Americans tend to believe that children who are successful at school are smart and assume that intelligence is something with which one is born. In the United States, parents often say something along the lines of, “I may be biased, but I really believe my child is very smart.” Many a mother and father hope that their children’s exceptional talents will be recognized by admission to a school program for the gifted.
It is common to hear American parents praise their children’s success with a compliment on how smart they are. This is a mistake, and it tends to backfire. I’ll come back to this concept in a moment, but first, let’s consider the concept of intelligence.
Intelligence is measured by looking at how well a child approaches certain kinds of problems, both mathematical and logical, and at how strong is his or her vocabulary, especially in comparison with other children of the same age. In other words, both verbal and mathematical reasoning and familiarity with the meaning of a wide range of words in a child’s native language are traditionally used as major means of assessment. Conventionally, these intelligence tests yield a final score known as one’s intelligence quotient or IQ.
But as Dr. Howard Gardner and others have shown, there are many forms of intelligence that are not measured on traditional IQ tests and have been traditionally neglected to a large extent in schools, including abilities in music, visual/spatial perception, and kinesthetics (movement, such as dance and sports) to name just a few in addition to verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical ability.
Also, contrary to widely held perceptions, intelligence does not seem to be simply genetically predetermined at birth, although there may be a genetic predisposition towards specific talents and gifts.
Obviously, in addition to the genetic inheritance that children bring into the world from their parents, their ability to learn and master new academic concepts and skills is also shaped by their physical health and well-being and by everything that they experience, especially in their first six years.
There is another way to understand and think about ‘success’ in school that is shared by many cultures around the world. It is fundamental to the Montessori perspective on children’s development.
We believe that success comes from a combination of meaningful experiences, practice, exploration, discovery, and persistence. Parents whose worldview is shaped by this perspective tend to praise their children’s diligence and effort rather than their innate intelligence.
Many parents have come to think of intelligence as being innate (something with which their children were born) but also to believe that we should encourage children to higher self-esteem and achievement by letting them know that we think they’re intelligent. Not that long ago, most Americans would have thought that this was a really bad idea. Today it’s become part of the everyday conversation within many families.
This sort of thinking is simply wrong-headed. It’s inaccurate from a perspective of what we know from both research and everyday experience. It also tends to encourage children to assume that their success is somehow connected to the way their brain works, rather than a blend of their native intelligence and their diligent effort.
There are many things about the way school has evolved that I believe are unfortunate. I believe that children learn in different ways and at different paces. I believe that children learn much more effectively (and tend to retain what they’ve learned), when they feel safe, respected, appreciated for their differences, and when they have a concrete sense of what they are actually learning. In most cases, people learn best from direct and repeated experience. As Dr. Maria Montessori often said, “It is the hand that shapes the child’s mind,” or in other words, children learn best by doing not by listening to someone else talk.
Children who are praised for their success because they are ‘smart,’ rather than because of the time they took to master the skill, tend to assume that everything in school will come easily. They tend to be confused and upset when they first begin to find that some subjects are no longer as simple as they experienced in the past.
These same students tend to focus on getting good grades and winning compliments on each piece of work, project, or exam. What’s wrong with that? When students, young or old, are more focused on the grade a teacher gives them, rather than on the actual concept and skill they are exploring, learning itself begins to become mindless and meaningless.
While it’s true that some children may actually breeze through every course they ever take with little or no visible effort, the norm for almost all of us is that learning takes time, attention, and energy.
By the way, this is not meant to excuse the tendency to assign hours and hours of meaningless homework to children as they get older. Much of the homework schools tend to give is busy work or simply unnecessary. Today, many schools in America give far more homework than any other schools in the world, and yet many students in other countries significantly outperform American students.
When school becomes a burden, and children find themselves mindlessly going from one assignment or test to another, forgetting much of what they learned along the way to prepare themselves for the next challenge, then the light tends to go out of their eyes. In order to keep up or earn high grades, they often become anxious and/or depressed. The documentary film Race To Nowhere illustrates the all-too-real mental health challenges created when we believe that education is, and should be, a race and not a journey of discovery.
Every teacher and every successful student of the truly gifted teachers of the world will tell you that something magical happens when a particular learning activity (whether it’s a project, an internship, field experience, or even a particularly brilliant and fascinating lecture) ignites children’s interest to a level of intellectual passion. Every child deserves as many moments of truly passionate interest and deep learning as possible.
Tomorrow’s Child / November 2014 / p 5
