You're so smart you probably think this post is about you

February 13, 2007 7:15 AM

"You're really smart!" Psychologist Carol Dweck says that praising a child for being smart only teaches the kid to avoid any effort that might fail. "When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don't risk making mistakes." Malcolm Gladwell chimes in with his thoughts on the importance of being a smart kid, "What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement."
posted by revgeorge (218 comments total)

Werd to that fear of failure. My oldest son (now 8) has always been really good at math and we've always praised him for it. He already has a problem with perfectionism and the fear of seeming not as smart as the praise we've given him has made it worse.

Last night he was trying to figure out 7^2 and decided to do it "the easy way" by taking 10^2 - 3*7 (why he doesn't have 7*7 memorized I can't explain). He was quite adamant that this was a valid method despite my demonstration that it gave the wrong answer.

The revealing part: He was only open to criticism once I revealed that I too have always wanted to get one square from another by a simple subtraction of the difference (you can get there by subtraction, but not quite as easily as he hoped).
posted by DU at 7:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Well, my mom constantly told me I was smart when I was growing up, and while I ended up pretty lazy, I never tried to avoid academic failure. I mostly didn't care about grades at all. I would always take the most challenging classes I could, in high school and collage and then slack off and do an average job.

Frankly I think a lot of psychologists just make crap up off the top of their heads. There is definitely a lack of scientific rigor in the field. (And of course, it's an inherently difficult subject to work through in a purely scientific way, but that doesn't mean people should just make things up)
posted by delmoi at 7:32 AM on February 13, 2007

This so completely mirrors my upbringing that I'm thinking about printing out the article and taking it to my therapist.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:32 AM on February 13, 2007 [15 favorites]

Needing a lot of praise etc. -> weakness. Pray that your kid doesn't have those genes, or that the environment prevents their expression.
posted by vertriebskonzept at 7:38 AM on February 13, 2007

That rings true to me; I was always told I was brilliant at math when I was growing up, and indeed it was easy for me... until it stopped being easy somewhere around sophomore year of college, at which point I lost interest and switched to languages. When I got into proofreading and then editing I knew I was in over my head at first and had to work hard to catch up with what I was supposed to know already, and I kept getting better because I didn't expect it to come easy. And this section resonates with everything I know about human nature:

Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped [the author's son] see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable how noticeably effective this new form of praise was.

Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love.

Fascinating article—thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 7:39 AM on February 13, 2007

delmoi: I've begun to suspect that "didn't care about grades at all" and "slack off and do an average job" are really just excuses and methods for avoiding failure.

At previous jobs, I was generally at least as smart as my coworkers in the IS/programming department so I could just coast along in, say, third gear. But now I'm working at a research place where my boss is eleventy-twelve times smarter than I am and I've had to shift into overdrive just to keep up. That provides many opportunities, as they say, for failure. After looking like a moron up at the whiteboard more than once (and possibly more importantly, seeing other people look like a moron while you sit in the audience), you start to get over the fear of failure and just do the best you can.
posted by DU at 7:39 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

I've chewed on this question pretty much my whole life. School came pretty easy to me and I was always told I was smart. That never really jived with how I felt - I assumed I was lucky because I was curious and tested well. I felt (and still feel, to some extent) that I was gonna be "found out"- that I really didn't know shit from Shinola. I think my lazy and procrastinating streaks are probably a result.

I now have a 7 year old son who is experiencing the same sort of things DU described above. I'm trying to temper my praising of him - but he is smart, and I don't want him to squander it. Tough issue.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 7:41 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Some of the laziest people I know are the products of the gifted program here in Scarborough. The article certainly has some merit to it.
posted by chunking express at 7:41 AM on February 13, 2007

There are a couple of points the articles don't make (but, on preview, I see that other posters have made). One is that heaps of praise can lead to a pernicious imposter syndrome--if I try and fail, then everyone will know that I've been faking all along. If I appear to be simply apathetic, well, I'll be judged for that, but no one will think I've been faking intelligence, at least.

Another is that if all my achievements are chalked up to some sort of innate, in-born talent, then I'm not really getting any credit for my hard work, am I? I see that with professional athletes, as well--Michael Jordan was certainly born with a predilection for being very good at basketball, but he also worked very hard at it. Calling his accomplishments the result of pure talent reduces their value.

I think some folks deliberately credit others’ accomplishments to talent or intelligence as a way of lessening their own sense of inadequacy. I saw that in school, and I see that in athletics, too. I’m not as good as you (at writing, math, basketball) not because I don’t work as hard, but because you’re simply more talented, or smarter.

Defensive? Yeah, a little.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:46 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Also, the study they talked about compared two different complements: telling the students they were smart, and telling them that they were hard workers. It lacked a control of students who received no feedback. They also didn't try giving both complements. Why not give both? Perhaps giving the "effort" complement is the only thing that had any effect. It certainly doesn't show that calling kids smart has a negative effect, which is what the article is trying to say.

I mean all of the studies seemed to be testing for two different types of praise: For being smart, and for working hard with just two different groups. none of the test seem to use the four groups that would actually be required. None of the tests given in the article can show that praise for being smart could be harmful, just lack of praise for effort.

Personally, I think I suffered for a lack of praise for effort. I always felt, growing up, that since I was smart I didn't need to try hard or care. I certainly plan on telling my kids, if I ever have any, that working hard is important, and I was planning on doing that before reading this article.

But, nothing here shows that telling kids they are smart is a bad thing. I think the author was just trying to make the headline as controversial and eye-grabbing as possible. Facts be damned.
posted by delmoi at 7:50 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

Danish novelist Peter Hoeg, in his horrifying autobiographical novel Borderliners, talks about the pitfalls of praise; his idea is that value judgments are artifacts of the adult world, that during childhood curiosity rules. There are so new things to explore and make and want to do, and these experiences and ideas live outside the adult world of good or bad, right or wrong. So, according to Hoeg, even praise forces a child to see, during the initial period of childhood discovery, in adult terms of right or wrong, and unfairly forces a child into a mindset and a track based on an adult's judgment.

As a teacher (for three years in a Japanese junior high school) I tried to apply a relatively judgment-free approach to my students, in class and in conversation (with homework it was not as much an option; grades are grades). Instead of praising and criticizing my students, I made it a point to thank them, show appreciation whatever they did, and encourage them to do more. I had smart kids and they all aced their placement tests; I have few illusions that my decision not to praise or criticize made it so, but still, my classes were full of engaged and reactive students, and classes were more enjoyable for me because I didn't have to waste time and effort setting up hierarchies.

Peter Hoeg's ideas are probably based on an overly wonderful or innocent view of early childhood. He grew up in brutal Danish orphanages and was denied completely the childhood he longs to protect; a foster family eventually adopted him and he dedicated Borderliners to them. But I think he's right about being cautious with praise around children, and it's interesting to see how and why psychologists might concur, though in entirely different settings and for entirely different reasons. Thanks, revgeorge.
posted by breezeway at 7:51 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

It's not that simple. Mozart is the archetypal prodigy, constantly told he was a genius and presented to the crowned heads of Europe from early childhood. Did it make him give up trying with music? There are many other factors at work.

I think it's best to let your kid know the truth about how good at things they are, smart or otherwise - and make sure you're not kidding yourself either. But it shouldn't be something you go on about all the time, or the kid is bound to feel pressurised, and suspect you only value their ability (or despise them for their lack of it). Calling your kids geniuses may be only slightly better than calling them morons.
posted by Phanx at 7:52 AM on February 13, 2007

This is me. Just sent the article to my still-somewhat-disappointed mom.
posted by everichon at 7:55 AM on February 13, 2007

I think the real issue here (and I have absolutely no idea how to achieve it) is that smart kids have to be challenged as students. They cannot learn that it's acceptable to excel at lowest-common-denominator academics. If you skate through school you just might get the impression that you can skate through life.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 7:56 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

This seems to be part of a larger pattern of using science to rediscover traditional wisdom which was previously dismissed as unscientific.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 7:59 AM on February 13, 2007 [7 favorites]

delmoi: I've begun to suspect that "didn't care about grades at all" and "slack off and do an average job" are really just excuses and methods for avoiding failure.

