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It's Dumb To Tell Kids They're Smart
theodp writes Over at Khan Academy, Salman Khan explains Why I'm Cautious About Telling My Son He's Smart. "Recently," writes Khan, "I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach." According to Dr. Carol Dweck, who Khan cites, the secret to raising smart kids is not telling kids that they are. A focus on effort — not on intelligence or ability — says Dweck, is key to success in school and in life.
Your children are precious and if unable or unwilling to achieve things for themselves we must institute a quota system in order that they can bring their unique life perspective to various public and private roles.
The funny thing is I was told all the time growing up that I was "extremely smart" and "gifted", when in reality, I didn't FEEL like I was.
Sure, I could do things with computers that few of the other kids could do, like program and build things. But I don't think I was "smart". I just LIKED doing those things, so I did them all the time, and thus became really good at those things.
Meanwhile, you could ask me to cook a meal at the time and I'd completely fail because I never cooked. I didn't enjoy it, and was thus lousy at it.
I don't think I was unusually "smart" or "gifted". I just got obsessed with computers and technology, so I got good at those things.
...when I tell my cat she's cute.
Just tell your kids that they are ugly (or don't tell your kids they look good) to raise prettier kids? That was easy.
But if you don't puff up your offspring with enough praise early one, how will they have the iron-cast confidence to windbag their way to the top in todays bullshit world? Again, what use is true intelligence if you don't have the bellicosity to shout down all gainsayers?
May the Maths Be with you!
you might have a hard part it will take hours of practice to pass and you get a nice cut scene as a reward
i do the same thing with my kids. i'll help them with video games but after a while make them figure it out themselves. and they get a nice reward after they figure it out
If this is true, why do psychologists continue to focus so much on IQ? Why do they insist there is a strong, undeniable link between IQ and success that must be catered to? Why has funding for students who, as they say, "are merely bright, but not gifted" entirely disappeared in favor of a fully mainstream approach? Why are the hard working students who achieve but who are not obvious savants lumped in with the merely average, and worst, the probably hopeless (whatever the reason)?
Is this real science, or feel good "also-ran" science for the ignorant and unspecial, as one might be led to believe if one actually believed psychology was anything like actual science? We all want to believe articles like this are true, IQ is a bitter pill to swallow and one that seems even murkier the more one reads about it, however it represents our cultures mindset towards success. No company wants a merely bright hard-working person, they want a genius, they worship that genius. Give an academic institution a test, and they will run off with the truly exceptional students (the SATs allegedly correlate to IQ at 0.82, so they actually DO this). Give a corporation that test and they'll probably rather do without than hire anyone with an IQ below 120, which of course, represents the majority of people.
I prefer to believe what is in this article in the same way that I prefer to believe in Free Will, but, however disappointing this may be, this does not reflect the prevailing attitudes of people that matter. Nothing in this article is substantial enough to use as a weapon to change education, and ultimately it's just feel good drivel, much like I think the IQ studies to date are, although sadly they represent the established convention. From a magazine like Scientific American I want something I can USE to make change.
They figure it out on their own. Once their exposed to other children in a learning environment, it becomes evident that they're different. Same as if your kid is a good athlete. Once they start playing sports, they'll figure out pretty quickly if they're better than average.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the "growth" that they are referring to is the "growth mindset":
http://www.austinclub.cz/dorp/...
http://www.mrscullen.com/image...
http://scholar.google.com/scho...
The short version of the "growth mindset" is: "the children who believe that their brain grows in response to effort/stimulus have a tendency to perform better at cognitive tasks". The alternative to a "growth mindset" is frequently self-defeatist ("I'm not smart enough to do math", "I'll never get it", "I already know all of the information I can and cannot handle anymore", etc.). The "growth mindset" is independent of any neuroscience, and doesn't pretend to be related.
From a recent conference: "it is actually unimportant whether the brain 'grows' as it learns more or not, the children who believe that it does learn more, quicker".
so... instead of appreciating the insight from empirical study on learning methods, you're criticizing it based on semantics. you have some weird hater thing going on.
