Don't tell them that they are.

I think that it's going to be tough to estimate the huge damage to society that the "self esteem" movement has caused.

[Via Geek Press]

But then aren't you doing further damage by praising the scientists for discovering this?

It's OK (in fact good) to praise them for actual accomplishment. Just don't tell them they're smart.

Very interesting link Rand.

People do differ in intelligence, talent and ability. And yet research is converging on the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what we call genius, is typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort. Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute much more to school achievement than IQ does.

The key word IMHO is passion.

On a side note, with all the talk about race and IQ going around, one should note the article's insistence on the self limiting nature of a belief system that says you can't do math which could be an unfortunate consequence of reading too much into the effect of a few genes on IQ. And why doesn't IQ measure something so fundamentally human as musical ability anyway? One might find genes for this missing in supposedly smarter races.

Another factor is making them learn things not just telling them the answers. People must learn that work is a means to an end. My sons used to hate asking me questions, I'd tell them how to find or figure the answer but rarely did I just give up information.

I even went so far as to make my older son quit high school and go to work because he was about to flunk his junior year. For the second time. ( he was going to the school, but not to his classes) He took his GED the day after quiting school, passing it with an overall average of 89%. He also went to night school while working to get a full HS diploma to enter the Navy. He scored 84 on the ASVAB. He was just lazy, not dumb. Isn't lazy the same as unmotivated?

He certainly never got motivated by teachers telling him he was SO SMART and would he PLEASE work harder. What a joke. However, he did get motivated by working menial jobs for low wages and paying for night school and by being charged room and board. He learned quickly that if you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough.

The school counselors went crazy, calling me several times right after he left school. They told me he'd wind up on drugs and / or in jail without a HS diploma. As an ex-HS drop out this pissed me off a little. I was never in jail nor was I a junkie. At that time I had 4 people working for me on a rotating basis, all of whom had degrees.

Both my sons are now well educated even though they attended public schools. They learned to love learning and can find new information anywhere. The system they grew up under must have hit home. My grandsons are now growing up under the same learn and appreciate the effort of work system I taught my sons.

My older son is a career sailor, currently doing an instructor stint in RI. My younger son learned explosives in the Marines. He just took a job working for a company that does construction, underwater and demolition blasting. At 26, he was hired to be a blasting supervisor and superintendent.

Not bad for public school kids from parents without full college degrees. Most of their friends, who had much better advantages, mom and dad payed for college, cars, spending money etc. and they just ain't making it.

Could being handed things AND told how smart you are be a combination of demotivating factors?

This fits well with the way my parents raised me. My father told me once that self-esteem comes from two things - being able to do things well, and being able to tell truth from nonsense. Feeling good about your heritage is just taking credit for stuff that other people did (reverse this for feeling bad about victimhood - it's stuff that happened to someone else).

And my mother was always crisp in her acknowledgement of good grades (they were expected) and "that's nice dear" for anything that didn't reflect earned achievement (like Homecoming Princess and similar silliness), but lavish in her praise for anything I had to struggle for.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Yeah and genes is why white people can't tap dance either.

TnT, why is it that white people are NOT supposed to be hurt or offended when it is pointed out that Asians score higher as a race on the SAT, but Caucasians are racist when it is pointed out that they are scoring higher than Negroes or Hispanics?

Asians are said to put more effort and family pride into studying and education and that accounts for the difference in Asians scores and Caucasian scores. If you move that down just one level of scoring, it's no longer because of differences in study habits, it's because whitey is keeping brown folks down. There is no personal responsibility on the part of the darker skinned people allowed into the factors.

Isn't that both racism and use of a dual standard within the same system of testing?

And before you add economics into this. Remember that many Asians, especially those from SE Asia post Viet Nam, came here penniless and their 1st generation children went to college. The same for Cubans who came here after Castro took over.

Yeah, but most schoolwork - from grade school to graduate school - actually is "boring and pointless."

Tah'tonka,
You seem to want to take this discussion somewhere else and quite off topic. Can't play today chum.

Yeah, but most schoolwork - from grade school to graduate school - actually is "boring and pointless."

Yes. And a child who really is smart (without being told) will notice it, and ask you why should he do such obvious busywork. Be prepared to answer -- and in a way which can convince a SMART person who happens to believe otherwise.

On the whole "self esteem" issue, I think it is telling that, as a group, prison inmates rank highest.

The secret of life can be summed up as NOT(PC).

So the man asks me "How to you get to Carnegie Hall?" . . . "Practice, practice!"

Let's leave out the consideration of intellectual achievement because we are living in Lake Wobegone where the children are all above average. I would like to focus on musical talent because most of us around here feel less threatened if it were suggested that we don't have it.

While there is a popular concept that to succeed in some intellectual discipline you need to have an IQ above a certain threshold, there is an equally popular concept (at least among some parents who pay for music lessons) that anyone could be up on the concert stage if they were more dilligent in practicing that expensive piano or violin the parents just payed for.

Part of it might be motivating a child at a young enough age to apply themselves to music. Just as speech fluency must be aquired at a young age - a disorder such as stuttering is a great mystery, but it may be a case of playing the speech instrument badly, something you cannot easily correct with lessons past a certain age.