*rolls eyes* What is it with people trying to analyze lazyness. I'm lazy because I'm lazy. Even when it comes to things that I have absolutely no chance of fucking up, like cleaning or even simple tasks. I just put things off as long as possible, and then do them at the last minute, or not at all.

Obviously some people's experiences can be different. I think what might be different with me is that I was told I was smart not for doing particular things, but just in general. So it wasn't like I felt that I had to "prove" to anyone how smart I was. I certainly never worried that people would "catch on" that I wasn't really smart or whatever.
posted by delmoi at 8:03 AM on February 13, 2007

The article in general rings true while still being surprising. That's quite a trick. One thing though is the reference to Nathaniel Branden and his work leading to the no criticism, no competition self esteem movement. Thing is, from what I've read of Branden, he seems pretty firmly in the camp that self esteem, while important, is not something that people are tricked into having. People have self esteem from being good at things. And by good at things, he ultimately means better than others at things. Branden was one of the big figures in Objectivsm as a soap opera, and a psuedo-socialist interpretation of lake wobegon self esteem seems at odds with everything I know about him.
posted by I Foody at 8:07 AM on February 13, 2007

I was a smart kid-- too smart for my own good, in many ways-- and almost always got good grades. But one thing that I distinctly remember is how much I loathed being praised for my effort. I hated getting a report card in grade school and seeing an "A" for results and another "A" for effort. It always felt like cheating, somehow. If I was going to be praised, I felt, it should be on my intrinsic merits, not just because I had "worked hard," whatever that meant. After all, anyone can apply time and concentration to a task. I would know I had achieved true academic success, I believed, when I received an "A" for results and a failing grade for effort.

I never did.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:07 AM on February 13, 2007 [6 favorites]

I'm smart and ever so lazy. I took non-honors classes in HS in english and social studies because I didnt want to have to make that extra effort. I could breeze through the classes with little effort and still get an A.

My friends in college hated me because the first few years, I could simply show up for class, take notes, come in and get an A on the test. No need to study or do any non-graded homework. Other people I knew would ask me how long I studied for and then I'd say that I didnt study at all, and then they got angry and frustrated. My last few years were more difficult, as the math and engineering classes became very hard.
posted by SirOmega at 8:08 AM on February 13, 2007

Eeh. That was slightly painful.

Yep. Gifted Program. Laziness. Apathy -- if I'm not trying, I'm not really failing am I? With my personal bit having parents who wanted to reassure me that I didn't have to get good grades, so if/when I'd take home great scores, they'd just say "That's nice. We love you no matter what" and it was infuriating. I wasn't sure why I should care if they didn't.

Glad to hear about your experience, breezeway. I'm at a Japanese high school now, and I had to stop and ask a teacher the other day: "If I put: 'I know you can do better!' on a test, is that encouraging or insulting?!" What I meant of course was that the student has more talent than was shown in this particular interview test. It was meant to be encouraging, but effort is so key here. To have great natural talent and to fail due to a lack of effort is to be seen here as the greatest possible failure. Whichever is healthier, the school board here has definitely decided that all focus should be on effort.

On preview: well in my case, delmoi, I can tell you that I didn't learn to work... I was going to say until first year university, but you know it may have been third year law school some 11 years later. Getting by (even with good grades) and learning to put yourself through the paces are completely different things, and I think that had I needed to study hard to make it into uni in the first place, that lesson would have stayed with me in other areas of life. I didn't have to learn it so I didn't. Self-discipline is built; you aren't born with it.
posted by dreamsign at 8:08 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

When I was in high school, I hung out w. a small crew of super-smart kids. We mostly “didn’t care” about grades, but at times we got a bit competitive. When we did, we always insisted, mostly not jokingly, that for the purposes of our competition, studying hard was a form of cheating. After all *anyone* could get a good grade if they worked hard for it...

It was a petty fucked up worldview that suffice it to say required some adjusting in adulthood.
posted by ManInSuit at 8:09 AM on February 13, 2007 [3 favorites]

Wow. This article rings very true to me.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 8:11 AM on February 13, 2007

The disconnect between childhood and adulthood is that in childhood, success (at least in the context of the articles and much of the discussion here) is measured by how smart, bright, or curious the kid is. In adulthood, success is measured in terms of money. When Gladwell talks about a gifted adult, he is talking about one that makes money.

The two things are entirely different. You can be an idiot and make a lot of money by working extremely hard, and you can be a genius and not make any money because you lack the requisite social skills that would place you in a position to convert your intelligence into money. A lot of very smart people work at NASA, NIH, and DOE. Most of them don't make over $100,000 a year.

But there's a corollary to this - as an adult you are admonished for curiosity or intellectual breadth as indicators of lack of focus. You are supposed to be an expert as an adult - depth but no breadth.

The irony is that the really successful people, i.e. the people who have changed the world, are both intellectually curious and hard workers, but in a world of hard works, its their intellect that stands out.

But it's a lot harder to explain to people why they should learn a bit of history and philosophy and physics before they get an MBA then it is to tell them to "just focus on your goal" , which is invariably some dollar figure.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:12 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

I'm saving the article to read later, but I have to say the title of the post made me laugh out loud.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 8:12 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

People have self esteem from being good at things. And by good at things, he ultimately means better than others at things.

I don't believe that for a moment.
If I run a half-marathon and do well despite lack of proper training, just through determination, I feel like I cheated. Sure, I made it, but I didn't train. I didn't become better. I just made myself do it.
Similarly, I remember a certain philsophy paper that I pulled out of my ass and scored an A. It didn't deserve an A. I certainly didn't put A-level effort into it. Did I keep the paper? No, it got tossed in the trash. Did getting that A build self-esteem? Far from it.

Pushing yourself builds self-esteem. Achievement, especially for those for whom it comes easily, is worth little, whether or not you do better than others.
posted by dreamsign at 8:12 AM on February 13, 2007

For whatever anecdotal evidence is worth, this rings SO TRUE for me that it hurts. I've always been a know-it-all little smartypants, was an incredibly avid learner, excelled in school, excelled in graduating NYU (BA in psych no less) a year early and excelled at law school (3.5 GPA) with minimal effort and even less interest while concurrently working full time in finance. I am/was a parent praise factory.

The older I've gotten, the less likely I am to try something new and my cognitive experience is that my enjoyment of an activity is linked to my success as perceived and reported back by others, or winning, or perfect performance. I am incapable of internal, inherent standards and rely on external cues from others to judge my personal satisfaction with an experience. I'm not competitive, in fact I avoid competition except with those I love dearly and closely, for the pure fear of losing. I've always, always thought that these traits were to some degree inborn, but also linked to the degree to which I was valued as a child apparently based on my success at academics and advancement to high levels in performance-based hobbies. I'm now stagnant in my life, failing to develop my career, my interests (beyond passivity, i.e. I'm very interested in science but regularly fail to attend or participate in anything related), or to take initiative. This has made me perhaps a bit bitter, bored and really resentful, with few healthy outlets for stress and anxiety. The stress and anxiety makes me even less likely to try. Oh god it's depressing.

