Recently, I listened to an interview on the radio with a Psychology Professor named Jim Stigler at UCLA.
He was talking about how he’d watched anxiously as a fourth grader in a Japanese math classroom struggled at the front of the class to solve a problem.
Maybe you didn’t know this, but I used to be a high school chemistry teacher. So although I don’t teach high school any longer, I’m still keenly interested in pedagogy (the study of teaching), and my ears always perk up when I hear things that relate to teaching, mental training, and that sort of thing, as I think those topics are applicable to agility.
Anyway, this guy was talking about how the teacher had called on a student who obviously DIDN’T know the answer to the problem at hand. Now, as a teacher, I always tried to choose a student who I was pretty sure knew the answer 🙂 But in this case, the student didn’t know the answer, and was up at the front of the room for a LONG time, getting the problem WRONG, over and over again. Finally, they solved the problem, and the class applauded.
To make a long story short, the point of the article was really that in the mind of this Professor, and according to his research, it seems that Eastern cultures have really promoted the idea that intellectual struggle is a GOOD thing, that the process of struggling intellectually is what MAKES you intellectually strong. He contrasts that to the prevailing notion in Western cultures, that intellectual ability is something innate, something you either have or don’t have.
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