I’ve worked with a lot of adults in both an academic and business setting. If there is one constant in most adult’s mentality it’s that they can’t do something intellectual. I’m not talking about not being able to do something because of a lack of time or physical / monetary resources. I am talking about an actual belief in their inability. I can’t draw. I can’t do math. I can’t run a business. I can’t write a book. I can’t play the piano. I can’t cook. I can’t design a table. I can’t make a table. I can’t program. I can’t do anything unless if I can do it “naturally” or automatically. Don’t say “growth mindset”, “grit”, “resilience” — just don’t.

I work with kids from time to time, but not nearly in the same capacity as, say, an elementary school teacher. Regardless, from my limited experiences, I’ve learned a few things. When kids are very young, say, younger than seven or eight years old, for the most part, they’re willing to try anything! They have confidence — some may call it reckless abandon, because sometimes that’s what it is.

And then, as they get older, the “I can’t”s start to develop and continue on through for the rest of their lives. Some of us have been able to curb this, but I’d venture to guess, the majority of adults truly believe that they simply are unable to learn something, with mathematics, programming, and drawing being the top three [my guess].

The excuses change over time. At first it’s “I’m not good at it.”, then it’s “That’s not for me.”, then it’s “Why do I gotta learn this when I’ve never needed it before?”, then it’s “Oh that’s for smart people.”, then it’s “I’m too old to learn this.” And then we’re dead.

Root Causes

I like to contemplate about root causes for these kinds of mental inhibitions, especially when they are widespread phenomena rather than being idiosyncratic to any particular individual. So it’s time for armchair pop psychology.

Most people have the following shared experiences

• Being bullied, witnessing bullying, or being a bully [some have experienced all three]
• Parenting [being parented, witnessing parenting, or being a parent]
• Attending school

Bullying in school is certainly being tackled and there’s still plenty to be done. Attending school, well, is attending school. And some would probably classify that as an oppressive, tyrannical system probably worse than in-school bullying by other kids. These people will likely call for abolishing the mass education system as it exists. I won’t go that far in this article, but if there’s anything that’s singularly screwed up with school, it’s how we assess.

Must fix my tweet feed … It's become #BrokenRecordChat …

— Manan Shah (@shahlock) July 14, 2015

At the risk of being the #BrokenRecordChat that my tweet feed has become let me address the following question: “How do people go from recklessly confident to intellectually paralyzed?”

Bullies, School, And Parents

And an answer is the three-headed dragon of bullies, school, and parents. The physical and verbal abuse that some kids suffer because of bullying and / or social pressure for 10+ years is probably tantamount to torture. How many kids grow up hating playing sports because of all the teasing in gym — from being picked last to drawing the ire of their “teammates” because of “failing at the bat”? How many kids shun “dorky” pursuits because, well, they are dorky and uncool [math, programming, eg]? Or even because they are primarily dominated by one gender [chess, nursing, programming, eg]? How many kids shun “low brow” pursuits because, well, those things are too “worker class” [anything hands on and / or involving dirt]?

How many of us have grown up into that adult?

Speaking of adults, how many of those childhood mental blocks that have developed are then projected onto our own kids? Here is but a small sample of nonsense I’ve heard:

• “My daughter is a social butterfly. Math isn’t for her.” — Oh really, please tell me what is anti-social about mathematics?
• “My dad makes a lot of money and he doesn’t need to know any math.” — Aha! Empirical evidence! But alas, sample size is one. See the irony here?
• “Don’t go into the Arts, you’ll never make a living.” — Oh right, the thousands of companies out there have no advertising and marketing staff.
• “Why do I gotta learn the computer when I work with 4 year olds?” — Um, perhaps because you can enrich them a bit further rather than holding them back because of your own inabilities?
• “Don’t pursue a PhD, you’ll be unemployable.” — You know who says this? Jealous people who want to hold others back.

And that’s parenting failure either directly from the child’s parents or from a broader view of parenting as in “It takes a village to raise a child.”.

And finally, we have school in all its glorious failures of assessment.

Assessments

Synchronized swimming is a beautiful performance to watch. It’s a terrible way to assess student performance.

Yet, this is what we have. If a student hasn’t learned the content being taught by the time the assessment is given, then that student is “behind”. If the student has learned it “too quickly”, then they have to wait. And for some, perhaps the ideal classroom is when everyone moves at the same pace. Granted that a classroom for 20 students to teach, monitor, nurture, develop, etc. requires some effort on the teacher; and if part of the task is to assess students in a formal manner, then a simple solution is to assess students at the same time with the same assessment. It’s supposedly consistent and fair.

But consistent and fair for what purpose? The only purpose I can come up with is for the purpose of competitive ranking. BUT WHY?

The income-earning world is fiercely competitive, that doesn’t mean that the education world ought to be. But if we still want an element of competition, then save it for college. College is a rite of passage of many sorts. I can hear the arguments already: but if college will be competitive, shouldn’t we prepare our kids for that competition? And this will regress all the way back to when the child is in the womb and we let the fetus listen to Bach via speakers on the mom’s stomach.

The simple truth is that kids will rank each other regardless of school assessments and that will be competition enough. We don’t need to reinforce it by synchronized grading.

The macro-level desire to rank by assessment is the third head of the confidence-killing dragon. And we can chop off that head in a very simple way. We have the technological means to do this.

We already force students to take annual (in the US) standardized exams. But damn it, nothing would change if we just let students choose when they are ready to take them. If the kid isn’t ready in October, then let him/her wait. The technological infrastructure is there. The state and federal level assessment needs are still met and a kid can focus on learning and less on “what things do I gotta memorize for the exam?”.

We can do this in the classroom, too. The devil is certainly in the details and I don’t deny that there are logistical challenges with what we have right now. But at a high level and with a few broad strokes of the paintbrush, can’t we at least try to imagine and research an education environment [they already exist!] with the existing infrastructure where we don’t have to entertain the question “How can I (re)build student confidence?”? We don’t have to turn everything upside down all at once. We just have to turn one thing upside down. Student choice for when to be assessed is at the heart of this. And the question we should be asking is “What changes do we need so that we aren’t creating a confidence-killing environment?”.

We’re not raising weak children by mitigating, reducing, removing education competition. In fact, I would argue that we’re raising healthier people by letting them learn and think on their own and promoting self-competition. Then when they’re ready, they’ll go and compete on their own. And when they do, they’ll be fierce competition.

A simple case in point, is my comic. I know where my artwork is and I know where it needs to be in order for the comic to be really good. I know that it’s not ready for actual competition (competition = profession). And thus, I’m not entering the world of professional cartoonists and comics. Right now, I’m focusing on learning to draw and learning to “do humor”. I won’t ever have to officially enter the profession, when the comic is truly ready, it will make itself known automatically. All I have to do is continue to push myself. There is no race to the top and I’m not being left behind.