What I am trying to say is that some of us may lack certain skills or qualities, and that hard practice of a musical instrument will never make us into concert musicians and will lead to frustration. It might be that many of us don't have suffiently broad-band peripheral neurological loops to move our fingers fast enough -- we can take lessons, read, understand, and play music at a slow learning tempo, but never be able to play at the tempos expected of professional musicians, and if we increased our practice intensity, we would be beating our head against the wall into frustration.

Great comment Paul Milenkovic!

There's only one idea similar to the concept of "you're all winners" that annoys me more and that's the "anyone can do it/anything if they try" sentiment.

Paul,
you are dead on target with respect to the ability factor here. There must be a basic innate "gift" to be developed and nurtured to start with.

My lack of gift is basic algebra. I simply cannot connect the dots. I can do it all day long with the formulas for electronics in front of me and with actual numbers and I did for years in work situations.

I can do boolean algebra til the bovines return to their original places of residence. I used to be able to do decimal to octal to hexidecimal to binary equations long hand on a piece of paper. I memorized that formula in tech school and used it hundreds of times. That stuff made sense.

But I always struggled with basic algebra.

axb
_________ = X

c

That does not compute, as the famous robot used to say. A, B, C and X are supposed to be used for spelling, not math!

Let the giggling begin.

Excellent article.

I've always had an effort-based mindset myself, and it seems to have done me some good. I had a bit of natural ability at math, but that would never have gotten me through 1st semester of college. I always had to, and did, work hard at trying to understand the material, most of which built on the previous layer.

Though people have differing levels of initial ability, very few outlying geniuses have the kind of fundamentally different thinking necessary to innately grasp math or physics or engineering right from the get-go. That kind of thinking is highly unnatural and has to be learned.

Excellent article.

I've always had an effort-based mindset myself, and it seems to have done me some good. I had a bit of natural ability at math, but that would never have gotten me through 1st semester of college. I always had to, and did, work hard at trying to understand the material, most of which built on the previous layer.

Though people have differing levels of initial ability, very few outlying geniuses have the kind of fundamentally different thinking necessary to innately grasp math or physics or engineering right from the get-go. That kind of thinking is highly unnatural and has to be learned.

Paul,

As mentioned in my earlier comment, I really think it is about passion with regards to musical accomplishment. Practice is fine, but the question is do you love what you are doing when you practice? The problem is how to instill passion and that's where great teachers make the difference, since passion derives from inspiration, or possibly even grace (in a Christian interpretation). I'm rambling here but it seems you need just that right mix of dedication, practice, inspiration and passion. Maybe the passion comes as you practice if it awakens a response within you.

Anyway, you might enjoy reading the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. The first chapter reports on one of his patients, an MD himself, who, having experienced a lightning strike at age 42, went from no piano to being an accomplished pianist in a few years. Something was rewired in his brain apparently and awakened a deep love of music, especially the classics. Not that I'm suggesting this as a method of fixing a childs lack of musical talent, but it raises the question of whether the ability was inside all the time and just needed to be awakened.

OK, another musician joke, this one told on the local Classics by Request radio program by a prominent piano teacher.

How many piano teachers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Five -- one to actually get up on the ladder and change the bulb, four to sit back and talk about how they have better methods.

Effort is good, passion is even better, but there is another mythology that the mark of a great sports coach is the inspirational locker-room speech or perhaps the exhortations that individual players need to run faster or try harder.

My personal experience is with ice dancing, and I had studies with many different coaches with different pedagogical style, and I have extrapolated that a great football coach has to be a great teacher (more people care about their football coach rather than the quality of the ice dance instructors in their community).

The exhortation, encouragement, leadership, and team spirit aspects only go so far. In my estimation, the great football coach needs the deep technical understanding of the physics of human motion of a great dance choreographer. If the NFL coaches as a whole don't have that understanding, the first coach who approaches football from either a dance training/martial arts training/human kinematics and dynamics standpoint is going to clean up because the players will execute their plays quicker, with less chance of injury, and will be less tired by the fourth quarter. I suspect the first rank football coaches work at that level judging by the Maranis book on Vince Lombardi and Lombardi's obsessional study of game films and his emphasis on being a teacher to his players.

My advice is not only do you need some measure of aptitude if you want to become a football player, a dancer, or a concert musician, not only do you have to practice hard and love what you are doing, you need to seek out the best coach or private-lesson instructor, because there is a lot more to a good coach or instructor than offering inspiration and making the subject interesting. A good ooach or private-lesson instructor is a diagnostician who can identify what is it about your current technique that is preventing you for achieving your goals, a good scientist who understands the physics and mechanics of the activity, and a good teacher who can convey those ideas to you as the student.

Otherwise, you can have all the passion in the world, but you are spinning your wheels as it were.

Paul: The piano-teachers joke also seems to tie in with "the perfect is the enemy of the good", as with people who strive for perfection in a subject, make a few mistakes and give up. The same applies to parents with overly high expectations. >.>

Another late comment by me but I've just got to second Math_Mage's excellent connection. Completely disregarding any blame on anyone/anything there's so many possible pit-falls it sometimes feels like a wonder anyone turns out reasonably ok at all ^_^ it really is a testament to humans and their general perseverance.