Why Being Average Might Be Key to Happiness in Children, ETEducation
By Dr Pavan Soni
Our societies put a premium on intelligence, as proxied by marks, ranks and other academic achievements. Right from the elementary level, exams are designed to gauge a very narrow aspect of intelligence—convergent thinking ability—glossing over other contributors of performance. It’s assumed that intelligence, especially academic excellence, is a good measure of creativity, or worst still, happiness. With creativity being a proxy of relevance and happiness that of longevity, we need to relook at our bearings on the educational front.
An acceptable measure of performance is IQ, intelligence quotient, as measured by one’s mental age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100. Stanford University’s Lewis Terman standardized the IQ test as we know it today. He adopted the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales to assess if academic performance predicts life’s performance, making it as one of history’s longest running social experiments. The test’s rigor, relevance, and conclusions are hugely instructive on how we must raise our kids.
What the Terman study actually revealed
The Genetic Studies of Genius, also known as the Terman Study of the Gifted, begun in 1921 with an aim of examining the development and characteristics of gifted children into adulthood. The original cohort had 1,528 children (856 males and 672 females) selected from 250,000 elementary school students. Famously called as ‘Termites’, the subjects were born between 1900 and 1925, were 95-99 percent white, and belonged to upper- or middle-class families. These children, with an average IQ score of 140, were studied throughout their lives—their important milestones recorded, their academic, financial and social performances contrasted with the peers, and the study continued well into the 21st century. What’s the finding? ‘The kids proved remarkable in some ways and ordinary in others,’ writes Stanford’s Mitchell Leslie. ‘They had fewer children than others of their generation and bore them later in life. More of them went to college and graduate school, more had careers and more remained unmarried… As a group, Terman’s kids got divorced, committed suicide and became alcoholics at about the national rate. They were no more—and no less—stable than the general population.’
In summary, Termites were just about average in all aspects of life, even though they demonstrated above average IQs. Most remarkably, none of the Termites bagged a Nobel—Terman’s measure of genius. If anything, two of the students left out from the original cohort, citing their low IQ scores, bagged Nobels—William Shockley (1956, Physics) and Luis Alvarez (1968, Physics).
Why academic obsession still persists
Yet our fascination with academic performance, class ranks, competitive exam scores and a desirable stamp on the passport early in life remains. Why? One simple explanation is that good academics is a passport to social and economic upliftment. In just a generation, we have witnessed students dislodging themselves from the trap of economic subservience, thitherto preordained by where you are born. No longer can it be said that only those with a business background can break the shackles of labour-intensive means of economics (read employment). Thanks to stronger educational rigor, greater social acceptance, wider economic opportunities, and proliferation of general-purpose technologies, one’s surname isn’t all that important. The charm of government jobs gave way to private employment, which is slowly fading in the wake of entrepreneurial dreams. And the catalyst has been education.
When academics lose real-world relevance
But in today’s reality, where what’s been taught is just about remotely relevant to the available careers, academic excellence must be viewed with discretion. It’s not that schools and teachers haven’t kept pace with market realities, but that market is often clueless of what’s coming up. Over 50 percent of the careers that kids of today will be championing haven’t yet been invented. Who was taught to be an airhostess, or a tattoo artist, or a pet hairdresser in a 60-minute lecture? But it’s all happening, and more so. That leave academics as a hurdle to be crossed than the inoculation that it once was. A well-rounded child is the calling of the day, and not the one who’s not tired acing exams.
Why the “Topper” isn’t always the happiest
An average child, one who stands in the 60-70 percentile of the class, has greater odds of happiness than the one holding the pole position. Why? Three reasons. Firstly, a student who’s used to being a topper expects the same outcome from the other spheres of life—friends, family, work, society, health—and when the regression towards mean hits, the child gets frustrated. She’s unable to cope up with situations where the causalities aren’t direct, and with no prescribed syllabus to digest.
Secondly, as the child moves from 70 percentile upwards, any gain in performance comes at the cost of ‘stealing’ time from other avenues of life—such as hobbies, socializing with friends, daydreaming, playing, going about apparently useless ventures—all essential for creativity and enterprise. The aspiring child (read aspiring parent) increasingly becomes straight jacketed, bot-like, in pursuit of cracking the exam code. It’s hardly worth, for the kid at the pole position isn’t sleeping on the wheels, and it’s a classic case of arms race.
Lastly, we are creating another ‘system’ where social strata and economic status are replaced by marks and academic performance. Once the pupil gets slotted into a certain class, she’s obliged to maintain it, as a slip may be construed as laxity, instead of normalization of the cohort. One ought to maintain the performance differential, as if that’s the end by itself, and that rest of the life would follow. Consequently, those who fail to make it to IIT-JEE at the Kota Factory think of it as the end of the line, and those who make it to the coveted institutes fail miserably to crack the subject called ‘life’. Disengagement, depression and suicide are fruits of the sordid seed we laid as parents right at the schooling.
A note to Parents
So, if your child is there about in the schools chugging along, is playing enough, has a few friends, keeps a hobby by the side—you must be proud of your parenting. Don’t burden your child with the carry forward of your life’s longings. To quote Khalil Gibran: ‘They come through you but not from you.’ Don’t push her to be excellent in anything. Let her have a long and wide sampling period, and this will more than cover up for a late start. Just be easy on them and yourself.
– The author of this article is the bestselling author of the books, Design Your Thinking and Design Your Career.
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