Success is about being in the right place at the right time with the correct skill set to take advantage of the situation. Hard work is the way you maximize your skill sets to that should you find yourself at the intersection of time and place you take advantage of it. The thing is, not only can't that intersection be anticipated, it can't be identified even when it's happening. Only in hindsight can you look back and realize where the critical moment was when your success actually started. Sadly, most people can't even do that. They believe that climbing the mountain of success was solely the result of having applied their skills and hard work, never realizing that - as the result of fortuitous time and place of their application - they were actually running down hill from that point on.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What the hell? Being yellow is a HUGE advantage! Smarts, musical ability, karate, is there nothing yellows can't do? And blacks have some advantages too, like being taller, faster, and getting more girls because they have a big dick.
Probably this is right in America.
As a European, living in the US(California, Washinton State, Chicago,Boston) I was surprised to see how kids were told they are so smart, so gifted, so talented, so much potential.... for doing nothing at all.
So probably it is ok some reward for doing some work and struggling there.... but in Europe, or worse Asia, it is quite different.
I was never told that I was smart, quite the contrary, and I have a ph.D in civil engineering and a master in economy.
I would have loved to be rewarded like Americans are and not punished so much by my environment. It would have given me more confidence.
But I was so lucky, I have seen how kids are educated in Germany, Japan, China or India. There people are punished real hard.
Specially Japanese and Chinese people. They crush individuality like no other. You are nothing without the group there. If you show "non compliance" they will use a big stick to "fix it".
Once you get out of this system you are basically incapable of doing something on your own, like Americans are.
Having said that, I don't consider the act of struggling to be a good objective. If you reward this, this is was you get: everybody not solving any problem at all, but "doing their best".
In Soviet Russia, "effort" was rewarded, basically because of communism envy system: It was not ok to be better to someone else just because you were. The only important thing was effort, so a 40 tons tank was better than a 20 tons one, double price and double the people was double times better because the effort doubles.
In the US, less effort and struggle to get to the same result used to be better. If you could screw something with a tool without damaging your hand it was much better than using your bare hands. But times change.
Just don't sing their praises and make sure they understand it's only one component of who they are and can easily be out-balanced by bad traits. Or, similarly, as it once told my daughter "Remember, a pretty bitch is still a bitch."
The goal should be guiding them towards being a decent and well-adjusted individual.
"the secret to raising smart kids is not telling kids that they are."
That they are what? Smart? Kids?
It hurts me to watch /. slowly die like this. Used to be only the editors sucked, but I never came here for the articles but for the discussion. Used to be, there would be a zillion well thought and documented responses illustrating all angles of a topic. I found this site to be an excellent forum to expand my understanding of issues surrounding a topic through informed, rational discourse. But the quality over the last few years has just trended ever lower and lately the quality of comments have just gone through the floor. If anyone knows where all the smart contributors went please consider throwing me a link. I'll keep it a secret from all these bigoted morons.
"You have liberated me from thought."
You literally just did this with your own post. You told the parent he was wrong, and then implied it was because he wasn't smart enough.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
The secret to raising a smart kids is being a smart parent in the first place. If you are not smart enough, well, ... no one is. But you can still try harder. Learning is cheap. Consequences are not.
Import talent from abroad? Yes, it definitely works. You only need someplace to dump stupid americans into, to make room for the talented immigrants.
Without the struggle to get out, the butterfly can't develop strong wings to fly.
I would propose an alternative theory - that Slashdot sucked this much all along, and your standards have been slowly rising.
You forgot about the importance of "self esteem" and feeling that you can do something.
Too many kids eschew math, because they think they're not any good.
I say... tell them they're good.
"You're pretty smart for a kid, keep studying and you may have a great future. Keep up the good hard work though, if you aren't careful, the average students can still catch up with you and leave you in the dust."
They figure it out on their own
This is one of the differences between intelligent and unintelligent people. Intelligent people are more likely to judge their own skills.
1. There was a study performed where they assigned people various tasks to perform in isolation. Then the researchers asked them to weigh how well they did compared to the general public. In the absense of information, the more intelligent people assumed they did average or below. The less intelligent people thought they did above average. The bad news about this is it means less intelligent people might not actually realize it.