I think the suggestion that praise of a child be linked closely to the child's personal effort, interest, etc. is genius. But I also think there's more to life than just playing the game for fun - something less than "Good girl, you won!! You're a winner!" but more than "Good girl, you tried and had fun and that's enough." I definitely am happy my parents encouraged me to excel, but I also wish that I'd learned how to NOT excel as well, perhaps how to just BE, just play the damn company softball game even if I won't win, how to be able to poke fun at my own mistakes or have a sense of humour about my faults, etc. I utterly lack the ability to gracefully lose, etc.
posted by bunnycup at 8:18 AM on February 13, 2007 [15 favorites]

Pastabagel: Are you saying that the smart people at NASA, NIH and DOE are not gifted doers? I imagine they have all sorts of goals they need to accomplish and they can't just read MeFi all day. Hell, even Einstein needed to publish.

Money isn't the only criteria of success in the Gladwell article. The fact that "there were no people who were nationally known in their fields" is evidence that childhood prodigy wasn't indicative of adulthood super-stardom.
posted by revgeorge at 8:20 AM on February 13, 2007

I think we are going by extremes and making some confusion between receiving misproportional prise and measuring maternal/paternal appreciation by praise..

If I praise one for doing homework, he/she may conclude he is doing_enough_ and maybe can do something.

Yet if this effort is not sufficient to regularly (not always, but often) achieve some results (like not needing to read paper where 7*7 is written) then I am praising a behavior of doing less the needed.

That is likely to produce a misperception of the effort that is really needed.

At the opposite end, if I don't praise BUT for well above average homework and very high votes, then I am not recognizing the effort, so the person is likely to attribute the praise to the result, not to the effort as it more often not praised then praised.

So what's the point of working and developing skills, if I can cheat ? This, imho, is part of the learning process developing the attitude to give more weight to result and little to way of obtaining it. This has negative consequence such as making obstacles look as not conquerable or avoiding them altogheter, if there is a shortcut to a desiderable result.

So two opposites, too much praise for little effort and subpar results, too little praise for a big effort unless it brings excellent results...destroying the value of effort altogheter.

----

As for measuring parental affection with praise..that's some kind of terrible confusion. I can only imagine the pain of a child looking for a praise he shouldn't be "paying" for.
posted by elpapacito at 8:22 AM on February 13, 2007

Great article. Great FPP.

The kids who do well in later life are the ones who are given the emotional and psychological mechanisms to cope with set backs and failure and who are taught how to see (simple simple at first) things through. Kids have to be taught that their failures are as important, if not more so than their victories, but in this culture if you don't get out there early and distinguish yourself you're thought of as "not good enough". Kids and adults mature at different times. It's wrong for people to give up on themselves. This book: Your Own Worst Enemy is awesome if you want to break out of the adult underachievement cycle of misery. It's amazing the psychological traps and justifications people will construct. Anyhow don't think, for now, go do and first thing is to buy and read that book.
posted by Skygazer at 8:24 AM on February 13, 2007 [6 favorites]

I was consistently informed of my innate brilliance via the praise of peers, elders, and evident results of my sublime work from the first brimming diapers of infancy right on up to the mathematically perfect parking job I executed in the lot this am. Now watch this drive...
posted by docpops at 8:25 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

dreamsign : I don't believe that for a moment.

You can't go dismissing someone's academic research just because your own opinion or perceived experience doesn't fit nicely with their findings.

By all means study the field, conduct your own research and publish whatever you find.

The whole reason this is an intertesting study is that it flies in the face of accepted wisdom. Scepticism is a reasonable response - flat denial is not.
posted by popkinson at 8:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [3 favorites]

Interesting post. (I'd like to see the original study documents though, because something seems off.)

This seems oddly appropriate because of the fact that I just found a bunch of my parents old files concerning my brother who is very smart, but never "applied himself" and dropped out of HS in 9th grade. But give him an engine of some variety and it'll be awesome. In ES, I was told that I was G&T, but only in reading/writing, not math so they couldn't do anything with me because I wasn't good at all the stuff. Fucking school.
posted by sperose at 8:27 AM on February 13, 2007

Whichever is healthier, the school board here has definitely decided that all focus should be on effort.

I have a problem with this view also. I understand that children need self-discipline, but it's wrong to turn them into achievement machines. At some point you want them to have some degree of insight to ask why they are doing what they are doing. If a child who loves to write is struggling with math, is it better to force that child to spend hours struggling with math or to spend hours writing?

In a lot of ways I'm sort of the opposite of some of you here. I didn't coast. I did every piece of homework that was ever assigned as well as I could. And in the process I never did the things I was interested in doing because there wasn't any time and because there would be no way to measure the accomplishment. I never shot off a model rocket, never learned how to draw, and those are some things that I wanted to do then, but I kept putting off (not this weekend, paper due, not that weekend, studying for tests, etc).

I would have been much better off with slightly worse grades but with the memory of all those experiences that never were. It probably would have taken a lot more effort to learn to draw, I'm just not sure it would have seemed like "effort".
posted by Pastabagel at 8:29 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

You can't go dismissing someone's academic research just because your own opinion or perceived experience doesn't fit nicely with their findings.

I said their research was bunk? Flawed? Did not account for variables -- what? I thought I stated a contrary belief. Sorry. My prerogative.

it's wrong to turn them into achievement machines

That's an easy interpretation of the Japanese system, but for the most part I don't see that. When someone does their best, that's it. That's what was asked of them. You don't have to "win". But not doing your best, win or lose, is seen as a pretty big loss. I found this out the hard way, and doing your best, all the time is bloody tiresome and I'm not used to it!
posted by dreamsign at 8:36 AM on February 13, 2007

Skygazer - That book looks phenomenal, personally am going to take your advice and give it a read.

This FPP and the comments have highlighted my biggest issue with my life, the thing causing me distress that I probably most want to change. Thanks all involved, for highlighting it and for making the issue seem changeable, approachable, and "not just me".
posted by bunnycup at 8:36 AM on February 13, 2007

>This seems to be part of a larger pattern of using science to rediscover traditional wisdom which was previously dismissed as unscientific.

No its not. Traditional wisdom is feeding kids insert-local-superstition-here makes them smart and healthy. Traditional wisdom is that the harder the beating the better the result. Traditional wisdom is logic makes you unspiritual and out of touch with the common man. Tradition wisdom is that book-smarts are for useless eggheads.

Traditional wisdom is pretty much anything you want it to be considering how broad the term is, but I really am tired of hearing the typical comments from the granola crowd everytime theres a study that might suggest that an old fashioned method produces results. Or if a newer method isn't as great as everyone assumed. Using a study like this for a backhanded insult against the entire scientific community and its methology is really just being silly.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:39 AM on February 13, 2007 [6 favorites]

Saw this article in print- very interesting. Makes me glad I was turned down from the "gifted and talented" program back in the 4th grade.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:40 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Pastabagel: Are you saying that the smart people at NASA, NIH and DOE are not gifted doers? I imagine they have all sorts of goals they need to accomplish and they can't just read MeFi all day. Hell, even Einstein needed to publish.


Not at all. They are not what most people would generally call "successful", however.

I can understand the idea that praising the process is more helpful, but I wonder if that's because it forces the kid to be more self-aware than he otherwise would be. To praise the process is to force the kids to recognize the process and be aware of it when it works and more importantly when it doesn't, and then prepares the kid for the much more complex task or deconstructing and modifying the process, and then internalizing the modified one.

When smart-praised kids fail, maybe they think "I'm not smart at this thing I failed at" so they don't do it anymore.

But praising process is not the same as mandating effort for efforts sake. You sort of have to teach the kid how to learn to do things he doesn't know how to do without having to be taught it, and that requires insight (sight into oneself, not a spark of inspiration). For every task there is a person who can accomplish it with considerably less effort than you'd think, only because they have learned how to think about the task in a certain way that you don't.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:40 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Interesting articles and discussions - very relevant to this household as we have two very clearly bright boys to raise this sort of thing concerns me.

