Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Against the growth mindset

I am dubious of Carol Dweck's touted "growth mindset". She writes thing like this:

http://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/index.html
Well, most of what I've read about intelligence says that it is not malleable. We don't know how to raise IQ. Someone should study literature, or a foreign language, or mathematics because those subjects are worth studying or to get a useful credential, not because studying makes them smarter.

A detailed critique of the "growth mindset" that I recommend is

NO CLARITY AROUND GROWTH MINDSET…YET
BY SCOTT ALEXANDER
APRIL 8, 2015

I have always assumed that Dweck's point is not that IQ is malleable, but that effort ALSO matters. A specific example would be musical talent and practice - presumably for most accomplished musicians, practice plays an important role, and they wouldn't have gotten as far professionally on talent alone.

One reason so many parents are concerned about their children being "challenged" at school, is that they want to ensure the kiddos have the experience of seeing effort pay off, and to also thus allay perfectionist tendencies.

But perhaps I've misinterpreted her work?

No, I think you understand Dweck.

I think telling kids "you're so smart" is so toxic. I experienced this firsthand and it was harmful. One of the benefits of having my DS at a gifted private school is that they understand this and praise effort, persistence, and grit instead.

Well...it's pretty easy to REDUCE your intelligence. Hypoxia, certain drugs, chronic disease, chronic malnutrition, and head injuries spring to mind as tried-and-true methods. So in that regard, intelligence is quite malleable.

That said, I've never actually met anyone who believes that "talent alone creates success." I'm sure that there are some people like that out there, but if you discount everyone under age 14 or so, there probably won't be many left in that group.

I wonder if this kind of statement is just a feel-good way of dismissing the importance of talent. Americans are inclusive to a fault, and to me, this kind of writing (along with Malcom whatshisname's 10,000 hours garbage) is a way for people to pretend that anyone can be an astronaut, or an engineer, or even the president, and that all children are gifted (tm).

Then we send them to college to drop out of STEM majors and incur extra debt while getting "degrees" in subjects like liberal studies, bizniz, or journalism, after which they end up in low-paying benefit-free jobs in retail.

Yeah, well, there's a flip side to that argument. I was never told how intelligent I am, and it took a long time for me to figure out what I'm capable of as a result.

Why does this idea always, always seem to come down to pitting two sides against one another (the bad people who reveal IQ and make their kids lazy vs. the good people who don't and teach their kids about hard work)? How can you develop a talent if you don't know you have it or its extent?

Two of my kids have been tested, and they both know their IQs. They're also reminded constantly about the need for hard work and consequences of laziness.

Dweck's theory can be over-extended. Ability is, to a large degree, innate, with minimum sufficient levels existing in many domains below which even infinite effort will yield effectively no tangible improvement in performance.

This is not to discount the importance of effort to harness talent--far from it!--there are cases where hard work can beat talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Potential is innate. It's probably fixed, at least by 2-3yo.


Failure to reach that potential is variable, and attribution is also highly variable. It can happen for a lot of reasons-- structural, socioeconomic, motivational, etc. Or, in Val's list-- because of external factors which attenuate that original potential in some way.

SO sure, growth mindset speaks to the motivational limitations, which can be among the most potent limitations (since they don't respond to external mitigation or intervention).

Thanks for posting Alexander's article. I have struggled with the either/or posited by the Dweck approach since first hearing of it. Behavior and attitudes just aren't so simply defined. I also flat out don't like the continuation of the tired old nonsense about all these smart people who are always proving their intelligence and that all they care about is their IQ. (That's what I get from several sections of the Mindset website.)

I am in the camp of those who would say acknowledge talent, then set things up to allow the talent to develop through hard work and application.

Has anyone read her site's section on the 2006 Olympics (http://mindsetonline.com/forum/2006olympics/index.html)? She claims that the US athletes must have all been simply praised for their talents, believed that's all it took to win... so they just "phoned it in" and didn't do well. C'mon. What hogwash. They all got to the OLYMPICS on talent alone and then failed because they didn't try hard enough? PUHLEEZE.

It's been interesting to watch teachers at the elementary school in our area try to "teach" this mindset (Dweck's theory is currently quite popular in our area) to younger students. While I see a value in praising effort, what are students learning when they get excellent results from very little effort or poor results from tremendous effort? Does Dweck address this? Because I certainly would not want a child with a LD to be told that it is primarily a matter of effort - that simply isn't fair or realistic.

It's silly to assume that kids don't realize that there are differences in ability, they see it everyday in class. In general I believe in telling my son the truth, that brains matter, but effort is just as important. The latter point may not be as obvious to them if they don't encounter challenging material in school and is why it is so important for kids to be taught at their level. If they aren't challenged from an early age, they don't know that studying/working hard is important and will struggle later on as material becomes more difficult.