As early as kindergarten, there is something that happens. It's so subtle that we don't even realize the effects of it until it's so far down the road that it leaves a person feeling resigned to their fate.
One day, a kid notices that their friend is in a different reading group than them. Or that they're in a different math class. Eventually, both kids come to a realization that all kids do, which is one is in the "smart" group and one is in the "dumb" group. Suddenly, there's this wall that has been steadily building up between them that none of them saw coming and that is beyond their power to tear down.
The smart kids become the honor students. They're the ones that become used to hearing about their potential because they happened to have picked up on something a little faster than the other kids did and this makes them special. Like anybody else would, they cling desperately to this idea that they are special because they're lucky to be born that way. They believe that they will always be special simply because they are.
And the other kids? They're not called special. They're not called dumb, but a nasty thought is constantly creeping around telling them that being normal - being average - is the same thing as dumb. By constantly being told that they're just average students, they end up stuck where they are because they think this is where they're supposed to be. To them, this is as good as they're going to get.
Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, wrote an acclaimed book called Mindset: the New Psychology of Success that discusses two distinct mindsets in regards to intelligence, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A person with a fixed mindset assumes that traits like intelligence are set at birth and are something as unchangeable as a person's height or ethnicity. A growth mindset, which Dweck promotes, is the mind of a person that thrives on challenges to grow and believes in learning from failure.
I have seen many people - honors students and otherwise - fall prey to a fixed mindset.
In the case of a conventionally smart person with a fixed mindset, they were usually honors students growing up that didn't have to work hard for their grades or for anything really simply because of who they were and who people knew them to be. In short, they were used to being the big fish in a little pond. The idea of being average is terrifying and many former honors students fall victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Being unable to cope with failure, they decide that they've finally peaked. They've decided that this is as good as it gets.
But for some people, it happens earlier than that. During my high school years, something seemed to happen every year. People were disappearing from the class of 2015, but it wasn't because of something mystical. According to my teachers, a lot of them had dropped out - some even right before graduation. But I had known most of these people since elementary school and I knew in the back of my mind that there was a reason that was hard to explain. At some point, they had felt like the school system had given up on them so they gave up on it in return.
The problem doesn't come from telling kids that they're special. It comes from not telling them that like any talent, it must be cultivated to grow.
To those who read this, you're more than what they told you that you were.
