Location and age cohort based education is designed for the center of the bell curve at the expense of the tails in about every way imaginable. It's a bad fit socially, because large discrepancies in intelligence makes for difficulty in relating. It's crippling intellectually, because beyond being bored to tears, you're not learning how to control and drive yourself toward goals, which is the fundamental skill to be developed in your youth.

I went to an elementary school for gifted children, so all of my classmates had above-average intelligence, and we had a challenging academic program. I'd be really surprised if we'd turn out to be any happier, or better at driving ourselves towards goals, than high-intelligence people who were educated in regular schools. In fact, my intuition tells me that these problems are not environmental but biological in origin.

Is there any hard data on this? Are high-IQ people who grow up in high-IQ environments happier or more goal-oriented than high-IQ people who grow up in an average-IQ environment?