A college-bound 5th grader? All kids in 5th grade should aim to go to college.

The rest is crazy too, and frankly not somewhere I would have put my kids, but the notion that you would predetermine kids' future that early made me yell. What's next, KG college-bound kids?

Once she arrives at the college, and doesn't have someone constantly directing her every breath, we shall then see what happens. But up until then, it doesn't look like she has any choice.

someone quoted a passage from Dickens' Hard Times, which was so apt.:

” ‘NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, – nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, – all helped the emphasis.

‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.” – Hard Times, Charles Dickens

with kids who forget to be silent?

It would have been TORTURE for me!

who might not make it that long.

How horrible for a young kid.

That description could literally have been torn from the first two weeks of boot camp when you are still really "locked down." Into and out of the chow hall in single file, silent lines. Eating in silence. Choreographed movements and scripted responses to repeated questions. Ugh. For basic training, I get the necessity of it. For an eight or nine year old kid, I think it borders on child abuse.