writepath

[writepath]

Thirty-two

The problem with Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, is that it omits a great moral issue – the racialisation of people that is the legacy of slavery and colonialism.  Haidt does not see the USA that, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates sees: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”  The book would have it that the most relevant moral question nowadays is why some people vote Republican and why others vote Democrat.

It was recommended to me by teachers on Twitter who consider themselves ‘traditional’ in their teaching approach.  I was trying to critique the prominence they gave the Arnoldian curriculum; the rebuttal invoked Haidt and seemed to suggest we could move beyond traditional/progressive and left/right divides. The question was put: have you read Jonathan Haidt on how focusing on what we have in common - our common heritage - unites us? Not yet, I said. Thanks for the tip.

But the book is problematic. This is due to Haidt’s blindness to persistent structural racism.  In quoting Rodney King (Can we all get along?), he paints a picture of all of us, equal in the eyes of the law, stuck here together for a while. And therefore we should try to work things out.  It is as if the brutality demonstrated by the LAPD in 1992 is squarely in ‘the past’ – we are more enlightened now, pats on the back all round.  

In February 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed.  The Righteous Mind came out the following month. In 2013, when Trayvon’s killer was acquitted, the Black Lives Matter movement began.  The Righteous Mind’s nod to Rodney King’s plea for ‘getting along’ buries the truth that the structural racism that led to his brutal beating, and protected the perpetrators, remains real.  

Haidt writes, “… most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines.”

And with that, Americans who share the concerns of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Charles Mills, bell hooks or Michelle Alexander are rendered irrelevant, invisible.  Haidt, the moral psychologist, has side-stepped a huge moral question: why does structural racism prevail? And what are the psychological processes at work in the people who believe they are white refusing to take steps towards social justice?

Why doesn’t an eminent social scientist know what’s going on?

Could it be due to what Michelle Alexander calls ‘the spell of a callous colorblindness’?  

Could it be what Achille Mbembe calls ‘delirium’?

“(The delirium) results, first, from the fact that the Black Man is the one (or the thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands nothing, and, above all, when one wishes to understand nothing.”

Haidt, a champion of science, has somehow failed to see the racial divide, how the USA is different for people racialised as black.  He wants to move on from the bad old days of the 1970s, when progressive ideals like racial equality were seen by many academics as more important than the values of science, more important than the truth itself.

But, in looking at Rodney King and seeing nothing, Haidt’s behaviour provides empirical evidence for Charles Mills’ description of reality:

“[A]s a general rule . . . white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years … And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed by the terms of Racial Contract, which require a certain schedule of structured blindness and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity.”

I don’t live in the USA.  I’m not a believer in the American Dream, a Dreamer as Coates says. But I am racialised as white and I’m becoming more conscious, through reading, of my privileges.  The Righteous Mind is smoothly and wittily written and Haidt has many psychological insights to share.  The problem is that, through the human experience it neglects, it falls woefully short of a true account of our most pressing moral failings.

Call it delirium, call it a spell, blindness or self-deception, we need to wake up and honestly struggle to put wrongs right.

“The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

The embarrassing aspect of Haidt’s thesis is that he hasn’t noticed how little has changed since 1965, when James Baldwin wrote:

“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country--until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.”      

(Between the World and Me)

(The Racial Contract)

(Critique of Black Reason)

(The Righteous Mind)

[writepath]

Thirty-one

To See the World in a Grain of Coltan

In a theatre near London’s Leicester Square, comedian Stewart Lee scolded the audience, the so-called metropolitan liberal elite, for blithely buying phones containing conflict minerals like coltan. We laughed at the absurdity, but this is not fiction. Frequently our behaviour is at odds with our values. Individualism and the unthinking consumerism it begets are doing damage. On reflection, we need to see - indeed feel - the interconnectedness of the global economy, because only then will we act together to overhaul it. ‘Business as usual’ is unethical and therefore unacceptable. A new and honest narrative about the true cost of our petrol and phones is needed if we are to live the values we claim to hold. If we are not free to buy products that are morally untainted, to what extent are we really free?