I can already see that being boys in today's society will be an issue because of the whole trend where "manliness" is defined by your ability to belch loudly and work with your hands... (note: I don't believe this and neither does my husband, but you can see images like this in the media and it's not encouraging.)

So the question is how do you promote/praise intellectual effort in bright young guys? I want them to feel like being smart is okay and in fact valued for men, but I don't want them to be overpraised and never challenge themselves?

Genuinely interested in what people have to say about this here.
posted by Zinger at 8:41 AM on February 13, 2007

Pastabagel:

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

There's a kind of schizophrenia when it comes to education: one school (the No Child Left Behind approach) sees education as a means to an end, and the other school (the Sane approach- is my bias showing?) sees education as an end in itself. IMHO, kids need to learn how to learn, not necessarily what to learn. That gives them something to draw on no matter what they encounter in life.

If you can impress on a student that what they are learning is the critical process as much as the material, then they can understand that the effort is more important than the result. Not that the result is umportant, though.

Man, this is like peeling an onion.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 8:44 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Uh, unimportant.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 8:46 AM on February 13, 2007

Forgot to add, re: Pastabagel's comments, I think the disconnect between childhood and adulthood is not so much the money aspect, but the fact that suddenly, you're not a phenomenon anymore. A kid doing robotics research at age sixteen is interesting from society's point of view. Someone 35 is not so much.

When you're an adult, there's not as much importance attached to accomplishments versus age, ie., there's not as much difference between age 22 and age 25 as there is between 14 and 17. You've got to work much harder to be "as impressive" as you were as a kid.
posted by Zinger at 8:47 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

delmoi: I mean all of the studies seemed to be testing for two different types of praise: For being smart, and for working hard with just two different groups.

There's an important difference, though: one praises the child's state of being (you are smart), and one praises the child's actions (your efforts are excellent). As pointed out in the linked articles, the difference between complimenting identity and complimenting actions can bear very different fruit.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:52 AM on February 13, 2007

Also, Pastabagel:

You sort of have to teach the kid how to learn to do things he doesn't know how to do without having to be taught it

This is the goal of every great teacher I've ever encountered, be they parent, schoolteacher, professor, boss, whoever. And the people I know who learned that fundamental skill, to be able to teach themselves, are consistently the most successful people I know.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:55 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

I was one of these gifted kids who received a lot of praise and had everyone making big predictions about me. I never needed to have anything explained by a teacher until high school. It seemed my dad really resented this, and he agressively took every opportunity to undo all of that ego-building. The problem is he took it too far and it took me a long time to feel I really deserved to have any success, happiness, or pride. Fortunately I was smart enough to eventually even break the shackles of my own ambition, and now my goal for life is to live at the optimal intersection of free time with material comfort.
posted by autodidact at 8:56 AM on February 13, 2007

Some of the laziest people I know are the products of the gifted program here in Scarborough. The article certainly has some merit to it.

I agree. I went through a "gifted" program that put me and my friends in college by the age of 15. We had all been fed praise from elementary school. Ten years later, I think almost every one of us is afraid of failure and none of us "push the envelope" in our career paths--well except the one guy who left Microsoft to become an actor.
posted by reformedjerk at 8:59 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

The closest I every came to precocious was to be pretty cautious.
posted by srboisvert at 9:02 AM on February 13, 2007

Huh. I've never thought about this before. I had one parent (Mom) that was a praiser and one (Dad) that wasn't, except in extreme circumstances. Maybe that was a good combination, b/c I've never been afraid to try new things that challenge my brain like switching careers, running a home business (that dissolved after a year), going back to grad school in mechanical engineering to get a Ph.D after 5 years working (and even though my undergrad was in materials science). I'm not saying it has made me into a world-changer, but I don't feel lazy or lost.

There is an opportunity for high school students to be gifted doers, it's called odyssey of the mind (OM). It was the greatest thing that happened to me, still donate money to the program at my old high school every year. Any parent of a "gifted" child reading this thread should look into it (and all you gifted children out there, too)
posted by Eringatang at 9:03 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Woo, this hits close to home. Very interesting read.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:05 AM on February 13, 2007

From the Po Bronson article:

Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

Aaaand, there we have it. It's always seemed so silly to me that people need to get their kids into the absolute tip-top pre-school programs, let alone elementary and high school... as if it's really more related to the parents' self-perception than any actual reflection on the child.
posted by rkent at 9:07 AM on February 13, 2007 [3 favorites]

Sorry, correction, OM isn't just for high-schoolers, it's for all grade levels, and it was previously discussed somewhat here.
posted by Eringatang at 9:07 AM on February 13, 2007

This is pretty much what happened to me but I got both the "You're a really smart kid" and the "You're Peter's little brother? Then we'll expect alot from you."

Suckers, they got nothing. Of course, I screwed myself in the end by rebelling but I wholeheartedly agree that telling kids they are really smart isn't a great motivator.
posted by fenriq at 9:13 AM on February 13, 2007

It is time now to talk about The Wheel.

Growing up, my parents had obviously read all the studies about praise and punishment and their effect on a developing child. My father came from a distant, reserved family and was the middle of three brothers. My mother grew up in a close-knit, church going family as an older sister. He went to gradschool for plasma physics and she was the secretary that typed up his thesis.

They obviously disagreed on how to praise and punish me and my little sister. Too much praise led to inflated egos, too little led to dejection, and an imbalance between praising parents could lead to favoritism. The literature at the time was all over the place, what were they to do? How could they raise children who were prepared for the hurly-burly of the real world, where good actions do not always generate praise and bad deeds go unpunished?

Enter The Wheel. The Wheel was first developed by Dr. Benjamin Adler who was an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. He had befriended my father over lunches in the school cafeteria and games of tennis. Dr. Adler (or “Adder” as my sister and I came to call him – he was a tall, skinny dude with big black eyes magnified by thick glasses) did not have children of his own, but he studied kids as part of his research. My dad, being a Man of Science then finishing up his post-doc, mentioned the quandary he and his wife were in when it came to molding my sister and me into real people, and asked Adder for his advice.

His advice was The Wheel. Dr. Adler said that praise/punishment was a major, driving motivation for a child’s behavior. The problem came when praise/punishment was shown to be fickle or imbalanced. Praising one child’s good report card more than the other’s similar report card was praised the year before frustrated the child and created tension between siblings. Praising the wrong thing (in the case of this post, intelligence over diligence) could lead to a disaster down the road. Already the symptoms were showing – I had been praised as being really smart for reading so many books and was in the process of failing fifth grade because I would skip doing homework in favor of reading. My sister, meanwhile, was praised for getting all her work done, but struggled to maintain a reading level on par with her class.

I still remember the night when The Wheel came home. It was a big, wooden thing, although looking back now at its charred remains, it seems much smaller, far too small to have the sort of impact that it did on our lives. The Wheel was similar to the wheel from Wheel of Fortune or that “pick a random beer” wheel you see in some bars with large selections. It had ten sections, six marked A, two B, one C, and one the dreaded D. Whenever my sister or I did anything that would warrant praise or punishment, my parents would Spin The Wheel then consult The Chart.

The Chart had a list of common praise or punish scenarios taken from Dr. Adler’s research. Stuff like “Minor Discipline Infraction” meant my sister and I fought in the car or I came home 15 minutes after curfew or something. “Major Academic Success” meant my sister got straight As or something. There was a giant list of these scenarios with more being added as my sister and I came up with new and more interesting ways to fail/succeed. Along with each scenario there was a response scaled to our age. So for “Minor Discipline Infraction” the standard, A Response was “No dessert”. B Response was a scaled up version of A, “Straight to bed with no dinner”. C Response was neutral and despite the scenario always read “Nothing happens”. D was the worst, the dreaded Flip Response that could turn punishment to praise and vice versa, so that teasing a sibling could suddenly grant the teaser the privilege of staying up an extra hour to watch TV before bed. It could also mean that, as in once instance, an almost-straight A report card got my sister grounded for a month.

