Most of us are familiar with the question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” It’s come down to us as a cautionary example of a pointless mental exercise. In its original context, it warned us against allowing our preoccupation with irrelevant theological notions and 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. Education experts are also skilled at reciting the obvious as if they’d just recently discovered it.
Consider “growth mindsets,” the cutting-edge notion coined and promoted by psychologist Carol Dweck. She contends that your 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 in-service 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 ordinary teachers like me have been telling our students for decades.
I’d likewise be in better shape if I got up 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 theories of intelligence 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 some people are smarter than others is “completely wrong” and that “virtually all kids” are gifted.
As breathtakingly ridiculous as much of this must seem to readers unfamiliar with school reform’s inner workings, a particularly dazzling pin dance occurs where mindsets meet gifted education. Some experts and mindset enthusiasts now assert that students identified as gifted are “especially fragile” and susceptible 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 school officials “dismantle gifted programs and eliminate separate gifted classes” to avoid these negative fixed mindset impacts on gifted students.
Meanwhile, a competing battalion of experts, also armed with research, have just as adamantly concluded that gifted students typically “believe that intelligence can grow,” meaning they actually have “growth mindsets.” These authorities counter that gifted students “are not as fragile or vulnerable” and 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.
My head hurts.
Of course, the experts who contend that the gifted designation leads to a growth mindset acknowledge “gifted students do not fall into one single pattern,” and “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-five 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 the regular classroom. 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 the regular classroom.
I mention this not because competing opinions are always absurd, or because they’re never worthy of consideration. Some debates need to be held. Some opposing views deserve to be considered. This is true 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, issue, 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, as school reform’s leading voices propose and promote their recycled fashions in education theory and practice, they drag successive student generations along with them.
The reality is, some students have more ability than others, but there is no defining line between gifted and not gifted. The reality is that 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. The reality is that innate intelligence does exist, and intelligence has always been nurtured by experience, everything from nutrition to how many books there are in your house. The reality is, effort will, in almost every case, improve achievement, but it’s a pernicious deceit to tell students 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.
Our leaders have followed suit.
Constantinople fell.
We need to bear that in mind as we consider what lies ahead for our schools, our students and our beleaguered nation.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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