Individualism underpins much of our philosophy in the West. Much of what we consume is tainted, because concern for profit trumps regard for other people. To change this, activism and cooperation will be needed. In his recent book Blood Oil, Leif Wenar explains how products like petrol are some of the last remnants of the ‘might makes right’ political economy. It doesn’t matter how brutally oppressive you are: if you can build a fence around an oil well, secure it (and the pipeline) with guns, you can legally sell the ‘black gold’ on the global market. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Columbia, this applies to the mining of coltan – a mineral needed for phone capacitors. In this context, Leif Wenar outlines the ethical imperative that in a true democracy the people, not militias or cartels, should have control over their natural resources.

This material history of the stuff we buy is veiled by politicians who are in thrall to Gross Domestic Product. Thanks to the insight of mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, we can avoid this fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which mistakes wealth for the public good. Economic theory may be used to justify the system, but we know that our petrol consumption feeds dictatorships and we hold products that were clawed from the earth by the bare hands of exploited children. While our material wealth all-too-often depends on the poverty of others, Leif Wenar’s counsel is not one of despair. Indeed, he reminds us that consumer activism and collective action were instrumental in ending the injustices of the past.

We are encouraged by our governments to be individualistic. Buying the latest phone and myriad similar purchases – these acts are essential to our economies. But according to psychologists, we might be happier if we spent less on objects and more on experiences – this is because experiences connect us with other people, and it is in our relationships that we tend to find happiness. If we told a more honest and sympathetic story about the people at the other end of the iPhone supply chain, we might wish to improve that relationship.

Pressured by the politics of Thatcher, Reagan and their progeny, many of us have lost touch with just how interconnected we are. We are mistaken if we believe it is a Hobbesian world in which all things are individual, unique and singular. Dualistic thinking is also misguided: developed countries distinct from those still developing; Us versus Them; you are either with us or against us. The Tang-dynasty Chinese Buddhist philosopher Fazang captured our reality more accurately:

All is one, because all are the same in lacking an individual nature; one is all, because cause and effect follow one another endlessly.

We can see this in commerce and trade, and in the very objects we buy. Our smartphones encapsulate not only coltan, but also this truth of interconnectedness. The phone is a phone because of each of the parts that make it up (‘all is one’), and the coltan capacitor is what it is because it is part of the phone (‘one is all’). Things are relational. All stuff is what it is due to context, contingent on other stuff.

Similarly, we can ask the question ‘Who am I?’ I’m a father, husband, brother, taxpayer, teacher and consumer. Each of these attributes is relational: I’m a father because I have a son; I’m a consumer because I have an income with which to buy goods produced by others. These things I am related to are also defined by me. People are mining the coltan under brutal conditions, because I (and millions of others) demand iPhones.

Philosopher Bryan W. Van Norden humorously uses gravity to show there is even a relation between his pet dog and Charon, the largest of the moons of Pluto. But bring human agency into these relations and we get to the serious point that our consumerism has a material impact on the lives of other people.

History teaches us that consumer activism can change these structures. The dynamics are as pertinent today as they were during the transatlantic slave trade. In Fazang’s terms, cause and effect followed one another endlessly when West Africans were enslaved by Europeans – relational repercussions connected millions of others to the evil of the slave ships and the cotton fields. Products like sugar became morally tainted. We should view modern goods like petrol and coltan in a similar way. We should acknowledge the connection. Leif Wenar writes about how people in Britain came to face their consumer complicity in the enslavement of people from West Africa:

The richest members of the British parliament owned slave plantations, and the Church of England had such extensive holdings that the Church’s brand (burnt into the slaves’ chests) was recognized on every Caribbean island. The leaders of the first modern consumer boycott—the boycott against slave sugar—tried to punch through their day’s “business as usual” by connecting consumers mentally to the slaves.

In 1791, the campaigner William Fox pulled no punches in his persuasion. He felt people should really sense the repercussions of their consumption. If we purchase the commodity, he said, we participate in the crime. He added, ‘In every pound of sugar used … we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.’