The point of The Wheel, I guess, was to show that Real Life was fickle, that you shouldn’t expect praise for every good deed and that many bad deeds go unpunished. My sister and I learned that well. We knew that anything we did wrong had a 20% chance of being ignored, maybe even rewarded while anything good we did could land us in hot water or reward us more than we expected. We even received an allowance of “re-spins” that we could use to try to avoid some of The Wheel’s more chaotic results. I’m pretty sure that the re-spins were my Mom’s idea, a compromise thrown in to prevent some of the excesses that we’d soon be subject to. I don’t recall Dr. Adler being too fond of them, but he came up with a chart where a certain number of re-spins would have to be spent to get a do-over for a certain level of scenario.

Slowly, The Wheel took over our lives. Every little action netted a spin. It was pretty easy on my parents, who no longer had to discuss between themselves in order to mete out punishment. They even started carrying around a ten-sided die as a traveling surrogate for The Wheel. I learned pretty quickly what all kids learn eventually – “hide everything from your parents”. I would not tell them of my successes in hopes of saving up my re-spins to get me out of trouble for my failures. On the other hand, Shelly told them everything in hopes of netting that 20% chance of a better-than-expected response. The only problem was that though my sister and I were pretty similar kids, I was by far luckier than her. I got out of so much punishment that my Dad had to check The Wheel for signs of tampering. Shelly was not so lucky. Every time she spun, up would come the dreaded D, turning a minor victory on her part into a punishment and causing her to spend some re-spins. I remember one night after she did well at a solo viola concert that she and my folks were up late, Shelly crying a spending re-spin after re-spin to avoid being grounded for a week and therefore missing her first middle school dance. My parents felt sorry for her, they even upped the B response into paying for her new dress for the dance, but no matter what she did or how much she spun, D always came up. No dress, no dance, no luck.

Don’t get me wrong, I got burned by The Wheel too. I lost the right to ever, ever own a Super Nintendo after it came to light that I had been blowing off study for video games. I could have used my re-spins, but opted not to as I had just discovered smoking and knew that would be Bad News once that got out. It did, but my re-spin bankroll was so large at the time that I was able to take it and the arrest that came from shoplifting cigarettes in stride. In fact, I think I ended up getting a carton of Camels out of that. I traded them to my friend Jerry for pot which, when found, got me free gas for a week thanks to a good spin.

By the time I made it to college (state school – my grades were purposefully average, a great boon in a house with The Wheel, not so much when it came to applications), we didn’t really think too much about The Wheel. It had become just another part of our lives, something to laugh and joke and cry about around the dinner table.

I had learned to work Dr. Adler’s system for everything I could, so if anything, The Wheel taught me to be self-reliant, to not expect too much from the world around me, to blend in. That’s what I was doing – blending in – though my sophomore year at college when I got the call that I had to come home right away.

Shelly, always down on her luck, maybe even addicted to The Wheel like some sort of gambling addict, was in jail. She had set fire to the house one night after getting accepted to Princeton. The Wheel told her that she couldn’t go. It was a pretty bad fire, spreading quickly up the walls through the house. By the time the firefighters arrived, my Dad was pretty hurt from smoke inhalation and Mom was dead.

Shelly had to go to an institution, I don’t think the government would have let her spin The Wheel to see if she could get off, no matter how many re-spins I would have loaned her for it. I still visit her occasionally when she’s not on suicide watch. When I go, though, I have to empty my pockets of all coins, the ten-sider I carry around, and any pictures of my family. Shelly has been under orders to avoid all anything random like a die-roll or a coin flip since the one time Dad visited her and she asked him for forgiveness and to pick a number. He said yes, he forgave her and four, which I guess was the B response on Shelly’s chart so she tried to slit her wrists with a pen.

Now that I’m a husband and father, I’m nearing the same stage my parents where in when they first brought home The Wheel. I know now how damaging The Wheel can be, so there’s no way I’m letting something like that in my home. Being worried about the right praise/punishment response is one thing, but limiting those responses to a simple spin of a ten-option wheel is not the right answer. Life is much more complex than A, B, C, or Ds, especially now when you consider the algorithms and random number generators we have available to us. My “Wheel” will be a computer program, likely a Palm applet for ease of portability, and I think it will truly solve all my family’s problems before they even begin. I’ve been in touch with Dr. Adler, who is retired now, and he’s working on a more modern, viable Parenting Matrix.

I'm looking forward to seeing it.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:15 AM on February 13, 2007 [329 favorites]

I'm a sophomore at a reasonably prestigious liberal arts college and I've had major issues with fear of failure every semester I've been here. I nearly failed a final exam last semester because I was too unwilling to commit to any real answers, instead giving vague (but superficially well-written) gestural answers that hinted at, that evoked what the professor wanted. Needless to say, that wasn't enough. I truly believe that the core cause of this was my fear of being wrong overriding my desire to give it my best. I won't identify myself as a victim of the kind of circumstances described in the articles (I was a gifted kid, but I also had a pretty good and well-rounded childhood), but I will say that no matter how good I was when I was younger, I'm still okay at best when put in a context like my college. I'm actually really relieved to read an article like this - over the past while, I've been feeling incredibly stupid (or maybe just mediocre), and while this doesn't explain everything I've gone through, it does give some perspective.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:18 AM on February 13, 2007

This just in: a story about underachiving brainiacs strikes a chord with Internet smartypants who ought to be working right now.


No, seriously, this article describes me very well.

This is a true story: in my gifted program, when I was about ten or eleven, I had one class in which they showed us a chart and said, "here are you guys compared to people with average IQs. Here are average people compared to the profoundly retarded." The distances were equal. Even at that tender age I thought, "why on Earth would you tell somebody that?"

I'm still struggling to learn to work hard.
posted by Bookhouse at 9:22 AM on February 13, 2007 [3 favorites]

robocop:

Wow. Just wow. I laughed. I cried. I'm scarred.

Wow.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 9:23 AM on February 13, 2007

robocop is bleeding:

If this is true, I feel terrible for being so entertained by your life.
posted by smackwich at 9:26 AM on February 13, 2007

I'm disappointed jonmc hasn't hit this thread yet. Let me see if I can't say what he would.

If you skate through school you just might get the impression that you can skate through life.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 7:56 AM PST on February 13 [+]
[!]

I assure you that you can very easily skate through life. I agree wholeheartedly with the article and like many others here it mirrors my experience, and I have begun to recognize over the past few months how harmful, in its own way, the praise and recognition I received was. However, I don't see the path it has led me down as negative. Why shouldn't you skate through life? How is that a failure of the education system?

Others above are entirely right when they observe that there are two competing visions of the education system. Some would look at me, deranged MMORPG'er, part time chef, and claim I am wasted potential and a failure of the education system. I would point to a incredibly successful but unhappy individual and claim THAT is a failure of the education system.

I was reading a brochure for a local private school the other day, and it boasted that all of its graduates went on to post-secondary education. This upset me. Did all of these students want to go on to post-secondary education? Maybe some of them wanted to be plumbers, or cops, or work in the restuarant industry, or...

An education system that demands performance degrades and insults us. Our studends should be guided, not pressured; failure, instead of being feared, should no longer exist.
posted by mek at 9:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

The whole reason this is an intertesting study is that it flies in the face of accepted wisdom.