2. I had a neighbor whose son was truly stupid. He was a pre-teen, and his mom was using drugs and alcohol during the pregnancy. Sometimes we would play Dance Dance Revolution together sometimes. No matter what the result of the game, he would always think he did great, or at least was really close to beating me. His responses were completely unrelated to how well he actually did. It was a bit awkward actually.
I think Khan is being a little too cautious. However, being a millionaire, he probably is more careful to instill certain values in his children, since they'll never do without for lack of money. I often read on the internet about how parents too often praise their kids for being smart, but I've never seen this in real life (except for my children, who are brilliant ;) I wouldn't take the research literally. I think people should take all the good lessons learned from their parents, along with some common sense, and pass them on to their children.
..... is that when they don't succeed at something, believing that they should have been smart enough to succeed, they can easily come to the conclusion that others are to blame for their failure, and can discourage them from trying again, believing the deck has been stacked against them all along.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I met a kid that transferred from one of those "grade on effort" rather than "grade on accomplishment" schools. They rewarded kids for how hard they tried, not how well they did, and the kids did exactly what any self-respecting sociopath would do: they pretended to try hard.
This kid was raging at her teacher for giving her an F on her spelling test. She kept saying "i tried as hard as I could, and the teacher KNOWS I am a bad speller!" But (as far as I know) the kid had not spent a single minute of her week actually studying for the test. She tried during the test, which does no good at all. And, in her prior environment, she would have been given an A and the teachers would have been patting their own backs at what a good job they were doing at encouraging a learning mindset.
I agree in principle....the value of "its ok to fail so long as you try" is very worthwhile to instill in the kids. But the value of "I get away with failure if I convince people I tried" is pure poison. One must be very careful not to instill the latter when aiming for the former.
The author didn't say he avoids telling his kids that they are smart, he said he was careful about it.
One of the main secrets to raising smart kids is setting high but achievable standards and providing life experiences where they can succeed.
Here is an example. When I was a cub scout leader our boys made model rockets. We also taught them how to use trigonometry to calculate how high the rockets went. With calculators, it was easy for them to master something that many adults would assume only smart kids could do. In this way each boy was taught that they were smart.
Greed is the root of all evil.
If anyone knows where all the smart contributors went please consider throwing me a link.
http://soylentnews.org/
I was misdiagnosed as mentally retarded when I was kindergarten due to hearing lost in one ear that wasn't diagnosed until years later. I traveled around the county in little yellow school buses, and puking my guts out every morning from motion sickness, to attend special ed classes. For six years in a row, I blew out the evaluation exams on the genius side of the scale and told each time that it was statistical fluke.The school system made three times more money from mentally retarded students. From the first through eight grades, I was told I was an idiot.
I didn't bother to go to high school. Spent four years at home teaching myself from a personal library of 400 books, reading newspapers and news magazines, and watching documentaries on public television. Learning what I wanted to learn with a wide-ranging curiosity.
After working with my father in construction for a few years, I enrolled in the adult re-entry program at the local community college. With a fifth-grade math and writing skills, and a college-level reading comprehension, it took me four years to get my associate degree in general education. I had trouble getting level-entry jobs because I didn't have a high school diploma.
A decade later I went back to the community college to earn an associate degree in computer programming. Uncle Sam picked up the tab with a $3,000 USD tax credit to change careers. That took five years going part-time while working 80 hours per week as a lead video game tester. I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major when I graduated.
Some people still think I'm an idiot to this day.
i hope he sure doesn't read your article lol
I'm very good with computers. I've been messing with them since 1978 and I was in on the digital revolution.
It's also my career and it's been good for me. I give back by helping people with these TV typewriters.
When people tell me how smart I am, I'm quick to ask them to please withdraw the remark. Beside creating a wedge between me and them, it is simply unwarranted.
I ask them what they do. Of course, whatever it is, I can't do that. I'm an expert with computers. If I were on THEIR turf, I tell them, THEY would be the smart one.
I'm not smarter than anyone else.
