Sacrificing Teaching on the Altar of Talent

By Samuel Duncan

We philosophers are in love with the idea of talent. As a group, philosophers think talent more important for success in our field than do members of pretty much any other academic discipline. Only mathematics really comes close to us but philosophers hold talent to be more important for doing well in our field than do even mathematicians for theirs. I worry very much about this and think our field would be better off if we did not venerate talent in this way. Now I am hardly the first person to worry about the way philosophers think about talent and success in our field; Alison Gopnik and Eric Schwitzgebel among others  have written some excellent pieces on the role our talent worship plays in the woeful lack of diversity in philosophy PhD students as a whole. Here and in the next few posts I want to explore another way that our emphasis on talent hurts philosophy: Belief in talent leads to bad teaching and our belief in talent no doubt makes philosophers worse teachers than we could be. While there’s no easy way to measure this, I’m also fairly certain that it makes philosophers on average worse teachers than our colleagues in less talent obsessed fields like history, political science, and art history. And unlike many other talent obsessed fields like mathematics, computer science, and economics philosophy cannot afford bad teaching.

Why do I say that belief in talent leads to bad teaching? I think there are some simple and fairly obvious reasons for this and some more complicated and subtle ones. In this post I will focus on the more simple and obvious ones. To begin, consider the research on effective teaching; one huge lesson from this is that good teachers don’t put weight on talent as a driver of success while mediocre and bad teachers do. In his “What the Best College Teachers Do” Ken Bain notes that one thing that unites almost all bad and mediocre college teachers (or as he euphemistically puts it “unexceptional” ones) is a belief that student success is largely determined by talent. Good teachers (exceptional ones in Bain’s formulation) don’t think this way. Instead they believe that students can get better through effort and that good teaching can make a crucial difference in helping them do so. Cathy Davis makes the same point in her “The New Education” and notes that a belief that talent is largely fixed is particularly detrimental to student success when teaching students from disadvantaged social groups who tend to be less academically prepared for college work.

More than Bain, Davis, or other work in education though much of my claim that venerating talent leads pretty directly to bad teaching rests on my own experience and common sense. If one believes that raw talent determines success then one has a ready excuse whenever one’s students simply fail to get something. Thinking that talent or lack of talent is the main determining factor in who gets philosophy and who doesn’t is an excellent way to avoid having to ask hard questions about one’s own teaching that are essential to doing it better. If many students can’t quite some tricky bit of philosophy like how important say distinctions between doing and letting happen are, how Thomson’s argument for abortion rights is supposed to work, or just can’t see why one should always switch in the Monty Hall problem then that isn’t because one hasn’t explained them well and needs to think of ways to do better. Instead, it’s because they simply don’t have the necessary talent to understand. The problem here is that teaching is like any other skill: You won’t get better if you don’t work on it and you won’t even think to make the effort of working on it unless you know you’re doing something wrong. Falling back on a belief in talent keeps you from even seeing that you’re doing anything wrong. 

The way that putting too much stock in talent prevents one from becoming a better teacher goes even deeper than this though. If one believes that talent determines success then there simply isn’t any point in trying to become a better teacher since good teaching makes little to no difference. Venerating talent is an ideology that devalues teaching in a very direct way.

Looking back on my early teaching I see just how detrimental to developing one’s teaching skills putting too much stock in talent can be. Now to be clear I never chalked up all of my failures as a teacher to the students’ supposed lack of talent. Sometimes it was so clear that I’d made a hash of explaining some point or other that I simply couldn’t tell myself this comforting lie. However, in cases where I thought I’d explained something well I could and did often blame the students’ lack of talent when they didn’t understand the point. I now realize that in many of these cases I hadn’t actually explained things nearly as well as I’d thought and even when I had done pretty well I could have often done better. Only when I stopped putting much stock in the idea that talent determined success in philosophy did I start to really get significantly better at teaching.

If we believe that talent is what determines success in philosophy, students will also pick up on this in subtle and not so subtle ways, which may be the best reason of all to rethink our idolization of talent. If students think that talent entirely or even largely determines success in a subject then the only sensible response to encountering any real difficulties or experiencing failure in that subject is to simply give up and move on. There is no reason to try harder or try new ways of learning the material and skills in question. I experienced this myself in high school math classes. None of my math teachers ever explicitly said that doing well in math classes or learning how to do advanced math required some sort of innate mathematical talent but it was very clear that most of them believed just that. I internalized this and stopped putting in much effort after mathematics got difficult for me in early high school. Philosophy professors who believe that talent determines success will send the same message in the same subtle ways even if they never openly air this belief. How many students then dropped philosophy the second they had difficulties because they believed that having any difficulties showed that they didn’t have the talent needed to do philosophy well?

