as being “gifted.” This may seem nonsensical—how can being labeled as gifted possibly harm anyone? I have already mentioned the research showing that the idea of giftedness—that you need some inherited gene to do well—is harmful for women and students of color, but how does it harm individuals who are given the label?
A few months ago, I was contacted by a filmmaker who was making a film on giftedness with a social justice angle. That, I thought, sounded interesting, so I looked at the trailer he sent me. I was disappointed to find that his argument was that more students of color should be identified as gifted. I understand the motives for such a film, as there are serious racial disparities in gifted programs. But there was a larger issue at play, and that was the continued practice of fixed-brain labeling.
I decided in those moments to make my own film, with the help of my youcubed team and an amazing filmmaker, Sophie Constantinou, from Citizen Film. I asked the Stanford students I knew to reflect upon their experiences of being labeled as “gifted.”23 The twelve Stanford students who speak in the film give a consistent message—they received advantages, but at some costs. The students talk about feeling that they had a fixed thing inside them, and when they struggled, they thought it had “run out.” They say they learned that they could not ask questions; they could only answer other people’s questions. They say that they tried to hide any struggles, in case people found out that they did not have a “gift.” At the end a student named Julia strikingly says, “If I grew up in a world where no one was labeled as gifted, I would have asked a lot more questions.”
The gifted movement has the worthy ideal of ensuring that high-achieving students get a rich and challenging environment, which I agree is needed. But they have done so by perpetuating an idea that some students are worthy of this because they have a fixed “gift”—like a present they have been given. Although the programs point out that some students need especially challenging material because they have reached an elevated point, they omit the fact that others can also reach that point if they work hard. The message is that some people are born with something that others cannot achieve. This, in my view, is damaging, both for those who get the idea they have no gift and for those who get the idea they have a fixed brain.
One of the reasons that it can be damaging to receive the gifted label is that you do not expect to struggle, and when you do, it is absolutely devastating. I was reminded of this when chatting with my education students at Stanford last summer. I was explaining the research on brain growth and the damage of fixed labels when Susannah raised her hand and sadly said, “You are describing my life.”
Susannah went on to recall her childhood, when she was a top student in math classes. She had attended a gifted program and had been told frequently that she had a “math brain” and a special talent. She went on to enroll as a math major at UCLA, but in the second year of the program she took a class that was challenging and that caused her to struggle. At that time, she decided she did not have a math brain after all, and she dropped out of the program. What Susannah did not know is that struggle is the very best process for brain growth (more on that later) and that she could grow the neural pathways she needed to learn more mathematics. If she had known that, Susannah would probably have persisted and graduated with a math major. This is the damage that is caused by fixed-ability thinking.
The story Susannah told me relayed her experience of being labeled as gifted, with a “math brain,” and the ways this fixed labeling led her to drop the subject she loved. This could be repeated with any subject—English, science, history, drama, geography—anything. When you are valued for having a brain that you did not develop, one you were just given at birth, you become averse to any form of struggle and start to believe you do not belong in areas where you encounter it. Because of my field of specialty, I have met many people who have dropped out of STEM subjects because they thought they did not have the right brain, but the problem is not limited to STEM subjects. It comes about whenever people are led to believe that their intellect is fixed.
Although I decry the labels given to students—of giftedness or the opposite—I do not maintain that everyone is born the same. At birth everyone has a unique brain, and there are differences between people’s brains. But the differences people are born with are eclipsed by the many ways people can change their brains. The proportion of people born with brains so exceptional that those brains influence what they go on to do is tiny—less than 0.001 percent of the population. Some have brain differences that are often debilitating in some ways, such as those on the autism spectrum, but productive in other ways. Although we are not born with identical brains, there is no such thing as a “math brain,” “writing brain,” “artistic brain,” or “musical brain.” We all have to develop the brain pathways needed for success, and we all have the potential to learn and achieve at the highest levels.
Bestselling author Daniel Coyle, who has spent a lot of time in “talent hotbeds,” agrees. He has interviewed teachers of the most “talented”—the people Coyle describes as having worked in particularly effective ways. Their teachers say that they see someone they regard as a “genius” at a rate of one person per decade.24 To decide that 6 percent of students in every school district have a brain difference that means they should be siphoned off and given special treatment is ludicrous. Anders Ericsson has studied IQ and hard work for decades and concludes that the people regarded as geniuses—people like Einstein, Mozart, and Newton—“are made, not born,” and their success comes from extraordinary hard work.25 Importantly, we should communicate to all students that they are on a growth journey, and there is nothing fixed about them, whether it is called a “gift” or a disability.
We are no longer in the fixed-brain era; we are in the brain-growth era. Brain-growth journeys should be celebrated, and we need to replace the outdated ideas and programs that falsely deem certain people more capable than others, especially when those outdated labels become the source of gender and racial inequalities. Everybody is on a growth journey. There is no need to burden children or adults with damaging dichotomous thinking that divides people into those who can and those who cannot.
The idea that women have to work hard to be successful whereas men are naturally brilliant was a notion I myself encountered in high school—not from my math teacher, but from my physics teacher. I remember it clearly. It was at the time when all students took a practice exam, known as a “mock exam,” in preparation for the high-stakes exam all students take at age sixteen in England. Eight students—four girls and four boys—received borderline scores, and I was one of them. At this point my physics teacher decided that all the boys had achieved their scores without trying, but all the girls had achieved their scores from working hard—and so they could never do any better. As a result, he put all the boys in for the higher exam and the girls were entered for the lower exam.
Since I did hardly any work in high school (I was bored a lot of the time from just having to memorize facts) and skated by with minimal effort, I knew he was wrong about the girls having worked harder. I told my mother about the teacher’s decision based on gender. My mum, being the feminist she was, complained to the school, so they grudgingly put me in for the higher exam, telling me it was a stupid risk on my part, because the only grades given for the higher exam were A, B, C, or failing. I said I would take the risk.
Later that summer I received my result—an A. I was fortunate that I had a parent who got the sexist decision the teacher made overturned, and countering his thinking gave me a reason to work especially hard for the exam. The unfortunate impact for me, however, was that I decided I would not go any further in physics. I just did not want any more to do with the man (who was the department chair) or the subject.
Luckily, I did not receive such sexist dissuasion in math, and some of my best and highest-level math teachers and professors were women. I chose to take advanced mathematics instead—I took all the sciences at advanced levels except physics. This is an example of the particularly insidious impact that men like my physics teacher have when they limit pathways based on gender (or race or other characteristics).
