Knowledge UK, which says it itself came from the think tank "Civitas".
Civitas was founded by David George Green, who was working for Institute of Economic Affairs immediately before the Core Knowledge Foundation was created.
The problem is, Civitas was apparently founded in
2000.
Why does Wikipedia not say when the
Core Knowledge Foundation UK was founded?
Why does Wikipedia not say
when Civitas was founded?
Why does the
Civitas website not say when it was founded?
What about all the other GATE curriculums? What happened to all the data from the standardized tests before they settled into their consistent forms across the US? Why is the TerraNova test still used for DoD schools but not civilian ones, when it was used in GATE schools?