Blog from Stuart Richie How growth mindset shrank Nuanced take on a major psychological hype - has relevance to hard sciences as well: "People can change. That’s the basic idea of “growth mindset”, an idea which is now utterly unavoidable in any educational context: schools train teachers in how to encourage the idea in kids; kids do workshops in how to improve their growth mindset; charities hand out big grants for more research on it; endless books are written about how to harness it in your everyday life. You can see why the idea—which originates with Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck—is so popular. It’s an uplifting message: if you aren’t doing well at some task, most obviously at school, then you can work hard and change your brain to do much better at it. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, where you believe that people are stuck with a particular intelligence level and skill level and can’t ever improve themselves. It’s debatable whether anyone really holds this extreme view, but proponents of mindset argue that people vary in the extent to which they believe in growth." A less nuanced twitter response:
I am beginning to wonder if the entire "we need to take mental health more seriously and accept it" has ultimately led to giving an awful lot of power to a bunch of people who are just quacks with fringe nonsense ideas and the consequences for society will be devestating if we keep listening to these people with no evidence for their nonsense. On the one hand I think its right we accept mental health as something we ought to do better with and accept those with these conditions but I think in doing so we have also stopped looking for the biological causes for the conditions they face and instead telling them they aren't getting better because they aren't fixing themselves, that is even worse than doing nothing.
Education is notorious for buying into fads like this. Growth Mindset was huge, every classroom had to have a display and children and teachers were coached in the right growth mindset language to use. Good teachers have always encouraged growth mindset, they just didn't call it that. Usually there is some sense in these fads but they become overblown. There's currently a complete obsession with ideas from cognitive science like retrieval, spaced learning and managing cognitive overload. To me (obviously, no longer a teacher due to ME) this just seems like fancy new names for things we've always done. As I'm no longer in the classroom, I can look at it from a detached perspective and to me it is clearly all the emperor's new clothes! I feel that if education is going to be so influenced by cognitive science from now on, teacher training should be teaching trainees to be science literate and able to judge the quality of a particular piece of research, otherwise it's just going to be fad after fad. But people make money from these fads so I guess there's a lot of interest in keeping them going. Rant over