Today, we need to connect mentally with the people who suffer to bring products we desire to market. It is a failure of the imagination to not see that cheap, plentiful supply is often related to the subjugation of others. Only when we feel the connection will we act together. Our economies still run on tainted products. And as consumers, we feel trapped. Our wish to live ethically is in tension with the practical necessity of sustaining our life-styles. Very often, Wenar reminds us, we are ‘bringing home products made with resources forcibly taken from some of the most violated people in the world.’

In terms of our values, individualistic consumerism is a luxury we cannot afford. Even if the price of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance can be borne, the injustice and misery at the other end of the supply chain is indefensible. The public good, indeed the global good, should be on our minds. Thinkers like Lee, Van Norden and Wenar are encouraging us to examine our lives and the stuff we fill them with. When our material possessions depend on the brutalisation of others, we have a stark choice: business as usual or build new relationships. For just as people abroad should have democratic control of their resources, so we should be free to buy blood-free phones.

References

Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Bryan W. Van Norden, Foreword by Jay L. Garfield, Taking Back Philosophy, A Multicultural Manifesto, Columbia University Press, 2017.

[writepath]

Thirty

The news I’m digesting is that dietary fat is not the cause of obesity.  Rather, the damage is done by sugars and starches.  Sucrose and fructose are especially bad because they boost insulin levels and overload the liver.  Stimulating insulin and elevating blood sugar, they lead to coronary heart disease, diabetes and possibly cancer.  Obesity is neither caused by overeating, nor by laziness.  Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller.  Fattening is due to an imbalance in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue and fat metabolism.  Insulin is the primary regulator: when it’s up, we accumulate fat (and when it’s down, we use fat from our fat tissue for fuel).  Carbohydrates stimulate insulin secretion and make us fatter.  As we accumulate fat, we get hungrier and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.

There are numerous implications here, but one is that it is ignorant and cruel to tell overweight people to eat less and exercise more.

(I’ve been reading The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes)

[writepath]

Twenty Nine

Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain: Annual Conference 2016

I’m a primary school teacher and this was my first time attending the pesgb annual conference.  I’m very grateful for the Teacher Bursary that made it possible - I’d recommend the experience to all teachers.

The conference was hard work. Work that I haven’t done in ages, if ever.  The listening and thinking required was exhausting!  The company and the craic, however, were mighty. And because of the content of the papers and the collegiality of pesgb folk, I enjoyed the experience immensely.

 To open with Meira Levinson’s work on normative case studies and action-guiding theory was a wonderful welcome to those of us working within the schooling machine.  When the stipulations of a contract clash with personal ethics, time and space for reflection and dialogue are essential.  And Charles Mills, Rudolf Rocker and Noam Chomsky being mentioned in the response signalled that the society was not limited to merely echoing Plato in its consideration of philosophical questions.

 Before attending the conference, I came across (via teacher Tait Coles @totallywired77) a review of Gert Biesta’s work.  Now, as a primary school teacher, I love a good Venn Diagram.  And Biesta’s education trinity of Qualification, Socialisation and Subjectification was a useful framework for considering many ideas presented at the conference.  Biesta argues for an education that keeps these three dimensions in balance (In the shadow of Pisa, the emphasis on Qualification is warping the student experience.).  What knowledge and skills do I need? Who am I? How am I?

 The other lens I was looking through was that of education as Formation: Biesta argues that models of ‘learning’ and ‘development’ don’t capture the full human experience of education. In this light, I was most struck by presentations from Áine Mahon (Moral Education and Literature) and Darren Chetty (‘White Discomfort’).  I’m told Wittgenstein was fond of Goethe’s saying, “In the beginning was the deed.” These two presentations made me reflect on what it’s like to be a subject in a world we share with others who are different to us and who are capable of their own actions.  We become who we are and how we are through action, that is through communicating with others and witnessing how they take up our cues and respond.  And like Dewey said, we are affected by social institutions and we have a share in shaping them.

