Does school encourage or limit high ability people?
“I have never been a fan of learning in a classroom. Inside a laboratory or a garage, I always wanted to know more, but never inside a classroom.”
That quote is from Caltech physicist Caolionn O’Connell, PhD, from the site for the PBS program Einstein’s Big Idea.
Speaking of Einstein: he was expelled from school (in 1894) for “undermining the authority of his teachers and being a disruptive influence.” A teacher described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.”
From my article Getting out of school alive.
Our self concept, recognition of our talents, appreciation for divergent thinking, respect for high sensitivity or other aspects of being exceptional — all of these can be guided and nurtured, or corroded and corrupted, by our school experiences.
In her article Are gifted students getting left out?, Carla Rivera (Los Angeles Times) notes, “Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren’t even identified — especially in low-income and minority schools.”
She writes about Dalton Sargent having “lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
“Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.”
Rivera also presents California statistics showing ethnic disparities: “Latinos, who make up 48% of total student enrollment, represent just 28% of students enrolled in gifted programs. African Americans represent 7.6% of students and 4% of students enrolled in gifted programs.
“On the other hand, Asians make up 8% of total student enrollment and 17% of gifted enrollment; whites make up 29% of total enrollment and 43% of gifted enrollment.”
Another dimension is how teachers encourage or discourage student thinking.
Wall Street Journal writer Joseph Rago describes a telling example in his article Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment, about an Ivy League professor “threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their ‘anti-intellectualism’ violated her civil rights. . .
“Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument.
Rago quotes her: “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful. They’d argue with your ideas.”
He adds that “even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s.
“The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about ‘interrogating heteronormativity,’ or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in. . .
“Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade.”
In his book Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement, psychologist Kenneth W. Christian, PhD describes patterns of thinking and behaving that can result from not being challenged appropriately.
He writes about “Self Limiting High Potential Persons” who “etch enduring pathways over time by repeating their characteristic self-defeating methods… this tendency can evolve into a general self-limiting style.”
[From my article Tripping ourselves up with blind spots.]
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