78Ellington would be growing up in a culture saturated with an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis: the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills - the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns, - and the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.
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79The problem, according to the report, was that children were no longer receiving enough cognitive stimulation in the first three years of life, in part because of the increasing number of single-parent families and working mothers--and so they were arriving in kindergarten unready to learn.
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80For certain skills, the stark calculus behind the cognitive hypothesis--that what matters in developing a skill is starting earlier and practicing more--is entirely valid. If you want to perfect your foul shot, shooting 200 free throws every afternoon is indeed more helpful than shooting 20. If you're in 4th grade, reading 40 books over the summer is going to improve your reading ability more than reading 4.
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81GED Statistics
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82Perry Preschool
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83The ACE Study
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84To Read: Why Zebras don't get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky
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85Hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA)
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86When they sat down with all the data and compared each child's Simon score, poverty history, and allostatic-load reading, they found that the three measures correlated--more time in poverty meant higher allostatic-load numbers and lower scores in Simon. But then came the surprise--When they used statistical techniques to factor out the allostatic load, the poverty effect disappeared completely. It wasn't poverty that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids, it was the stress that went along with it.
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87Researchers have found that there is something uniquely out of balance about the adolescent brain that makes it especially susceptible to bad and impulsive decisions. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has analyzed two separate neurological systems that develop in childhood and early adulthood that together have a profound effect on the lives of adolescents. The problem is, these two systems are not well-aligned (et seq)
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88The first (incentive processing system) makes you more sensation seeking, more emotionally reactive, more attentive to social information. The second cognitive control system allows you to regulate all those things.
The incentive process systems reaches full power in early adolescence while the cognitive control system doesn't finish maturing until you're in your twenties.
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89To Read: Egeland & Sroufe, The Development of the Person
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90MOTIVATION
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91What the coding-speed test really measured, Segal realized, was something more fundamental than clerical skill: the test taker's inclination and ability to force themselves to care about the world's most boring test.
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92What Segal's experiment suggests is that it was actually their first score that was more relevant to their future prospects. That was their equivalent of the coding-test score, the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well something is going to do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive.
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93And yet we know--on some level, at least--that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship--some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves they can.
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94Traditionally, the purpose of a school like Riverdale is not to raise the ceiling on a child's potential achievements in life but to raise the floor, to give him the kinds of connections and credentials that will make it very hard for him ever to fall out of the upper class.
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95When I go into a lot a schools, I see posters that say "dream it and you can achieve it." But we need to get away from positive fantasizing about how we're all going to grow up to be rich and famous, and start thinking about the obstacles that now stand in the way of getting where we want to be.
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96The chess players' memories weren't particularly visual at all. Instead, what they remembered were patterns, vectors, even moods--what Binet described as "a stirring world of sensations, images, movements, passions, and an ever-changing panorama of consciousness"
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97de Groot found that a typical chess player with a rating of 2500 considered about the same moves as a typical player with a rating at 2000. What gave the higher-ranked players the advantage was that the moves they contemplated somehow turned out to be the right ones. Experience had given them the instincts to know intuitively which potential moves to take seriously; they never even considered the less promising options.
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98In the early 20th century, the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper wrote that the nature of scientific thought was such that one could never truly verify scientific theories; the only way to test the validity of any particular theory was to prove it wrong, a process he labeled Falsification.
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99But over the past few years, it has become clear that the US does not so much have a problem of limited and unequal college access; it has a problem of limited and equal college completion.
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100"The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get through failure," Randolph told me. "And in most highly academic environments in the US, no one fails at anything."
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101The conservative author Charles Murray argued in his 2018 book "Real Education" that the true crisis in American higher education is not that too few young Americans are getting a college education. It is that too many are. Because of Americans' natural tendency toward "educational romanticizing" Murray wrote, we push students to go to college who are simply not smart enough to be there. High school guidance counselors and college admissions officers, lost in a "fog of wishful thinking, euphemisms, and well-intentioned egalitarianism" encourage low IQ, low-income students to attend colleges that are too intellectually demanding. When these students discover that they don't possess the intelligence necessary to do the work, they drop out.
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102In a 2006 paper, Roderick identified as a critical component of college success "Noncognitive academic skills" including "study skills, work habits, time management, help-seeking behavior, and social/academic problem-solving skills."
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103And so the traditional American high school was never intended to be a place where students would learn how to think deeply or develop internal motivation or persevere when faced with difficulty--all the skills needed to persist in college. Instead, it was a place where for the most part, students were rewarded for just showing up and staying awake.
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