 Áine Mahon spoke about the approach of Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum and its limitations: while we can gain moral insights from the traditional literary canon, literature can do more than this – it can push us to respond more viscerally, more empathically to the ‘other’. Literature can be philosophy.  Áine described “… the realistic spirit … a spirit of committed and keenly-felt exposure.” This is vital for enquiry.  Her paper talks about how if what we communicate does not fully connect with others then the moral life is not an objective reality to be easily matched by subjective speech.  The moral life is an ongoing task fully dependent on our modes of response.  I took this to mean that if I wish to be a moral subject, I must make an effort to take up the beginnings of others and stay in the conversation despite the tension and anxiety that may result.

 Darren Chetty’s paper on Whiteness and the Philosophy for Children movement connected with a longstanding question for me: what does it mean to be a white middle-class man teaching a multi-ethnic, multicultural class of primary school children?  Darren contrasted the intention of the Philosophy for Children approach to create communities of enquiry with three examples of ‘white discomfort’ limiting or blocking that enquiry when it came to questions of race and inclusion.  One example included a senior white male academic derailing a discussion about racism by seeming to assert that racism had ended sometime soon after the 1980s and that his university was entirely free of such prejudice.  The origins of the Philosophy for Children movement lie in Matthew Lipman’s dissatisfaction with what he saw as the inarticulateness and irrationality of students in the 1960s.  ‘White discomfort’ can evidently provoke these same errors 50 years later, even in those with philosophical training.  The point being: if we adults cannot dwell with difficulty and enter dialogue in a spirit of keenly-felt exposure, what does that mean for the diverse perspectives of children in the classroom and their teacher (who holds the power to control the conversation)?  

 In the Q and A, two respondents expressed surprise that A) a senior academic had behaved in such a way and B) the others present had allowed such a derailment of the discussion to occur. I was left wondering: Is it not a bit too easy for us to imagine that we (white people present) would have acted with more courage?  Are the white people in this example so very different from the white people who make up the majority of the pesgb, for example?  

 More radically, it was also pointed out in the Q and A that white people have status and privilege to lose by taking action to promote equality.  As Zeus Leonardo says, for many it’s a jarring mental state of wanting racial justice but being unable (or unwilling) to respond radically and take action e.g. by publicly challenging a senior white male philosopher or opening up to feelings of guilt about colluding with white privilege.  It is much easier to agree, express solidarity with the race equality cause and wish the project well.

 I’m saying that I didn’t say what I should have said.  But the world is not static. That was not my one chance get a handle on the dynamics of ‘white discomfort’ and how it obstructs understanding that people of colour can experience society very differently to me.  It’s an ongoing effort to listen and think – to resist platitudes and rushing to find commonality. To stay with the conversation.

 I feel that the conference has renewed my motivation to avoid ‘easy’ and stay with hard conversations despite the anxiety and tension they may bring.  The emphasis that action-guiding theory puts on teacher judgement is crucial here.  If I don’t engage in genuine dialogue, how can I make good choices?  If I don’t think about normative case studies and read about the experiences of others, how can I expect to be prepared for dilemmas and challenges down the road?

[writepath]

Bibliography

Trivium 21c by @surrealanarchy

What if everything you knew about education was wrong? David Didau

Twitter convo with @chemistrypoet 

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Twenty Seven

Fela Kuti

 On the 15th of October 1938 a boy was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria.  Abeokuta is north of Lagos and near the banks of the Ogun River.

 Fela’s mother was an Activist and his father was a Protestant Minister.

 (Photo: Early Christian Ministers in the Methodist Church, Abeokuta, Nigeria 1920's)

 Fela went to a Christian school; he sang in the choir at the age of nine.  

 He loved to use song to express himself and in 1958 he travelled to London and began studying at the Trinity College of Music.

 He fused two genres of music: Jazz and Highlife. On a trip to Ghana in 1967, he named it Afrobeat.

 The Funk music of James Brown was a big influence too.  In 1969, Fela took his band to the United States of America.  

 (Photo: James Brown)

 Here he learned more about the Black Power movement.  Fela made connections between the struggle for social justice in the USA and the Pan-African vision of people like his mother and Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence from Britain in 1957.