Is it really accepted wisdom that showering kids with praise for some trait that they didn't work for will churn out well rounded adults? I mean, take a cute little girl and tell her how pretty she is every single day, all the time, and I think most people would instinctively feel she'd grow up to be a woman with some sort of weird baggage tying her worth to her attractiveness. Why should intelligence be any different?
posted by 23skidoo at 9:28 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

One of the only things I really, really remember from growing up is my Dad saying, after I would mention a test, or a soccer game, etc., "Did you try your hardest?". He never really told me I was smart, unless I needed to hear it to motivate me. We never got praise for getting good grades, or into good schools. I think they would have liked to, but more than anything we were always told to try our hardest, and if the outcome sucked, move on. I think it was a really smart lesson.
posted by docpops at 9:28 AM on February 13, 2007

Is everyone on MeFi a closet member of Mensa?

"When I was a kid..."

"I was so smart..."

"... great grades..."

"...didn't have to work very hard..."

blah, blah, blah.

Hell, I was going to jump in and post my own story of unfulfilled potential but I think I'll just get back to work. Luckily for me, I've been able to make the transition from gifted learner to gifted doer.
posted by C.Batt at 9:28 AM on February 13, 2007

Oh my Lord, that story was intense robocop. And I thought my family had trauma. Wow. I don't even know what to say...
posted by miss lynnster at 9:28 AM on February 13, 2007

C.Batt it seems to me a site like Metafilter would attract smarter, self-learning types... check my screen name.
posted by autodidact at 9:33 AM on February 13, 2007

Benny Andajetz wrote "I felt (and still feel, to some extent) that I was gonna be 'found out'- that I really didn't know shit from Shinola. I think my lazy and procrastinating streaks are probably a result."

Quit reading my mind. It freaks me out.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:34 AM on February 13, 2007

robocop is bleeding- that was coolest story I've heard in a while.
posted by horsemuth at 9:35 AM on February 13, 2007

And as for me, everyone said I was super smart but I saw how my sister was expected to get As all the time so I pretended I wasn't good at stuff. Made life easier most of the time. I was in all of the advanced classes but I got Cs in everything except writing & art. Always was good at anything creative. And then of course when I went to art school people decided it was because I was too lazy to get a job... so I got all kinds of grief for being an underachieving loser.

And now I make more money than them and they all tell me how they "always knew I could do it!" Riiiiiight.
posted by miss lynnster at 9:38 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

Why shouldn't you skate through life? How is that a failure of the education system?

Some clarification. I've got nothing against skating through life - I've been doing it for 46 years. I just think it chews at some people; wasted potential, and all that. Judging from the comments, it seems to be an impediment to at least a few people.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 9:40 AM on February 13, 2007

Is everyone on MeFi a closet member of Mensa?

Another unexamined downside of the Praise culture: everyone thinks they're extra smart, even when they aren't. (No, but I really AM smart!!! I got good grades and I didn't even try!!! I went to college!!! I have a job!!!)
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:47 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

I thought the Gladwell piece was even more interesting.

Particularly the "gifted learner" vs. "gifted doer".

I've work in education and learning for 9 years, mostly with adults in learning very complex hard and soft skills (social workers, police officers, sales, leadership, therapists, design, you name it). The single thing that shines through all of these experiences is that our culture equates knowing with learning. In fact it is ALL about DO-ing.

Knowing or learning something means precious little in almost any context outside of a classroom. Yet, we continue to focus on this. For those bright kids (yep, I was one too) it is easy to get 'lazy' or tune out or focus on a teacher's praise or a parent's because the actual act of learning what is taught in most shcools IS incredibly boring. It means nothing and kids figure out this game very early on.

Geometry is meanignless. Building a bridge that people have to walk on can be fascinating and has inherent meaning - someone could actually be hurt if you screw up.

Writing a report on the Civil War is just an act with an arbitrary set of rules that someone thought up in the late 1800s. Telling someone about your parent's divorce and and the effect it had on you and listening to their similar story can be a life-changing experience.

As an example of the contrast, imagine if high school students graduated with skills insted of knowledge (knowledge they will very quickly forget, might I add). Suppose in order to grauate you had to be able to do the following at a medium-high level of skill:

- drive
- cook
- dance
- prepare your monthly finances and do a budget
- articulately express your emotions
- listen and empathize
- manage a project (balancing budget, time and quality)
- make a fire kit from scratch (i.e. bow drill) and start a fire
- (add a few of your own)

and the way they learned these skills was not by reading about automobiles in america or by writing reports about the history of dance. The skills are learned by doing them over and over - and failing and getting better and being successful and getting critiques and more practice and so on.

I think we would have a bunch of 18 year olds who would actually be interested in learning, wouldn't think it was arbitrary and many of the skills would stay with them a long, long time.

Plus "smart" kids would stay challenged, because when we say "smart" in the sense of the articles in the post we really only are talking about two forms of "smart" - math and language, but a well rounded skill-based education would be much, much more than just those two incredibly narrow slices of intelligence.
posted by django_z at 9:48 AM on February 13, 2007 [8 favorites]

Re: Pink's comment.

As a psych major, I remember my psych 101 prof engaging in a demonstration of a well-known experiment. Have the entire room close their eyes, and ask "Who believes they are smarter than average?" "Nicer than average?" "More attractive than average?".

Almost everyone will raise their hand - EVERYONE thinks they are better than average. As my further psych education taught me, the exception is depressed people, who tend to rate themselves as well below average in all areas. Thinking you're better than you are is in part an element of psychological/emotional health, at least as it was then theorized.

I don't keep up sadly so things may have changed...But I also think MeFi is not a random sample, I do think the average MeFite is smarter than the average Joe.
posted by bunnycup at 9:51 AM on February 13, 2007

Almost everyone will raise their hand - EVERYONE thinks they are better than average.

Yup.

I do think the average MeFite is smarter than the average Joe.

I think this is true, although, a, I'm biased, and b, we probably define "smart" differently than the average Joe ( there are people in the world who think talking to people you don't know over computers is STUPID).
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:53 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

Wow, that Wheel story is amazing, in a horrific way. I think that just made my morning. This is a great topic that obviously a lot of us can relate to. When put on a pedestal it's a long way to fall.
posted by sweetmarie at 9:56 AM on February 13, 2007

Robocop - that was a beautiful piece of fiction. Truly.

If you haven't already, you should work it into a complete short story and get it to McSweeney's or something of that caliber.
posted by django_z at 9:57 AM on February 13, 2007

Excellent post and article. Thanks revgeorge.

As a person who was in childhood manipulated by praise and perfectionism, I find as an adult that Oops is my favorite four-letter word.

Some kids may have fear of success because their parents co-opt the success in order to garner attention and praise for themselves. In that case the success of the child's endeavors, or the child being pedestalised, is less about the child and more about the narcissistic needs of the adult/s around the child.

And some kids may have fear of failure because it's taken for granted by society that ability in any particular area shows up early on and to be precocious at something is important because it’s a predictor of future success. Again, this is the adult/s around the child, imposing/projecting their fear and demonising, that the child will "amount to nothing" unless they 'succeed'.

The success/failure pretzel can be a double bind, no-win quandary.

Books that come to mind about the double binds children survive are: the Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, Scripts People Live by Calude Steiner and Soul Murder by Leonard Shengold.

Carol S. Dweck has written a lot of interesting papers, especially on learned helplessness.

On the flip side of learned helplessness, I would like to see more written about healthy motivation, what works.
posted by nickyskye at 10:03 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

I was a math wizard in elementary school, praised and encouraged and sent up to my room to soldier through "homework" in math textbook after math textbook far above my grade level, textbooks my parents had arranged with my teachers for me to study. My brother, two years older, was a model student, particularly in math, and I "showed even more aptitude" than he did, and was accelerated even more than he was. Teachers all remembered what a bright and good kid he was, found him a joy to teach, and expected the same of me. Problem was, I was a cutup, using my smarts to orchestrate the fifth-grade "pencil-drop" incident and other highly subversive acts. I liked the other kids, and they liked me.

