To properly explain my thoughts here, I have to explain the series of thoughts that came to that conclusion.
I’m currently in Colombia, trying very hard to learn Spanish. I took it in high school (and earlier) and even in college, but never really progressed. My first thought was to question why that was.
My immediate answer was that we didn’t utilize our time that efficiently. I remember just pounding away trying to learn grammar rules and would spend an entire class period (or week?) learning how to conjugate one verb in one tense, or learning some other concept that really shouldn’t take that long.
Part of it, too, is that they are teaching at the rate of the kids who need the most time to pick it up. Which, as I’ll get more into in a moment, probably isn’t the dumbest kids, it’s the kids who don’t care and aren’t paying attention.
So I thought: I’m doing about an hour of flashcards per day, which allows me to learn and retain about 40 new cards every single day. In my case, that’s usually about 8 new verbs, with examples. It’s a fairly rapid rate.
And then, of course, any time spent actually speaking is extremely valuable in getting better.
But then my next thought was, “Well… You learn concepts and whatnot in class, and then you’re expected to actually study and review vocabulary and concepts at home, right?”
Which is fine, but let’s think about this now. Is everybody going to actually study at home? Absolutely not. The kids who consider themselves smart, and who think they are “good” at it probably will, because they feel good about it and believe they can succeed.
And who is not going to study? The kids who think they are dumb, and the kids who don’t care. And, as a side note, I would bet the kids who “don’t care” actually think they aren’t smart or are bad at the subject, and just “don’t care” as a defense mechanism. That’s a separate topic though.
So in a class where it’s expected that you need to study in order to succeed, what happens if one group actually does study, and the other doesn’t? Even if they are just as intelligent, the group that studied is clearly going to do much, much better.
So now the grades come out. The ones who studied scored highly, and they feel good about themselves. They think, “I’m smart, that’s why I succeeded.” Their parents praise them and tell them how smart they are and they truly start to believe it. They continue to take interest in their studies and continue to succeed, creating a virtuous cycle.
But what about the other kids? They get a bad grade. They know they didn’t study, but still… This must be evidence that they are dumb! Their parents punish them. In some households maybe they even call them stupid or had already been doing that.
It wouldn’t take too long before they would feel stupid. The next time, they might put in even less effort, because what’s the point? They believe they won’t succeed anyway so they aren’t going to bother doing everything the ‘smart’ kids are doing.
And in this way, it’s a cycle. The ‘smart’ get ‘smarter’ and the ‘dumb’ get ‘dumber’. And if you’ve been paying attention — to the extent that intelligence is, in any way an actual, quantifiable trait — the so-called ‘dumb’ kids are very likely the exact same intelligence as the rest.
And now they’re going to go through life thinking they are too dumb to succeed. And that seems like a tragedy.
Additionally, in a school-setting, concepts absolutely build off of one another. It’s much easier to grasp something new when you have all of the underlying concepts memorized. Someone who just “instantly gets” something may only do so because they understood all of the preceding material, not because they are “smarter”.
This might be more fit for a totally different conversation, but I think our emphasis on “intelligence” is also way off-base. It’s a terrible predictor of success (at least as measured by IQ), and I think our very focus on it actually leads to poorer results.
If people think that being “smart” leads to success, then they’ll start thinking that their successes are due to their intelligence, and their failures due to their lack thereof.
This is a terrible outcome for two reasons. Firstly, you can’t (really) do anything about your intelligence. It’s more or less inherent and unchanging. So focusing on it cannot possibly improve your life.
Secondly, it completely takes hard work and sacrifice out of the equation. Literally anything that someone has done to get where they are is overwritten by saying that they are just ‘smart’, or even ‘naturally talented’. Research says that ‘natural talent’ is almost entirely a myth, and I don’t think ‘intelligence’ is that far off in the context of explaining success.
So when it comes to school-age children, I think it’s much more important to tell them, “good job, you studied hard and earned that grade!” instead of saying, “you’re so smart!”
One of those things will help them deeply to understand how to succeed, and the other is only helpful as a confidence booster. If people think their success is due to one, inherent and unchanging metric, then they will not take any responsibility for their successes or failures. They won’t truly understand that the actions that they take lead to their outcomes.
Thinking back to when I was in school, I remember always being in the “honors” or “gifted” classes. I think we all genuinely believed that we were much smarter than the kids in the “regular” classes.
My two thoughts on that now are:
- We were foolish and wrong for thinking that.
- What does it matter? You can’t pay the mortgage with ‘intelligence’.