	Sign In Sign-Up

Phil Willis Online

home bio pics stories links

Sep 24th, 2005

Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for the New Yorker magazine and the author of two books: The Tipping Point and Blink

I had a chance to see him deliver a speech on "America's Obsession with Precosciousness" at the New Yorker Festival in Sep 2004.

I hope he writes a book, or at the very least an article in the New Yorker on the topic, because not only do I think it's important, I think he has some original ideas to share on the idea of precosciousness in children and whether or not it can be used as an accurate predictor of adult success.

Here are the notes I took.

Introduction

Right on starting time, from behind the curtain came a casually dressed man with a fuzzy head of hair. At first, I thought he was the moderator for Malcolm Gladwell's speech, but it turns out, it was Malcolm himself.

With no-one to introduce him, he proceeded to introduce himself as he imagined he'd like to have been introduced.

"If my agent or my editor was here to introduce me, no doubt they would say I was diligent, hard working, astute, punctual, honest, brave and noble."

"Indeed, in the steamy jungles of Vietnam, (and I'm sure my editor would most likely say this if he were here himself), that if 'Charlie' was over the next hill, there was no other man on the earth he'd rather have fighting by his side than me."

A Precoscious Past

Malcolm Gladwell was actually a very decent medium distance running in his time.

He set high school records in his home country of Canada between the ages of thirteen and fifteen in the 1500 metre event.

It was in the arena of competitive running that he first encountered the idea (held by some to be an axiom) that nuturing precoscious children was a way to build better adults.

But something happened which changed his perspective.

He lost.

His first defeats were crushing. He soon realised he wasn't the best and he found it very emotionally unsettling.

Malcolm Gladwell is still a runner and is slightly above average for his age group in the events he still participates in.

When he looked up the top fifteen runners of his high school prime ten years later, fourteen of their names were no longer to be seen in the upper eschelons of Canadian track and field.

In fact, the only name he recognised from his high school days, the fifteenth guy, was someone who never won, and was considered by most of his old teammates as a perennial loser.

This was the first time he thought about and challenged the assumption:

"Early talent is a predictor of adult proficiency"

Genius Revisited

In a study entitled "Genius Revisited" a group of researchers looked up group of children who had gone to one of Manhattan's most selective schools to see how they were faring as adults.

In order to enter Hunter School, a child had to demonstrate an IQ of at least 150 in order to be admitted.

The school was founded on the principle that if a talented child was surrounded by peers of equal giftings and given a challenging workload, they would become the future statesmen, scientists, philosophers and business leaders of their generation.

It turns out, their assumption was wrong.

Much to the disappointment of the researchers, they found that Hunter alumni, as adults:

were all pretty successful and happy

were not superstars or Nobel laureates

mostly had happy, balanced lives - based on conscious choices they had made about their career, family and lifestyle etc

The hardest job of the researchers was to report to the school that the purpose for setting up the school in the first place was fundamentally flawed.

Good Learners

One of the things that child prodigies all have in common is that they are all good learners.

Adult success on the other hand, is more about being good at doing something.

Almost all of the precosciousness we see in children is them being incredibly good at consciously (or unconsciously) mimicking the styles of others.

Adult success on the other hand, is not just mimickery, but innovation and the creation of a conscious style.

The main skill these gifted children had learnt was how to reach proficiency in a given skill faster than their peers.

Faster is not Better

You could argue that learning something faster than others is a good skill, because it enables you to keep ahead of your peers and guarantee (or at least assist) your success in adult life.

But there are some skills where there is little or no advantage to being a fast learner.

Take walking for example: Everyone learns how to walk eventually. There is no intrinsic advantage to being an "early walker".

Similarly, learning to read by age three, in some circles, seems like an early sign of a child's intellect, but given that everyone learns to read by about age six or seven then where is the advantage?

Martin then quoted from studies where pushing children to read at an early age did not always guarantee that they would enjoy reading by the time they were ten years old.

In certain Scandinavian countries they did not even push reading until the age of eight or nine until the child was ready to begin reading by themselves.

Optimism versus Pessimism

Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvannia suggests that how a person explains failure has more correlation with adult success than early childhood aptitude.

People who we might class as "optimists" would see failures in their life as:

a temporary setback

local to the area concerned

changeable or fixable

Meanwhile, "pessimistic" people might see a failure as:

long lasting

global

immutable

Failing a math test could yield two "explanatory styles":

This is just one math test, at least my other subjects are okay (local). It's not the end of the world (temporary). I'll just need to look at what I did wrong and get better next time (fixable).

Well that's my academic future gone now (long lasting). I suck at school (not just math? global). I'm dumb and that's just the way I am.

It turns out that when hiring staff for sales positions, interviews and testing that seek a "positive explanatory style" does a better job in hiring good candidates than most other methods. Possibly because a salesperson's job involves repeated failures in the form of rejections as part of the job.

Mozart - the Posterchild

But what about Mozart.

Mozart is held up as the poster child for child prodigies.

It turns out, Mozart's father, Leopold Mozart, was the original "little league dad".

It's not only likely that he pushed his kids into practising hard, but that he lied to concert goers about the ages of his prodigy children.

It takes around 10,000 hours of practice to become a great violinist. Mozart probably had 3,500 hours between the ages of three and six. So even at six, obviously he's better than any six-year-old, but compared with a professional he still has a long way to go.

Secondly, Mozart's decent work does not appear until about age 21. In his early years, he mostly just imitates and reproduces Bach's early symphonies. There is also the problem that while Mozart was young it was his father who wrote his early compositions down on paper.

It's generally held that it normally takes ten years as an artist before a genuine work of note is produced.

Some rare exceptions are Paganini and Schostakovich who only took nine years. Mozart took eleven years.

Hard Work

Thousands of kids sit for England's standardised music exams each year.

Children in the top 25% spend 800% more time practising their music than the bottom 25%.

One legitimate question might be: is being gifted less about being a good learner and more about having a natural aptitude for work?

One of the possible explanations for why the children who went to the Manhattan's exclusive Hunter school didn't become high-flyers is that early on, they understood the sacrifices required for adult success and chose to be happy, rather than successful in the eyes of society.

Luck

Luck, whether we like to admit it or not, plays a large factor in adult success.

If Bill Gates was born in the 1850's, what would have happened?

Einstein's great achievements only occurred in a small time window. Once his colleagues moved on, his methods and ideas made no further progress.

Sometimes luck manifests itself when a person who hasn't worked hard finally finds something they're actually really interested in.

Why Obsess About Precosciousness?

If hard work trumps natural talent in the long run, why do people value precosciousness in children?

Precosciousness in itself is not bad, it's just not a good predictor of adult success, because:

a) you can't make reliable predictions based on traits that can change

b) adult success is more about hard work than fast learning

c) sometimes luck plays a part in whether people are successful or not

Malcolm did not downplay the importance of learning certain skills early in life. Music, language and even chess are far easier to learn at an early age than as adults.

He was more concerned about the trend for people to use the precosciousness of children as a predictor of adult success.

Unfortunately, he did not try to explain why Westerners (in particular Americans) were susceptible to the idea that giving your child an advantage in their youth was a guarantee of future success.

Given the crowd he was speaking to, I'm sure many would have been blanching at his findings, knowing only too well how much their kid's education was costing them.