The individuals who view themselves as smart and hard-working also seem to be perceived by others as smart and hard-working
A few years ago, when someone from a Top University (pseudonym) in the US wanted to talk to me about education in Nepal, I volunteered to share what I knew. But five or ten minutes into the phone conversation, as the gentleman described his vision and mission, I kept wondering how a person who sounded so superficial got an advanced degree and a professor’s job at a prestigious university.
He said that he was helping establish an organization that would provide (initially for free) course management technology that teachers in developing countries like Nepal can use for creating, sharing and using educational content. That didn’t make much sense. I told him that few, if any, teachers in Nepal create their own course syllabi and assignments and were thus unlikely to be interested in a mechanism for sharing content; nor did many have internet connection and devices to use the new teaching/sharing platform.
It was then that the person introduced himself better: he paused to say that he was a third-year bachelor’s degree student who was helping develop the platform and he wanted to learn more about education on the ground to fine-tune his platform.
Now, I was not so surprised about what he was saying as I was about why I assumed that this person was a professor. Listening to that ambitious young man’s grand ideas, I thought about how someone’s confidence and the scope of their ambition seemed to increase along with the higher perceived prestige of their institution, the political power of their country/society, and their personal identity based on other factors.
The incident forced me to ponder—and that’s what I want to do in this essay—whether and how we can take this dynamic of ambition, and “artificially” and deliberately use it to boost our children’s and students’ confidence. Can we boost their success by enhancing their confidence, like we can add fertilizer to the soil to grow larger fruits and vegetables? Can we fill the confidence and ambition gap between students in private versus students in public institutions, in urban versus rural areas, between richer versus poorer students, and between younger versus older learners?
We all know that social privilege increases confidence and helps develop more ambitious ideas among learners; so does others’ trust and respect for their ideas. But how can we boost confidence when learners know all too well that their school/college, their family/community, and their status is low? So, for instance, how can we help a Nepali young woman studying for bachelor’s degree in Butwal Multiple Campus project the same level of confidence as a young man studying for the same degree in an equally prestigious university in New Delhi?
Whereas a Harvard undergraduate with the same level of knowledge about a subject (let us say economic empowerment of women in developing nations) as a student in the capital of Nigeria is likely to project a “global” vision, his Nigerian counterpart may only have ambition of a national scope. A student studying at a college in the outskirts of Nairobi may only have a “local” ambition, even if he has same knowledge of the subject as his peer in the city or at Harvard. The incident with the super-ambitious student above reminded me that education is not just about what we know; in an odd sense, it also includes what we think we know, what we believe we can do with it, how we want to use it, how others perceive us and the level of our knowledge.
If we refuse to recognize this problem by regarding it as a social reality that cannot change, or with “you know that’s how power and privilege work,” then we can’t change the status quo. But if we try and counter it, we may create a condition whereby young girls and boys from Butwal and Nairobi can speak up about their local realities, experiences, and perspectives at least as confidently as someone who has never set a foot in their society. Otherwise, only the crazy few will dream big.
Labels on our colleges and power and prestige associated with our nationalities will continue to determine what we are worth, no matter how much we know, or how hard we work.
Of course, there will be variations, depending on the personality, gender, class, race/ethnicity, language and national backgrounds. But these factors are now reinforcing the stratification of ambition based on perceived self-worth more often than they counter it.
After the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, there was a discussion about how a person who sets his or her mind to an extremely high goal is more likely to achieve it than someone with lower goals. Is it possible that people who voted for him were influenced by his (oversized) ambition?
When it comes to our children and students, can we teach them to not only dream big but also to talk big? How can we boost their ambition to the right level? As a student and then a teacher, I have seen many learners who seemingly had lower academic caliber but were rather successful, even academically.
Of course, street-smart people are able to apply even their limited education to the world outside. But I was always surprised by individuals who made unbelievable academic progress without being very talented or hard-working. It seemed to me that they “believed” that they could do it, and that dogged confidence helped them achieve greater success.
Those with larger-than-life ambitions about what they want to do in life seem more capable of achieving more. I think that especially in the South Asian context, teachers and parents need to give more attention to this dynamic, deliberately planting its seeds and fertilizing the ground with approval and positive push. We see educated middle-class parents invest time and resource to enhance their children’s confidence, but we don’t use the same strategy in educational.
Individuals who view themselves as smarter than they are or think they work harder than they actually do also seem to be perceived by others as smart and hard-working. Such perception gives them even more leverage. They also seem to spend more time influencing others and marketing their ideas, even when the ideas are rather superficial—like the ones of the young man who I thought was a researcher/scholar of international education. As such, educators and parents should focus more on students’ strengths, look past weaknesses, and highlight what they’re doing right and where they could go next. This may sound like a recipe for disaster, but we need an antidote to the low self-perception among our students regarding who they are in terms of their institutions, society and nationality.
If you compare students in a private school/college and their counterparts in public school/college with similar talents, you will see that the former have greater confidence about their knowledge and skills—with other factors being constant. Now imagine that the first group’s teachers tell them a study has proven that they are doing very well in academics, and that they can get good jobs due to certain factors (such as multilingual skills, more self-directed learning and greater commitment to education). The latter group is likely to perform better rather than worse. It is not okay to lie about such serious issues as inequality and caste, but we should also not desist from using the placebo effect for worthy causes.
Next time someone asks you where you went to college/school, tell them about a prestigious institution and see how they treat you. You can blame me for the dirty trick when you tell them the truth later.
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The author is an assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University (State University of New York)
ghanashyam.sharma@stonybrook.edu
