Learning tolerance?

Okay, when I was a kid I was in the highly-gifted program in El Cajon. We were taken out of various schools and sent to a central classroom at Chase Ave. School where we were supposed to get an "enriched" education that would make the best of our excessive brainpower and hopefully turn out some thirty exceptionally educated persons per year.

This program and similar programs across the country, such as tracking or acceleration, were vehemently opposed by our political Left wing as promoting inequality and elitism as far as the education we got, but far more important was the social deprivation we were supposedly suffering from: we wouldn't get to know kids who "weren't like us" so we could never learn to get along with them and tolerate their "differentness".

And so, programs that catered to the higher intellects of kids were phased out in the late sixties and seventies. The exceptionally brilliant kids with IQs as high as 205, who could have handled algebra at age 7 and chemistry at age 9 were forced to sit and NOT learn at the same pace as the kid sitting next to him, the kid who didn't like to read, refused to learn to write, and hated math and science.

In the nineties the fad of "tasking groups" (or whichever of a dozen other asinine names you could apply to them) swooped into our schools. Teachers no longer taught because they had been taught not to in education college. "Children learn best when they learn on their own. They don't listen to teachers and never learn from them. Their best teacher is a same-age peer who already knows the subject, but they still learn best when they discover for themselves."

The supposed result of the tasking group was to split the room up into groups of four or five and let them work on a "task" (that's newspeak for "assignment") and discover the answer as a team. A leader would evolve, supposedly a different leader for each task, depending on who knew the material. This leader would assign kids in his tasking group to tackle different parts of the task. Kids would look in the materials the classroom contained, such as the World Book Encyclopedia, gather information which they would pass on to each other, and the pieces would be connected and the task would be completed.

What actually happened was the smartest kid in every group got stuck with the job of solving the problem alone, giving out the completed answer to the other kids, and the work would be avoided in an incredibly boring manner, but at least there would be the hope of getting out of doing the work and sticking that bright kid with presenting to the teacher the group's final result.

From what I've learned from kids who went through school in the nineties, they didn't learn to "tolerate" their less-intelligent fellows. They learned to hate them. How stupid is this?