This brings me to a final point; philosophy doesn't have the luxury of bad teaching in the way that many other talent obsessed fields do. Mathematics and computer science and indeed all of the so-called STEM fields as well as economics, can afford to lose students through bad teaching because of the importance that administrators and legislators place on these classes and students’ own perception that such classes are a necessity for well paying careers. Students will be forced to take classes in these fields no matter how badly they are taught and how much students might hate them. More than a few students who dislike these subjects and struggle with them will even soldier through to majors in these fields because of their perceived link with well paying jobs. Philosophy cannot afford bad teaching or setting up students for failure in this way though because the students who fail will simply leave and not come back, and they'll warn their friends not to make the mistake they did. And if few students want to take philosophy courses or even if it gets a reputation for failing too many students administrators will pull out the knives and come for philosophy departments and philosophy teaching positions. It’s not just good teaching that we are sacrificing to the idol of talent but quite possibly the future of our discipline as well.

Comments

[Daniel Weltman]

Agreed 100%! One of the ways this is often described in pedagogy discussions is the difference between a "growth mindset" and a "fixed mindset."

Someone with a growth mindset treats their intellectual abilities as things that they can develop through effort. Someone with a fixed mindset treats their intellectual abilities as already determined. Someone with a growth mindset can see challenges as things to be overcome and criticism as opportunities to improve. Someone with a fixed mindset can see challenges as evidence of their inability to succeed and criticism as the same.

So you can imagine why it would be important to get one's students to cultivate a growth mindset - otherwise, they will give up on hard readings and be dispirited by the comments you write on their papers. And it will be hard to help students develop a growth mindset if one believes that the correct mindset to have is a fixed mindset!

[Evan]

I would also add that STEM tutors are widely available compared to philosophy tutors. They can compensate for bad teaching, which also increases or maintains stable enrollment for the field. However, the drawback is that tutoring isn’t as individualized as I’d like because the the time spent and the ratio for tutors and the tutored are significantly skewed. But nevertheless, it’s a benefit that the STEM fields tend to have. Maybe universities should hire (more) philosophy tutors if they can. For example, writing centers can hire philosophy students. I find that when fellow students tend to explain things so much easier. I actually enjoyed gen. chemistry the most out of all my STEM classes. Having formulas to memorize in one or two pages made it easier to do problems.

Philosophy is different because there really is no one formula for writing essays or arguing. Philosophy requires second and even third order thinking. Getting into state of mind takes years. I try my best to provide “cheat sheets” to make *doing* better, efficient, and quicker. Perhaps one activity you can do is make a list of different kinds of claims and have students answer which kind of claim it is or identify which claims are empirical, normative, or logical claim in an article. Teaching students basic differentiation and classification skills can be helpful. In general methodological or intro to philosophy class, worksheets can be beneficial.

[Just Wondering]

I agree with all of this and think it's really good to note. But I've always been curious as to why philosophy focuses so much on innate talent? It's always been so prevalent in the discipline and I've always wondered why, especially given that it also seems (at least to me) obviously false.

[Sam Duncan]

Just Wondering,
This is an excellent question, and I have no idea what the answer is. I'm tempted to say that it's because a lot of analytic philosophers want to ape the culture of math and some of the other "hard" sciences including the nasty bits like a belief in talent and an openly abusive sort of discourse and culture (that last bit probably deserves its own post). But that won't do since for one thing there's the fact that in my experience this cult of talent or genius is hardly limited to analytic or Anglophone philosophy. Things seem to me as bad or worse in European departments and in more continental departments in the U.S. Even if that weren't the case there'd still be the sociological question of why the sciences are like this. I wonder if in philosophy a lot of this can't be traced back to the "great men" approach to philosophy. But again that's just a guess. I think this would be a really interesting topic for a sociologist to take up though.

