In third grade, I learned something: I could choose to not do homework, and the world didn’t end.
I was a very bright child. I demanded my mother read so many stories to me that she finally just taught me to read myself. By the age of two, I was reading simple chapter books; by five, encyclopedias and the Bible. I was a good girl, too, though prone to daydreams.
Then one morning on the school steps, I saw a classmate frantically scribbling. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I didn’t do my homework!”
You could do that?
In no time at all, I’d settled into a pattern of ignoring any homework I didn’t enjoy, a pattern that stuck until high school. Why should I bother? I already knew everything in my classes, and none of the homework taught me more. Unfortunately, that discovery taught me bad habits, too: procrastination, arrogance, and the belief that effort was optional.
What, I wonder, would a gifted and talented program have done for me? It might have challenged me properly, forced me to think, and ensured I learned good study habits, instead of coasting through every test. Gifted and talented programs are the difference between children who learn to excel in life and those who simply drift through it.
When gifted children aren’t challenged, they don’t just get bored; they get lost. They tune out, coast, and sometimes turn destructive just to feel alive. Many spend years trying to relearn the discipline and resilience they were never asked to develop. Others never do. The light that should have illuminated the world ends up dimmed, not by failure, but by neglect.
And when these programs vanish, the damage falls on the poorest and most vulnerable children. Wealthy families can buy opportunity with tutors, private schools, or early college courses, but gifted kids from poor or minority backgrounds have no such safety net. For them, a gifted program can be the only place where their ability is recognized, encouraged, and expected to grow. Take that away, and their talent too often goes unseen or even punished. Instead of being told, you can go anywhere, they learn the quieter lesson that standing out is a kind of betrayal.
Socially, the fallout can be just as brutal. Bright but unchallenged children often struggle to connect with peers who don’t share their interests or pace of thought. Without environments that value their curiosity, they learn to hide it, to shrink themselves to fit in. Some turn into class clowns to mask their boredom; others retreat into loneliness or resentment. Many internalize the belief that intelligence makes them strange or unlovable. Gifted programs don’t just cultivate intellect; they create a community where gifted kids can finally breathe, where being different isn’t a flaw, but a responsibility and a real gift.
That’s why proposals such as the one now circulating in New York are so dangerous. Over the past month, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has called for eliminating the city’s gifted and talented programs for early grades, describing them as relics of inequality and “colonial thinking.” The words sound lofty, but the results would be brutal: tens of thousands of bright children condemned to sit through years of lessons that teach them nothing new, and more insidiously, that expecting more of themselves is somehow unfair to others.
Who Is Mahmood Mamdani?
Mahmood Mamdani was not some obscure activist prior to his rise to prominence as one of the most influential public intellectuals of his generation. Now, as the father of New York mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, his long campaign against Western notions of merit and hierarchy has entered the realm of politics. A Ugandan-born scholar and Columbia University professor, he has spent decades shaping the doctrine now known as “decolonization.” His ideas have redefined departments of education, social work, and political theory, and through them have quietly rewritten how America thinks about fairness, ability, and success.
In books such as Citizen and Subject (1996), Define and Rule (2012), and Neither Settler nor Native (2020), Mahmood Mamdani argues that Western systems of merit and individual achievement are not expressions of fairness, but extensions of colonial power. The very act of identifying excellence, he claims, creates hierarchy, and hierarchy is oppression. To “decolonize” education, therefore, means to reject the notion that some students can or should rise above others.
It’s a worldview that sees gifted education not as opportunity, but as inequity. In this framework, a test that identifies a five-year-old’s unusual ability is not a doorway to growth, but evidence of systemic bias. Talent becomes suspect; ambition becomes privilege. The goal shifts from cultivating potential to managing resentment. One can imagine what that does to a smart African-American child when the culture around him already equates scholarship with “acting white.” Instead of finding pride in intellect, he learns suspicion of it, and the very trait that could lift him out of limitation becomes a source of shame.
For most of Mamdani's life, these ideas lived within academia. But Mahmood’s son Zohran has brought them into the political sphere. As a state assemblyman from Queens and now as a leading candidate for New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani has taken his father’s theories and translated them into proposed policy. Nowhere is that inheritance clearer than in his proposal to eliminate New York City’s gifted and talented programs for young children, which he describes as “colonial relics.”
How the Idea Traveled West
The academic world is full of abstract revolutions that never escape the seminar room. But this one did. Over the past two decades, Mahmood Mamdani’s framework of “decolonizing” knowledge has moved from elite universities into teacher colleges, education departments, and state bureaucracies, the very places where school policy is written.
