The Chair of Psychology at Boston College Ellen Winner has written that our American culture seems happy to dismiss talent and inborn capacity. It’s permeated with the populist view that “hard work is all that is required for genius or even expert level performance….with sufficient energy and dedication on the parents’ part, it is possible that it may not be all that difficult to produce a child prodigy.”
Think about it: If you’re truly dedicated parents, your kids could write symphonies like Mozart, paint portraits like John Singer Sargent, produce sculptures like Rodin, design buildings like Calatrava, create fashion to match Dior or Chanel–-the list is endless because you can get your kids to do anything. It’s all about work. Yours. Theirs. Everybody has to want it enough. That’s all.
As Hemingway wrote: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I come from a family of mathematically-gifted people. My mother’s father was a statistician; my mother tutored her peers in mathematics; my older brother aced every math class he ever took–-and yet from kindergarten on, I had trouble with the simplest computations involving “pennies, nickels and dimes” as my first report card said. I wanted to succeed. I was desperate to please my teachers and my mothers. I was a good little student in everything else except this one area, and it was a torment to me that no matter what I did, no matter how anyone tried to help me, and how hard I worked at it I just could not succeed. Math tests were agony: no matter how much I studied, I could without warning go blank staring at the exam.
By the time I reached high school, I was often drowning in a fog of incomprehension, barely keeping my head above water in my math classes no matter how much tutoring I got. Except for Geometry, which is visual, math did not make sense to me; it might as well have been Klingon.
There’s nothing I wanted more than to be a normal kid who understood math as well as my peers. I wanted to erase the shame of all those failed exams with blaring grades in red. I wanted to never live in fear of pop quizzes. I wanted to wipe out the humiliation of having to move my seat every day in fifth grade to sit in The Dumb Row during math lessons. I’m not making that up. It really happened. That’s what our teacher called it.
Winner says that psychologists and educators widely observe “very young children showing signs of extraordinary ability prior to any training” which provides “evidence of nature before nurture.” I would also argue the opposite is likely. The innate lack of talent in certain areas is probably observable early on, too. It sure was in my house.
I may have been miserable at arithmetic and math, yes, but I was gifted at language arts from the get-go: I could read LIFE Magazine in second grade. I was reading Isaac Asimov short stories a year later. By seventh grade, I was even annoying an English teacher by using words in my book reports that he deemed beyond my reading level. He even complained about it to my mother at a parent/teacher conference. It really happened.
Popular writers like Malcolm Gladwell have helped spread a kind of perversely seductive, populist belief that work trumps talent. But it’s not really either/or, as Winner points out. The reality is much more complicated:
“The best systematic evidence disentangling nature from nurture comes from studies of chess masters by Fernand Gobet, Guillermo Campitelli and Robert Howard. These researchers found wide individual variation in the number of hours needed to reach grandmaster level. They also found players who put in huge amounts of chess time (from childhood) yet never attained master level. Thus, sheer hard work is simply not sufficient to become a master. What is true of chess is bound to be true of all kinds of great achievers, whether in the arts, the sciences or athletics.”
Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay
Yes, math was torture and language was a warm breeze for me also. I do hope the time will come when we will let kids be kids again, play in the afternoons without a coach or pro watching everything they do, explore their own ideas with day dreaming, or putter around in their dad's workshop building god-knows-what. We have created generations of children doomed to frustration and disappointment because of the ideas described in your piece.
And then you can be good at something and not like it (math comes to mind). I recall an interview at IBM. After a half day of grueling tests, the recruiter told me: you're too literary for us. I thanked the man, warmly!