For computers, I'm certainly most experienced than most.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Because, the "everyone is equal" notion seems patently false. Some people are a lot healthier than others, some people are a lot more altruistic than others, and some people are a lot more intelligent than others. Some people are much better at delivering value to their fellow man than others.
If someone is more altruistic, or smarter, or a better leader, or prettier.........none of that makes their wants, desires, and happiness any more valid or important than the next person's.
Think of it another way: a common way of measuring someone's worth is to see how much money they have. It lets them buy nicer things, we even call it 'net worth.' But in the eyes of the law, and in terms of the pursuit of happiness, they don't deserve any better treatment or deserve to be any happier just because they have money. We as a society make a considerable effort to ensure rich people aren't treated better in court (although we haven't completely succeeded, we've gotten rid of the worst abuses), even if their net worth is greater.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is just one more form of totally screwed up political correctness. Based on her logic you shouldn't say please or thank you either. Bogus.
You don't seem to be answering the question. I asked what makes a person "better."
I did. Read what I wrote again, but this time understand. I explained why you are no better than I, and why I am no better than you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nope, political correctness was far less pervasive when I was a teen here. Even the oldbies are mostly indoctrinated now. It's spooky.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
There is likely more to the conclusions than that.
1) Humans are not logical. You can't take one solution and apply it to another similar aspect of humanity.
2) Humans are chaotic fractals. Broad trends make them all nearly the same but some demographics may exist that do not nicely fit into expectations (psychology relies upon it;) aside from that, small details are as random as snowflakes (and still not likely without fractal like patterns on another level, which is why I used snowflakes as the metaphor.)
Just because we can't comprehend how humans work doesn't mean there isn't a difficult non-linear equation and/or fractal description. Fractals are all over the randomness of nature and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume they apply beyond certain physical traits. We can only study the problem and do the best we can; those of us without the time and resources will just have rely upon elite experts (aka scientists... before you bash the soft sciences, I suggest you look up the word science.)
Disclaimer, I'm not in the soft sciences.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
...what DOES make someone better? [...] In what useful and practical sense of the word is everyone "equal?"
He didn't say equal, he said not better.
Consider: is i > 1? Is i 1.
The world is not composed strictly of totally ordered sets. There's absolutely no reason that, just because some people are stronger than others, smarter than others, nicer than others, etc., that anybody is better than anyone else.
It's wasn't. You're not. Wow, you miss subtext almost as much as your own hypocrisy.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
It's wasn't. You're not.
I know.
you miss subtext almost as much as your own hypocrisy.
I'd really like to know where the hypocrisy is.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The simple truth is, the word "better," by itself, is vague
very true. And yet people often think they are 'better' in some vague way, just because they are smarter.
When it comes to living with someone, and deciding whether to live in Virgina or New Mexico, smarter doesn't make you better or even righter, because whether to live in Virginia or New Mexico is a want. If someone wants to live in New Mexico, then logic isn't going to change things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From the time I was born, my parents lied to me. By the time I was 10, I realized that adults where full of shit when they talked to kids.
Be seeing you...
So where are the Einsteins, Fermis, and Von Brauns of today?
Praising effort and improvement is pretty standard pedagogy. You reinforce the behaviours you endorse. (As a teacher) (...and a parent)
I never tell my kids they're smart or hard working. If they do something good, I tell them they got lucky, so they will develop a good lucky feeling.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Some people are better carpenters, better coders, better fencers, or better with words. Some people know how to get others to cheer up, or laugh, or get riled, or get angry.
But we're all equally human, and deserve all the respect that humans are afforded.
In what useful and practical sense of the word is everyone "equal?"
OH, you want "practical"? That's easy: Legal rights.
Equal protection under the law. Equal rights of movement, speech, organization, ownership, blah blah blah. Everyone has the same rights to vote (barring you don't get convicted with a felony). There is most definitely some minor imbalances, but on the whole, the USA is doing pretty good with this one. Personally, the imbalance that irks me the most right now is that James Clapper blatantly lied to congress and hasn't been prosecuted yet. It's a breakdown in the rule of law and shows that the heads of the intelligence community are not our equals. It's a problem.