The translation was subtle at first: Decolonize the curriculum became diversify the reading list. Then came a push to “eliminate tracking,” to end the separation of students by skill level. Finally, the movement turned openly hostile to gifted education itself, declaring that “equity” required the abolition of programs that recognized high performance.
Zohran Mamdani’s worldview is the direct heir to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, which transformed education from a search for truth into a struggle for power. Freire taught that hierarchy in the classroom mirrored oppression in society; Mahmood Mamdani expanded that claim to argue that all hierarchies, whether intellectual, cultural, or civilizational, are colonial artifacts. What began as a call for “dialogue” between teacher and student has become a crusade against distinction itself.
The father wrote the doctrine; the son is now testing it on America’s children.
These ideas filtered westward through the credential mills that train administrators, where the language of Freire, Gayatri Spivak, and Mahmood Mamdani was presented not as theory but as moral truth. Young educators learned to see excellence as exclusion and intellectual rigor as privilege. In time, they became superintendents, curriculum directors, and state commissioners.
By the time most parents noticed, the change was complete. School districts began using new language to describe old programs: gifted classes were renamed “clustered learning environments,” acceleration became “differentiated instruction,” and the word merit quietly disappeared from official documents. On paper, the systems still existed. In practice, they no longer selected for excellence; they selected for optics.
San Francisco led the way by scrapping merit-based admissions at Lowell High School. Seattle followed by dissolving its Highly Capable Cohort. New York suspended gifted testing for kindergartners. Even Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, long considered one of the best in the nation, replaced its admissions exam with a “holistic” system that functions as a racial quota.
Each time, the justification was identical: equity, inclusion, and the elimination of “colonial hierarchies.” Each time, the result was the same: lower standards, lower achievement, and the quiet exile of brilliance from the classroom.
Mahmood Mamdani himself could hardly have hoped for a more complete victory. His premise that the Western model of individual excellence is inherently oppressive has become institutional doctrine, shaping not only how children are taught, but whether they are allowed to excel at all.
The Consequences: Enforced Mediocrity
For Zohran Mamdani, the son of Mahmood Mamdani, ideas are a family business, and he has clearly learned at his father’s knee. His proposal to eliminate New York City’s gifted and talented programs for younger grades isn’t a side issue or a campaign gimmick. It is the political realization of his father’s intellectual project: the deliberate dismantling of hierarchy in the name of justice.
When Zohran calls early gifted education “a colonial relic,” he isn’t speaking metaphorically. He is echoing his father’s conviction that the very act of distinguishing gifted children from others, of recognizing exceptional ability at all, perpetuates colonial logic. In his view, erasing gifted programs is an act of moral purification, a symbolic breaking of the old order.
And with that background, there is no reasonable doubt that he will make this one of his key goals if elected. His father’s entire academic career has argued for the replacement of individual excellence with collective identity and moral reparation. Zohran’s campaign offers him the machinery to put those ideas into practice. The elimination of gifted education in New York would not be an isolated reform, but a pilot project, a demonstration to other cities that “equity” requires the deliberate dismantling of distinction.
The consequences would be catastrophic. Across the nation, math and literacy scores are already in free fall. Removing advanced learning pathways will only accelerate that decline, leaving bright students disengaged, unmotivated, and alienated from the very system meant to nurture them. When the message from the top is that standing out is a moral wrong, mediocrity becomes a civic virtue.
We are already seeing the results. Teachers quietly admit they are forbidden to group students by ability, lest someone feel excluded. Accelerated reading lists are replaced with “social-emotional learning modules.” High-performing students, especially those without private resources, drift toward apathy or rebellion. The system that once lifted talent now smothers it under the weight of ideology.
Worse still, this ideological flattening punishes the very children equity is supposed to protect. In schools where everyone is “the same,” those who could have broken generational cycles of poverty through intellect and drive are told to wait, to slow down, to hold back, to apologize for being ahead. The escape ladder is kicked away in the name of fairness.
The Mamdani revolution is no longer theoretical. It has passed from lecture hall to campaign platform, from thesis to law. And if it succeeds in New York, it will not stop there. From New York, the contagion will spread to Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond, until the very concept of giftedness is not only unfashionable, but forbidden.
The war on giftedness is, at its heart, a war on grace—on the mystery that some gifts simply are. The proper response to talent is gratitude and stewardship, not resentment or fear. Civilization depends on those who refuse to dim their light to make others comfortable. We honor equality best not by denying excellence, but by rejoicing when it appears.
