Gifted And Talented Education
I'll tell you what I know. I was in one of these GATE programs in Leesburg Virginia called FOCUS (elementary) and Spectrum (middle school). The high-testing kids were rounded up and pulled out of class a few times a week to study Esperanto, play risk, and study architecture mainly. Big focus on synthetic languages like ASL and RSL too. All the kids in the class stuck together outside of school, we were pretty much the only friends each other had.
Then I moved to Ohio where I was placed in a program called PACE. I don't know what it stood for, but we were no longer studying anything concrete, instead we were competing in a nationwide contest called FPS or "future problem solving". My team placed in the state level, you basically sat in a room and spitballed platitudes for crisis scenarios like oil spills and whatever else. My team used "Self-replicating nano-bots" for everything and the judges ate that shit up.
During the state finals competition, we were all staying at this hotel in some flyover city in southern Ohio, my team wound up sneaking a PSP into the competition and we basically gave up because we knew something creepy and weird was going on, so we listened to Dr. Octagon and wrote a parody to Thriller as a solution to some prompt about invasive fish species. We lost purposefully as to not have to participate any further.
Then my PACE group was split into male and female classes. The males all built rockets and the females continued to do FPS, probably because they weren't privy to how creepy and sinister everything felt (we used to hold the competitions in sketchy church basements). All the guys basically bullshitted and smoked weed while the female class took shit way more seriously than we ever did. Here's where shit gets weird.
My buddy was the only guy in the class with the ladies, he was presumably trying to get pussy (we all could opt to what class we wanted to be in, one had an ex-nasa guy teaching it, the other was a government drone lady with really saggy tits). So fast forward to high-school when the GATE program wasn't mandatory and was underfunded so no one participated. My one buddy that went on with the FPS group lost his fucking mind. I remember in Latin class one day, he stood up and started shouting at our teacher "I KNOW I'M BEING WATCHED, STOP INTENTIONALLY LYING TO US." We all thought he was absolutely nuts, but we stuck by him and he eventually snapped out of whatever existential crisis he was having. I don't know what the fuck FPS was all about or who funded it, but my best guess is DARPA. My test results followed me through the move and I was pulled out of class within the first week at my new middle school. Here's the thing though: the aptitude test they administered me in grade school was already completed when they gave it to me. All the bubbles were already filled in but half-erased. I told them that I had an old test, but they told me to keep my scan sheet and make sure every bubble was erased and my answer was marked. The bubbles that were filled in on the test were all correct, so that's what i gave them. Something is seriously up with GATE, I think I was lucky enough to get out with the kids that stopped buying into it early. Although what I'm doing for a living right now is kind of insane (I'm the Cree guy from a few months back). I kind of feel like everything in my life was a setup, I'm too rich and too well protected for the amount of effort I put into things. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'm starting to doubt it.
If you want more information on GATE conspiracy, I would strongly advise looking into the Future Problem Solving competition.