 (Photo: Martin Luther King Jr. & Malcom X

Black Power)

 In the 1970s, Fela made music that criticised the actions of the military government in Nigeria.  His 1977 album Zombie powerfully attacked the violent methods of the military rulers; it was a huge hit.  The rulers were angered.

 (Photo: Zombie (1977) by Fela Kuti and Africa 70)

 Soldiers were sent to beat Fela and his friends and family. Funmilayo, his mother, was murdered by the soldiers.

 (Photo: Funmilayo Ransome Kuti (Fela Kuti’s mother)

(25 October 1900 Abeokuta, Nigeria - 13 April 1978 Lagos, Nigeria))

 Fela Kuti did not stop. His response was to bring his mother’s coffin to the house of the military ruler. He continued to write songs which pointed to injustice and which called for freedom.  He said, “With my music, I create change…I am using my music as a weapon.”

 Abeokuta photo https://www.pinterest.com/pin/165648092518585954/

[writepath]

Twenty Six

Being a 21st Century Teacher

(Picademy application)

I’m coming at this via an interest in language; in particular the relationship between language and social justice.

Language is a practice, something that we do. And this practice delineates what can be said, what can be seen, what can be thought, what can be known and what can be done.  The concern is that if you are not fully part of this practice then you might be vulnerable to manipulation or exclusion.

So teaching is all about giving children a command of language.  And I mean language in its widest sense.  From the written word or formula to the language of art or the language of film, children will need language skills to fully engage with the world.


“To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it.”


Paulo Freire

Being a 21st century teacher requires giving children the language tools to name the world of technology too, and to change it if they see fit.

Code-Switching: The ability to adapt, linguistically, to the task at hand

We know how important reading, writing, speaking and listening are to children’s chances of carving out a productive niche in the world.

And we know how code-switching between slang and standard English is a vital skill.

Likewise children should all have equal access to the language of computer programming.  This language builds the apps and games which children ‘consume’ and it would be an injustice if we did not give them access to that language.  We teach children that reading widely will make them good writers.  We must give them the same power over technology.

To avoid passivity and become active citizens, children will need the grammar and vocabulary to deal with the world on equal terms.

To resist, for example, the manipulation and exploitation of advertisers, children will need to ‘name’ the methods employed to make them docile, to make them consume.

“It’s a really important culture, it’s important to have the geek community as a whole think about its responsibility and what it can do. We need various alternative voices pushing back on conventional government sometimes.”


Tim Berners-Lee

By giving children command over these languages, including computer code, we will empower them to push back.

  >>> t.reset()

  >>> for x in range(1, 9):

         t.forward(100)

         t.left(225)

A video featuring some stars of pedagogy and technology.

[writepath]

Twenty Five

HipHopEd July 2013

I've been thinking about Jeffrey's presentation, particularly the rap battle performance to other students and staff that was shut down by the Head.  Like Darren said, we walk this line of challenging the system while at the same time surviving and working within it.  And here was Jeffrey and his students challenging notions of which forms of creative expression are admissible in a school assembly - not to be troublemakers, but just because the students' authentic, thoughtfully crafted material happened to be in a non-standard medium. Echoing the teacher voice in one Power to the Pupils song, Jeffrey's Head-teacher effectively said 'That's not appropriate'.

In Did I hear you write? Michael Rosen makes the case for children’s oral language and culture being respected and honoured in school.  Rather then get too fussy too early about establishing the conventions of the written-mode, show how the students’ oral mode is easily written down in free verse so that it paints a graphic and emotional picture, and not a dead, reported one.  This approach produces better art AND says to the students: What you already know and say is important – this school respects your voice, your lived experience.  And in the case of Jeffrey’s students, they brought Hip Hop to the table themselves and used the rap battle to express their ideas, sparked by the text they were reading in class.  They received encouragement and praise from their teacher but the institution implicitly told them: your culture doesn’t matter.