And I heard from my brother about how, in middle school, if you were three grade levels ahead in math, you had to go to the high school for math class, and how he felt like a jerk being a 12 year-old around 16 year-olds; he was pretty cool about it, and to his credit, didn't care one way or another: it was only school.

Well, I was five grades ahead, and good in other classes, too, and I saw the writing on the wall. So for the sixth grade math placement exam, a scan-tron multiple-choice test, I quickly penciled in a pattern of answers: A, B, C, D, E, D, C, B, A, B, etc., all down the line.

They placed me in a general math class for slow kids, where it was clear I didn't belong, then moved me to an advanced class with the top students of my age group. I never liked math class through high school, always tried my best to get C's and not A's, and avoided the subject as much as possible in college.

As an adult, I love math. I love the logic, I read books by mathematicians, I love the more mathy parts of science. I even started working in investment banking pushing numbers around, and coincidentally, along with Michael Lewis' tremendous book Liar's Poker, much of my inspiration to work in this field came from a great and wild novel called Bombardiers, by Po Bronson, the author of the first linked article in the FPP.

The real treat for me, working with derivatives, is not finding that I love pushing numbers around, but finding that it thrills me to find out that I like pushing numbers around. It's a thrill-of-discovery thing. It's like stumbling on a secret about myself that I buried for some reason or another, and when I unearthed it, I found that I had a whole lot left to learn about myself.

This is a great thread, and my contributions have been a bit tangential, but I guess that's the intersection of psychology and personal experience. I got a lot out of reading everything here, thanks.
posted by breezeway at 10:06 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

ThePinkSuperhero: Another unexamined downside of the Praise culture: everyone thinks they're extra smart, even when they aren't. But see, the really insidious thing about all this is that the highly-praised-as-smart kid has no way of knowing for sure if he or she really IS all that damn smart. I know that my parents and teachers told me I was "gifted"; but because I was so averse to risking my "gifted" self-image by actually attempting difficult tasks at which I might fail, I've never gained a real, bone-deep belief in my own intelligence or competence. Maybe I *am* extra-smart, maybe not; there's no way you could actually prove it by anything I've achieved. So when I handwave all the more vigorously in the direction of some random bit of credentialling (GRE 800s, hah!) as evidence of braininess, it's with a concomitant sense of bogosity and general fraudulence.
posted by Kat Allison at 10:07 AM on February 13, 2007 [7 favorites]

>everyone thinks they're extra smart, even when they aren't.

I think thats true. Afterall, gradeschool is supposed to be easy. Everyone is supposed to pass. Everyone is usually very nice. The system doesnt allow for too much competition just yet. Its only in college that these 'gifted' egomanaics fail, blame the system, and end up blaming their parents.

Who doesnt think theyre gifted when they are a child? The real question is why do so many people carry that smug label into later stages of life and then refuse to drop it when all the evidence points to them as being pretty medoicre.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:08 AM on February 13, 2007

Is everyone on MeFi a closet member of Mensa?

Naw. That would take too much effort. You got to sign up and everything.
posted by juv3nal at 10:11 AM on February 13, 2007 [5 favorites]

holy shit robocop is bleeding, your Wheel story was mind-blowing. Wow.
posted by nickyskye at 10:12 AM on February 13, 2007

I wonder if all these people who fail because they were praised too much also suffer from self-diagnosed Asperger's.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 10:13 AM on February 13, 2007 [10 favorites]

imagine if high school students graduated with skills insted of knowledge (knowledge they will very quickly forget, might I add). Suppose in order to grauate you had to be able to do the following at a medium-high level of skill:

- drive
- cook
- dance
- prepare your monthly finanes and do a budget
- articulately express your emotions
- listen and empathize
- manage a project (balancing budget, time and quality)
- make a fire kit from scratch (i.e. bow drill) and start a fire
- (add a few of your own)

Wow. I think that's the worst idea I've ever heard.
posted by washburn at 10:14 AM on February 13, 2007 [3 favorites]

What TPS, bunnycup and to some extent damn dirty ape are saying is true, but just a show of hands of those who were, for better or worse, selected (not self-selected) for the "gifted program" has so far been interesting if only as an indicator of school experiences. Wherever they really fit into the spectrum of ability or potential, the segregation, attention, and praise all likely have effects -- largely negative from what I've seen.

I just think it chews at some people; wasted potential, and all that

Yeah, considering a third career jump (after three very successful but unfulfilling ones), and that's pretty much the whole kettle of fish in one comment.
posted by dreamsign at 10:16 AM on February 13, 2007

Wow. I think that's the worst idea I've ever heard.

I don't think it's a bad idea, but I don't think it would work. First, you'd have to teach all the teachers first (I'm sure there are plenty of teachers who can't dance, cook, balance their checkbooks, etc). Second, someone would have to decide what's important, and everyone would have different opinions on that (me? I think learning how to build a fire is a totally pointless waste of time).
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:20 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Why would knowing how to build a fire a waste of time? Sounds like a very valuable skill to me. I agree that school should be MORE about teaching valuable life skills (I think it's criminal that kids can leave high school without a class on finances) but I don't think abandoning traditional history/math/english/etc. is the answer either.
posted by agregoli at 10:25 AM on February 13, 2007

I don't think its about whether learning how to build a fire is a critical skill in adulthood - the point, as I understood it (and please do correct me if I am mistaken) is that LEARNING how to learn how to do any new task is critical. Writing better and better outlines of the same dumbed-down textbook analysis of the causes of the Civil War does not prepare you to think on your feet, creatively approach tasks, time manage, prioritize, etc., which are the skills arguably most in demand in the workforce. It reminds me of the controversial self-directed learning method, where kids explore whatever they want (don't like math? do something else) because it's not WHAT they learn that's important, but that they LEARN to learn something new for themselves.

I'm not necessarily endorsing those views, my jury is still out, but that's the way I understood it.
posted by bunnycup at 10:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

That was brilliant, robocop. How hard did you work on it?

This link and the discussion leaves me pretty cold. It seems very alien to my own experience but not in a few others. So it ends up feeling largely alien, but I think my own experience is a bit unconventional and more in the pathological families end of things.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 10:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

Why would knowing how to build a fire a waste of time? Sounds like a very valuable skill to me.

Valuable how? When does the average person NEED to know how to build a fire from scratch? You don't! Totally pointless.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Valuable how? When does the average person NEED to know how to build a fire from scratch? You don't! Totally pointless.

Talk to me when the oil runs out.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 10:28 AM on February 13, 2007

Teaching kids how to change the oil? THAT'S a skill worth knowing.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:29 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

So far: telling average kids they're smart is bad because it's part of the "praise culture". Telling smart kids they're smart is bad because then they'll think they don't have to work hard. Putting smart kids in gifted classes where they'll be more average and have to work hard may sound good, but it's actually bad because it will reinforce the idea that they're smart and therefore don't have to work hard. Having high expectations for smart kids is bad because they might be upset if they can't live up to them, but having low expectations is bad because they'll think they can coast through life.

There are already a lot of people who want to take smart kids down a notch (what else do you call suggesting that high school graduation should be contingent on being able to dance well and build a fire?) The ideas expressed in these articles aren't new. Perhaps there's an argument to be made that devaluing the intelligence of smart kids is good for society at large; I just wish that people would stop pretending that it's good for the kids themselves.
posted by transona5 at 10:29 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Pink - I think I've needed to know how to build a fire from scratch exactly as often as I've needed to understand the subtext of the novel "Shane" (8th grade), do a quadratic equation (9th grade) or understand Papua New Guinean ritual cannablism as expressed in 20th century western hemisphere documentary film (college). All equally pointless, to me, unless I got something different, something deeper from all of that learning - for example how to think in the abstract. FWIW, a little learning on how to learn concrete real world skills might make me more confident and useful.
posted by bunnycup at 10:32 AM on February 13, 2007

All good points; I'm just bitter about being involved in programs that equate camping-related skills with "real-life" and being closer to God, blah blah blah.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:33 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

Valuable how? When does the average person NEED to know how to build a fire from scratch? You don't! Totally pointless.

