Parenting for High Potential: Swimming Upstream Against the Cultural Current
by Stephen Schroeder-Davis
Following are excerpts from an article by Stephen Schroeder-Davis for the National Association for Gifted Children, December 1998, reprinted in EPCGT NEWS October 2001.
With rare exceptions, media coverage either ignores student scholars or ridicules them. In terms of news coverage, high-achieving students and their academic accomplishments are given so little screen time that one reporter likened their absence to “symbolic annihilation,” i.e., you can watch hours of news and never see a substantive story about scholarship.
Injurious screen role models are reinforced in just about every female-oriented teen magazine, which features endless tips about how to shop, attract boys and lose weight while offering very little about becoming a happy, competent, well-adjusted adolescent.
Children are not born thinking that bright students are “study-buddies,” “brainiacs” or worse. They develop such prejudices the same way they learn racism or sexism, from imitating the attitudes and behaviors of adults. When they see a bumper sticker that reads, “Your child may be an honor student, but you are an idiot,” they learn an indelible lesson about anti-intellectualism.
What are the attitudes of school-aged children toward academic effort and achievement? A huge body of research reveals that the answer is “ambivalent” and that attitudes toward high achievers become more negative as students approach junior high age.
It should come as no surprise that researchers have found that:
- 50% of high school students do not do assigned homework;
- less than 20% have friends who value good grades;
- less than 25% discuss homework with friends;
- “jocks” and “partiers” are, respectively, five and three times more popular than “brains;”
- the hard working, intelligent student is the least popular “type” in American schools, and those designated “brains” are the most shunned and avoided of all adolescent groups.
Within generic peer culture, there is tremendous pressure to conform to group standards by calibrating academic efforts downward toward mediocrity and away from true excellence. “Getting by,” “staying eligible” and “appeasing parents” are goals that are understood and accepted by most students, while a sincere pursuit of academic excellence, a love of books and ideas and a passion for the life of the mind can make the scholar a social pariah. Such behaviors and attitudes create painful “forced-choice dilemmas” for student scholars. Given the importance of social stature and the fragile egos of young adolescents, it is predictable that many will intentionally underachieve or hide their abilities to gain acceptance and avoid teasing.
An interesting sidelight to these dilemmas is that athletic effort is consistently recognized and rewarded. Popular culture, schools and the adolescent peer group all confer tremendous status upon athletes. In fact, athletes are the most revered group in schools – honored by students, teachers, the media, and their communities. This phenomenon dates back to the late 1940s and is still true today.
Many high schools, in fact nearly all that I have visited, inadvertently not only fail to combat the undue glorification of athletics, but actually add the weight of school culture to that of popular culture when they recognize and celebrate athletic accomplishments more frequently and more publicly than academic and creative achievements. Communities can amplify this problem with banners, calendars, honors banquets and local newspaper articles that celebrate sports triumphs and ignore or trivialize academic accomplishments and participation.
It is my contention that many adults, in a desperate effort to motivate students to invest time and effort in their studies, have emphasized the potential long-term monetary gains associated with a good education almost to the exclusion of the myriad other benefits that true education brings to individuals and communities. These include enriching an individual for life and cultivating individual as well as social skills that would be of use and service in enriching the lives of others. Since intelligence and scholarship bring such immediate, negative social costs, we have tried to persuade students of long-term, monetary gains. Even though there are demonstrable economic benefits to a good education, do we really want to “sell” learning as being a mere fiscal advantage?
Parents have a tremendous opportunity to nurture and protect achievement values and scholarly pursuits by actively and vociferously contradicting the “dumbing down” messages sent by the larger culture, the media, and peer culture…