[Daniel Weltman]

@Just Wondering, like Sam I have no idea and I suspect it's a result of many factors, but I wonder if one of the reasons is that as many people conceive of it, philosophy is entirely an a priori discipline, so in principle you can just sit down and write philosophy one day without having done anything. (And, some of those who may think it's not a priori still think you can do it largely through introspection, via phenomenology or something like this.) Meanwhile lots of other disciplines you at least must research things before you can do anything, so those disciplines accept that "putting in the work" is at least a partial component of success. Notice that the discipline we most naturally look to as being as talent-obsessed as us, math, is another one that some people conceive of as entirely a priori.

Another perhaps relevant factor is that I think there's some research on fixed vs. growth mindsets and variation among them depending on cultural upbringing, and philosophy is one of the least diverse disciplines in academia.

[Tim]

I agree with a lot that is here, and I look forward to further posts on this theme.

One thing I'll mention is the significance of communicating this idea. Some teachers do tell their students philosophy is about innate talent/brilliance/skill. That can be demoralizing for students who don't feel that they are the best among their peer group. I periodically tell my students--either individually or during a class--that I think success in classes is about working hard, and I design my courses to help develop or create skill. At least some students do find that comforting and useful.

[Derek Bowman]

I agree with these points, but I think it's also worth cautioning against the opposite phenomenon. If, in dropping the misplaced ideology of talent, we assume that it's all a matter of effort, then we can over-diagnose poor performance as being due to lack of effort.

I've found I have to increasingly remind myself not only of how much longer I've been doing this than my students, but also of how this mode of thinking, reading, and engagement came much more easily to me than it does to many of them.

(Of course I also have to remind myself how much of my own learning I take for granted. I can still recall the gently delivered but substantively devastating smack down I was given by Ed Halper after making fun of the absurdity of thinking that all change is illusory. 'Well Parmenides does give some arguments for that view, so you must also be able to show where those arguments go wrong.')

[Evan]

Daniel:

I’m average maybe slightly below average when it comes to math. I just know the basics. But one of the best math teachers I had was my algebra teacher in middle school. His way of teaching math and his classroom environment was highly controlled. His class was one of the most therapeutic classes I've taken. I think because he understood how anxiety-inducing math can be for many or even most students. He never allowed us to write as he demonstrated because he thought the human the brain is not supposed to multi-task. He suggested we watch his demonstration first and then copy afterwards. After his demonstration he gave us group exercises while his music played in the background. The atmosphere felt like an art class. It was very calming. I think the way he controlled the classroom environment reduced a lot of anxiety and because we get to work in groups which lessens the alienation students could feel working by themselves. If we had questions about a homework question we’d go over it briefly.

[david]

Here's an interesting question: Is teaching in itself a talent?
Can being a good teacher really be taught, or only up to a point? Perhaps you either have it or you don't?
Are some professors just better at teaching than others, e.g., more engaging, patient, charismatic, etc.? Or perhaps they just enjoy it more?

[Sam Duncan]

Derek,
I think your point is a good one, but I don't think there's a dichotomy where we have to either assign everything to talent or effort. It's obvious that students' backgrounds are going to make a big difference in performance. For instance, students who've taken a proof focused math class are going to start with a huge leg up when it comes to formal logic. More generally students' level of preparation for college will depend a lot on what high school they went to. I've even found at my institution that there's a huge range in how required classes are taught that can make a difference. For instance, I know that some of my colleagues do a pretty serious unit on informal logic in their English comp classes while others just seem to harangue students about not using "I" and the passive voice and the supposed "fact/opinion" distinction. Obviously those lucky enough to take comp with the first sort of teacher are going to come into any philosophy class with a big head start. Students' larger situations is also going to make a difference, which I see a lot at a community college. An 18 year old living at home with no serious work or family commitments whose high school education is still fresh in their minds is going to have an easier time of it than a 40 year old who has forgotten a lot of her high school education who also has a full-time job and two kids at home. But none of these differences is due to talent. In fact, thinking in terms of talent tends to obscure these more subtle factors, which itself leads to bad teaching by not taking them into account.

David,
I guess that some people may well start out with advantages as teachers. But it's also clear to me that most of teaching is a skill that can be learned. Now I do think there are some serious questions about how to teach that skill (it seems much more a matter of knowing how than knowing that) and graduate programs would do well to start asking those questions. But the whole obsession with talent I think prevents that since it leads to the assumption that there's no point in developing that skill.

[Derek Bowman]

Sam,

Yes, I completely agree. I just thought it was worth warning against a form of over-correction that I've sometimes found myself at risk of falling prey to. We can recognize those other factors - indeed we can better recognize them in their particularity - without hiding them under the obfuscating term 'talent.'