Opinion

Memories of particularly dazzling dances on less dazzling pins

By PETER BERGER
The question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” is a cautionary example of a pointless mental exercise. In its original context it warned us against allowing our preoccupation with irrelevant details to distract us from properly focusing on faith and its practical application in our daily lives.

The education world is no stranger to pondering the irrelevant and disregarding the practical.

Consider “growth mindsets,” the cutting-edge notion coined and promoted by psychologist Carol Dweck. She contends intelligence isn’t “fixed,” and she’s the author of the declaration, “You can be as smart as you want to be.” What she really means is that making an effort in school can render a student more skillful and knowledgeable than he otherwise would have been without that effort. If that’s as strikingly obvious to you as it is to me, welcome to the realm of education experts and the throng of inservice disciples who “ooh” and “ahh” at every word.

Dr. Dweck’s mindset theories are this moment’s fashion. They prop up the popular deceit that all students can succeed and meet high standards, which all students demonstrably can’t. I don’t mean that effort won’t improve academic performance. It clearly can and usually will, something I’ve told my students for decades.

I’d likewise be in better shape if I got out of my chair more often. But I’ll never be an Olympian. Or an astrophysicist. If you set and enforce high standards, some people aren’t going to meet them.

Of course, Dr. Dweck’s aren’t the most outlandish intelligence theories ever lauded by the education world. NEAToday once featured an “innovator” who preaches that “innate intelligence” doesn’t even exist. He’s determined that the idea that some people are smarter than others is “completely wrong” and that “virtually all kids” are gifted.

A particularly dazzling pin dance occurs where mindsets meet gifted education. Some experts and mindsets enthusiasts now assert that students identified as gifted are “especially fragile and vulnerable” to developing a “fixed mindset.” They warn that the “gifted label itself” stifles gifted students’ effort and achievement, and induces them to “avoid challenges” in the future “in order to maintain a smart identity” because they’re afraid they won’t live up to their gifted reputations and appear gifted enough. These advocates recommend that schools “dismantle gifted programs and eliminate separate gifted classes.”

Meanwhile, competing experts and enthusiasts, also armed with research, have concluded that gifted students typically “believe that intelligence can grow,” meaning they actually have growth mindsets. These authorities worry that not identifying gifted students will leave them insufficiently challenged and “set the stage for fixed mindsets to develop.” They prescribe gifted programs and separate gifted classes as “highly beneficial for gifted students” and an antidote for fixed mindsets.

Of course, while they insist that the gifted designation leads to a growth mindset, they acknowledge that “gifted students do not fall into one single pattern” and that “some gifted students do adopt fixed mindset beliefs.” They also speculate that a student could have a fixed mindset in one domain like math and simultaneously a growth mindset in another domain like creativity. In addition, some gifted students, like every other kind of student, simply prefer not to push themselves too hard. Also, not surprisingly, students at the upper end of the academic ability and achievement spectrum tend to have “more positive attitudes” toward academic “challenges and hard work.”

May I have this dance?

Thirty years ago at my first English teachers conference, we received a standard collection of experts’ journal articles. I opened to one consultant’s authoritative two-page prescription instructing us, based on “the research,” to place gifted students in regular classrooms. Then I turned the page, where I found an equally authoritative two-page prescription from another consultant instructing us, based on “the research,” to remove gifted students from regular classrooms.

I mention this not because competing opinions are always absurd. Some debates need to be held. Some opposing views deserve to be considered in every field, including education.

Nor do I pretend to have coined the observation, given us by a far wiser teacher, that there is nothing new under the sun. Some questions, issues, and facts of human life are perennial.

The problem in the education world is that we spend so much time denying and defying reality. The worst of it is that as school reformers propose and promote their recycled fashions in theory and practice, they drag successive student generations along with them.

The reality is that some students have more ability than others, but there is no defining line between gifted and not gifted. Some students will never meet the high standards we wish they could no matter how loud and long officials shout that teachers and the latest “best practice” can make it happen. Innate intelligence does exist, and it’s always been nurtured by experience, everything from nutrition to how many books there are in your house. Effort will in almost every case improve achievement, but it’s a pernicious deceit to tell students that they can be as smart as they want to be.

Tradition records that theologians were preoccupied debating pins and angels as the Turks besieged Constantinople.

Education policymakers have been busy with equally pointless debates for decades.

Constantinople fell.

We need to bear that in mind as we consider what lies ahead for our schools and students.

 

Peter Berger has taught English and history for thirty years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

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