I really doubt you'd think it was pointless if you were lost in the woods on a cold night. Or any other life-saving situation. What on earth could be considered pointless about basic survival skills? Life doesn't always stay comfy.
posted by agregoli at 10:34 AM on February 13, 2007

(Furthermore, I think that CPR and first aid should be a part of every high school program).
posted by agregoli at 10:35 AM on February 13, 2007

All good points; I'm just bitter about being involved in programs that equate camping-related skills with "real-life" and being closer to God, blah blah blah.

Pretty damn smug knocking other people's skills, especially when you're willing to be the benefactor of them. Or do you think ground beef grows on styrofoam plates? Or your stove lights itself by magic?
posted by Benny Andajetz at 10:36 AM on February 13, 2007

"Perhaps there's an argument to be made that devaluing the intelligence of smart kids is good for society at large; I just wish that people would stop pretending that it's good for the kids themselves."

It's good for the kids themselves because being "smart" in the way that we're talking about isn't all that much more actually valuable than being good at athletics. It's just not that important. It should be "devalued" because it isn't actually valuable. The sooner kids learn that, the better.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 10:36 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

I really doubt you'd think it was pointless if you were lost in the woods on a cold night.

I will never get lost in the woods on a cold night. I will never get lost in the woods on a cold day. I will never get lost in the woods on a warm day, a warm night, or any day or night. I will never get lost in the woods, because I never go to "the woods". I don't even think New York City has "the woods", and if it did, I'm sure I wouldn't go.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:36 AM on February 13, 2007 [5 favorites]

I'm so glad I got to the sob-story thread in time!

My cousin and I were the same age and were close friends as children. I tested as "gifted" in kindergarten, she was completely, decently average. Our family made all the worst mistakes, banking on my sure success and encouraging her to be more like me. By fourth grade I was so overwhelmed by the expectations of our school's ad hoc "gifted" program that I had a nervous breakdown. Afterward my grades got worse every single year. I barely graduated from high school, and by then my family had mostly stopped counting on my success. Meanwhile, my cousin passed through the grades at an average pace with increasingly below-average results. No matter how badly I continued to fail, I was still held over her head as the ideal to be strived toward.

My cousin and I went to the same high school, but it was basically assured by then that we could never be friends. She graduated high school with a higher GPA than I did, which the family ignored in favor of scrambling to make sure I got accepted into some college SOMEWHERE, no matter what.

Dropping out of college and scorching the earth of my family's expectations was the best thing that could ever have happened to me, and I have worked hard enough to wind up with a professional career on my own terms all the same, and ironically am considered a "success" by my family's weasly standards. My cousin is in bad shape, and has never wound up being able to provide for herself, and has black-sheep status in our family, and I am overwhelmed with guilt on the rare occasions when she and I speak. I know I personally didn't do anything that contributed to the misery and abuse she experienced, but I am a handy symbol of it, which has cheated us out of enjoying each other as family, perhaps forever.

Ultimately I think the danger of praise is not only in how questionably deserved it may be, but who else is around to hear it and what effect it has on them in the long run. The fact that such Darwinian meddling and gambling takes place in children's lives is pitiful. The fact that it is institutionalized so haphazardly is criminal.
posted by hermitosis at 10:42 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

So much for being a unique and special snowflake, I guess.

This so completely mirrors my upbringing that I'm thinking about printing out the article and taking it to my therapist.

Oh yeah, me too.
posted by briank at 10:43 AM on February 13, 2007

I didn't understand the article. Fuck this.
posted by sfts2 at 10:48 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

Holy balls, robocop is bleeding, don't take this the wrong way, but you're gifted. Subtle and gifted.

My favorite part? Dollars to donuts some of the gifted kids are furiously googling for matrix recipes at this very moment.
posted by melissa may at 10:52 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

robocop, if that isn't actually a Stephen King short story, it should be. (Or better yet, one of your own.)
posted by iguanapolitico at 10:56 AM on February 13, 2007

I love how everyone is huddled around this thread like a campfire in the big scary dumb dark.
posted by hermitosis at 10:59 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

This so completely mirrors my upbringing that I'm thinking about printing out the article and taking it to my therapist.

Frankly I think mathowie should just send a $75/hour invoice to everyone who posted here.

Metafilter: For All the Unrealized Geniuses Who Are Too Smart to Need Actual Therapy
posted by pineapple at 11:05 AM on February 13, 2007

Yup, sounds like my life. Gifted program, skipped grades, top .5%, blah blah blah. Now, I get by on as little effort as possible, and never bothered with university.

However, I find I am competitive, but honestly I only like to play when I know I can win. I've always been that way. I also don't recall a whole lot of praise as a kid.

Maybe I'm just lazy.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 11:06 AM on February 13, 2007

I do think the average MeFite is smarter than the average Joe.

MetaFilter: where all the children are above average.
posted by cenoxo at 11:07 AM on February 13, 2007

I couldn't relate to this at all.

I wasn't praised for any of my achievements when I was young even though by th age of 8 I was having heated arguments with my math instructor about transcendental numbers and Group theory. My parents thought: What use is this?

As a result I grew up feeling outside of the world. By 8th grade, I was getting D's and F's and my counselor was worried I wouldnt make it through junior high school. I got an F in my Computer Science class even though I was spending my spare time writing Assembler code and trying to get a small game software company off the ground (this was in 1980) with a friend of mine.

No praise, no praise. I was praise-starved. So when a recruiter from Harvard showed up at my high school, walked right past all the A students, and wanted to know more about the kid who was scoring perfect scores on all his Math and Verbal tests, well, I was shocked.

Obviously there's a lot more to tell but I figured it was worth a couple paragraphs to throw an alternate voice out there....
posted by vacapinta at 11:08 AM on February 13, 2007

I'm surprised so many people are praising this article, I thought it badly misinterpreted the evidence from the studies. It's not praise that is bad it's false praise. Even in the first study, horribly designed, lacking controls and I suspect it was not double blind, they praised every kid as being intelligent just for finishing a simple test, the kids would be able to tell this was bullshit. Since the kids probably did try hard at the test, being praised for working hard was not taken as false. In all the other studies in the article were praise was harmful, the praise was used in a very broad brush that would mean that it was probably bullshit most of the time as well.

I was able to coast through school pretty easily, but when I stopped trying hard was when I started figuring out so many things that were taught to me in school were bullshit; drugs, sex, religion, whatever. False praise is just one part of the recognition that adolescents have of the falseness of the adult world, and I doubt it is the most important. I guess I am more comfortable blaming my apathy on the blatant hypocrisy of the modern world than on my parents praising me too much.
posted by afu at 11:09 AM on February 13, 2007 [4 favorites]

I can build a fire, but I REFUSE to articulately express my emotions!

Or prepare my finances. Or get out of your dumpster.
posted by hermitosis at 11:14 AM on February 13, 2007 [2 favorites]

Talk to me when the oil runs out.
-- posted by Benny Andajetz

Teaching kids how to change the oil? THAT'S a skill worth knowing.
-- posted by ThePinkSuperhero

There's a gorgeous (unintentional?) double-entendre in those adjacent comments. We all need to learn how to change the oil.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 11:19 AM on February 13, 2007

Ewww. Go away!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:25 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

Oh my Lord, that story was intense robocop. And I thought my family had trauma. Wow. I don't even know what to say...

Oh, miss lynnster, honey, you didn't think that was real, did you?
posted by languagehat at 11:27 AM on February 13, 2007 [1 favorite]