Educating Ruby by Guy Claxton Read Free Book Online

especially if their own experience as a schoolchild was not happy or successful. Some parents may feel that school is more or less the way it has to be, and lack confidence in their ability to challenge and suggest. Some may be well aware of their and their children’s concerns, but feel that they have no option – if they are to do their best for their children – but to tell them to knuckle down and ‘suck it up’. To play the game as well as you can and hope to get a place at as good a university as possible seems like the only sound advice they can give, and so they stifle their doubts.
    John Watts, a wise head teacher in the 1960s, said that “parents, however much they have suffered at school, or even if they left with a sense of failure, usually attribute the shortcomings to themselves rather than to the system, and thus find it difficult to envisage school in any form other than the one they themselves experienced”. 7 So they sit on their hands.
Exam fodder
    There is another Trad myth that says that everyone can do well if they try hard enough – except, sadly, for those who, when the brains were being doled out, were at the end of the queue and got small ones. This means that, if you did poorly in your exams, it was either because you weren’t bright enough or you were lazy. This turns out to be another of those pernicious over simplifications.
    First, exams like GCSEs and A levels are competitive. Not everyone can be a ‘winner’. There have to be a good number of ‘losers’ in order to make success worth having. If everyone got four As at A level they would be of no use to employers or admissions tutors, would they? Here’s a thought experiment. It is the morning when everyone gets their A level results letter, and your daughter is waiting anxiously for the post. She opens it and finds that she has got her four As. She rings her best friend, Rachel, and is (mostly) pleased to find that Rachel has got four As too. They go down to the school and are surprised to discover that everyone in the school who sat A levels that year has got four As. And then, on the news that night, it is reported that every single candidate in the country achieved four As. Just imagine her emotional trajectory throughout the day, from delight, to pleasure (tinged with a bit of competitiveness), to puzzlement, to dejection and despair! In reality, examination boards (and politicians) are constantly tinkering with pass marks and grade boundaries to ensure that nothing like this fantasy can actually happen. A lot of children have got to do badly at the examination game; it’s a statistical necessity. It’s deceitful to claim that everyone can win if they try hard enough.
    On the traditional view, intelligence is something that neither you nor your teachers could do anything about: it was largely decided by your genes. A lot of children come to believe, from pretty early on, that they are destined to be the losers – and it is because, in Jack Dee’s words, you are just thick. But we know this isn’t true. Children’s performance at school depends on a host of other factors, such as whether they are worried about what is going on at home, whether they have a good teacher, whether they like their teacher, whether they are willing to devote their intelligence to things that seem pointless, whether their experience has taught them that trying hard is usually worthwhile, whether they much prefer practical and active learning to academic and sedentary learning, and so on. If your child is struggling at school, one thing is certain: it is not because they are stupid.
The importance of beliefs
    One factor that makes a huge difference to how well children learn, in school and out, is what Stanford researcher Professor Carol Dweck has called a growth mindset. 8 Over decades of painstaking analysis of pupils, Dweck has been able to show that there are two broad categories of