Trouble
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THE TROUBLE WITH TALENT: ARE WE BORN SMART OR DO WE GET SMART?
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KATHY SEAL
Kathy Seal is a journalist and author who has written about education and psychology since 1985 for such publications as The New York Times, Family Circle, and Parents. Seal attended Barnard College, where she graduated magna cum laude. She is the author of two books: Riches and Fame and I the Pleasures of Sense (1971) and Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning (2001). "The Trouble with Talent" appeared in the July, 1993 issue o/Lear's magazine.
'Jim Stigler was in an awkward position. Fascinated by the fact that Asian students routinely do better than American kids at elementary math, the UCLA psychologist wanted to test whether persistence might be the key factor. So he designed and administered an experiment in which he gave the same insolvable math problem to separate small groups of Japanese and American children. 2 Sure enough, most American kids attacked the problem, struggled briefly—then gave up. The Japanese kids, however, worked on and on and on. Eventually, Stigler stopped the experiment when it began to feel inhumane: If the Japanese kids were uninterrupted, they seemed willing to plow on indefinitely. 3 "The Japanese kids assumed that if they kept working, they'd eventually get it," Stigler recalls. "The Americans thought, 'Either you get it or you don't.'" 4 Stigler's work, detailed in his 1992 book The Learning Gap (Summit, Books/Simon & Schuster), shatters our stereotypical notion that Asian education relies on rote and drill. In fact, Japanese and Chinese elementary schoolteachers believe that their chief task is to stimulate thinking. They tell their students that anyone who thinks long enough about a problem can move toward its solution. 5 Stigler concludes that the Asian belief in hard work as the key to success is one reason why Asians outperform us academically. Americans are persuaded that success in school requires inborn
THE TROUBLE WITH TALENT: ARE WE BORN SMART OR DO WE GET SMART?
________________
KATHY SEAL
Kathy Seal is a journalist and author who has written about education and psychology since 1985 for such publications as The New York Times, Family Circle, and Parents. Seal attended Barnard College, where she graduated magna cum laude. She is the author of two books: Riches and Fame and I the Pleasures of Sense (1971) and Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning (2001). "The Trouble with Talent" appeared in the July, 1993 issue o/Lear's magazine.
'Jim Stigler was in an awkward position. Fascinated by the fact that Asian students routinely do better than American kids at elementary math, the UCLA psychologist wanted to test whether persistence might be the key factor. So he designed and administered an experiment in which he gave the same insolvable math problem to separate small groups of Japanese and American children. 2 Sure enough, most American kids attacked the problem, struggled briefly—then gave up. The Japanese kids, however, worked on and on and on. Eventually, Stigler stopped the experiment when it began to feel inhumane: If the Japanese kids were uninterrupted, they seemed willing to plow on indefinitely. 3 "The Japanese kids assumed that if they kept working, they'd eventually get it," Stigler recalls. "The Americans thought, 'Either you get it or you don't.'" 4 Stigler's work, detailed in his 1992 book The Learning Gap (Summit, Books/Simon & Schuster), shatters our stereotypical notion that Asian education relies on rote and drill. In fact, Japanese and Chinese elementary schoolteachers believe that their chief task is to stimulate thinking. They tell their students that anyone who thinks long enough about a problem can move toward its solution. 5 Stigler concludes that the Asian belief in hard work as the key to success is one reason why Asians outperform us academically. Americans are persuaded that success in school requires inborn