Of course mastery of Standard English and formal modes of expression are vital skills in navigating the world; it’s criminal for teachers to ignore this.  The crime the Head committed was what Sam Seidel calls identity abuse, that is telling them that ONLY formal modes of expression are of value.  So, how do we stand up to people who are selling the lie that children have an either/or choice to make: slang or Standard English, home culture or school culture?

One suggestion from the HipHopEd group (sorry, I forget who) was encouraging and supporting the students in writing a letter to the Head explaining their creative process and where they were coming from.  This would implicitly communicate: ‘we have multiple identities – we can rap and we can write formally too – we appreciate the value of both’.

  There is a parallel here between Hip Hop Educators trying to work within the system while challenging it, and students trying to stay engaged with school-based learning while demanding that their voices be heard and respected.

Relevant to this is Michael Rosen’s dialogue with critics who try to shut him out of the club and say his work is ‘not poetry’.  Two of Rosen’s identities are ‘Oxford English Graduate’ and ‘Champion of Children’s Voices’ and so, in defence of oral traditions and claiming poetry for everyone, he quotes WH Auden and John Garrett’s 1935 essay: The Poet’s Tongue. 

“Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best; ‘memorable speech.’ That is to say, it must move our emotions or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is memorable, and the stimulus is the audible spoken word and cadence, to which in all its power of suggestion and incantation we must surrender, as we do when talking to an intimate friend …”

What might Jeffrey’s Head-teacher make of this?

Sam Seidel writes about Hip Hop High in Minnesota.  They have a showcase called a Pick Me Up – in the context of school a student can grab a microphone, rap and dance across a stage followed by a spotlight, while being cheered on by fellow students and staff. 

This spotlight is literal and figurative – it plays a vital role. Students who have endured racism, classism, sexism, ageism and homophobia are told that their lives do matter. 

Jeffrey’s students moved the crowd. It’s not so important whether people call it poetry or Hip Hop.  They created something authentic and exciting.  To spit lyrics straight from the heart is surely what counts most of all.

    More HipHopEd:

  @unseenflirt

@rapclassroom

@poetcurious

@rlj1981

@rapgenius

@chrisemdin

[writepath]

Twenty Four

Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset

Prof Carol Dweck @ RSA Monday 8th July 2013

Notes

Babies explore, try and try again; they don't lack resilience or motivation.

(cue cute baby photos followed by a photoshopped baby with bored expression, cigarette and bandana)

Somewhere along the way, many children lose their learning zeal.

Those with a Fixed Mindset are often 'afraid to look dumb'.

Here is the binary (although Dweck accepts these describe extremes on a continuum):

Look smart at all costs OR Learn at all costs

It will come naturally OR I need to put in work

Hide mistakes OR Confront deficiencies

How do you repair your self-esteem?

Look at people who messed up worse than you and seek solace there OR Learn from the setback, address the negatives and 'take the positives'

PRAISE THE PROCESS - THAT'S WHAT WORKS

"You are doing really well at this; it's great the way you keep looking for a different approach that might be even more effective."

Dinner table chat suggestion:

Who had a fabulous struggle today?

(We want Hard Struggle to be synonymous with: worthwhile, fun, valuable, engaging etc.)

The power of 'yet'.

Low attainment gets graded 'Not there yet' rather than a number or letter that signifies failure.

Adapting it to make it culturally relevant:

Stephanie Fryberg brought the Mindset approach to the Native American community in which she grew up. The students weren't motivated by 'getting smarter' but when it was re-framed as 'work hard so you can serve your community better' the Growth Mindset was increasingly adopted and grades improved.

Female and minority representation in academia:

Andrei Cimpian and colleagues found that the more a discipline holds the view of innate talent being vital to success, the fewer women and people from minoritised groups there will be in that field.

Dweck and two colleagues of Indian descent conducted a study that compared parental attitudes in the US and India. In contrast to the US, the majority of parents in India believe every baby, regardless of caste, has the potential to be a highly intelligent adult.

In terms of teaching the Growth Mindset, one exercise Dweck mentioned was asking students to write a motivational letter to a friend who is really struggling with something.

The book.