The Pursuit of Excellence Through Education

Michel Ferrari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135670962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Although specific definitions may change over time, few goals are considered more important to education than the pursuit of academic excellence. There are many different viewpoints on this issue today among educational psychologists and other social scientists. One particularly glaring fault line in the debate divides those who emphasize developing individual learning and those who focus on promoting cultural and institutional reform. These two perspectives are rarely addressed in a single volume. In this book, well-known theorists and researchers present a range of perspectives on how to promote excellence in education. This allows those who stress transformation of educational practice and those who emphasize individual abilities to speak to each, and invites readers to jointly consider the arguments for both positions, or for some synthesis of the two. The point is to consider how these two divergent viewpoints can be reconciled, or simply coordinated, in an effort to benefit both students and society at large. The main thesis is that excellence can be fostered without sacrificing equity, both of which are fundamental tenets of a democratic education. The issues addressed in this book have implications and relevance for school reform efforts and across the fields of educational psychology, curriculum and instruction, philosophy of education, and educational leadership. The volume provides a unique source for students and teachers in various disciplines who want to gain a broader and more integrated view of the nature and development of excellence through education.

Part I

THE INDIVIDUAL PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

Chapter 1

Learning From Extraordinary Minds

Howard Gardner

Harvard Graduate School of Education

FIVE QUESTIONS

I have spent much of the last decade studying individuals who would be considered extraordinary by almost any definition. Included in my sample are outstanding scientists (Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud); artists (Pablo Picasso, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Martha Graham) and political and religious leaders (Pope John XXIII, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; cf. Gardner, 1993a, 1995, 1997, 1999). As a long-time enthusiast of biography and history, I have enjoyed my studies; they are their own reward. Yet any scholar who devotes a substantial part of his career to such an undertaking should be prepared to answer five questions:

1. How do you conceptualize extraordinariness?

2. How do you study it?

3. What discoveries have you made?

4. How do you justify this line of work?

5. What broader lessons might be learned from this work?

CONCEPTUALIZING EXTRAORDINARINESS

There are a number of ways in which one can determine who is extraordinary. One can select individuals on the basis of a quantitative measure, for example, number of home runs hit, number of best sellers. One can rely on the decisions of informed individuals, for example, those who select the winners of the Nobel or Pulitzer Prizes. One can consider a number of different variables (e.g., fame, influence on other persons or on neighboring domains) and make the decision on a weighted multifactorial basis.

My approach grows out of the conceptualization of creativity proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1996). In Csikszentmihalyi’s formulation, one does not ask “Who is creative?” or “What is creativity?” Instead one takes into account three distinct vantage points and the interactions among them. The vantage points are the individual person, with his or her talents, interests, ambitions; the domain or cultural sphere within which the person works; and the field or social system that renders judgment about merit. Only a person working in a domain whose works are considered to be creative by the field—either immediately or in the long run—merits the label “creative.”

On the basis of this approach, a convenient measure of extraordinariness emerges. Any person who succeeds in altering a domain in a significant way emerges as extraordinary. Einstein altered physics, Picasso altered painting, Martin Luther King, Jr. altered the practice of protest politics in the United States. Of course, observers may not agree on whether, or to what extent, a domain has been altered; in any systematic study, one wants reasonable consensus that the individual(s) in question has in fact affected the domain. This is particularly important if the individual is controversial; I have restricted my focus to individuals whose effects on the domain would not be questioned by knowledgeable observers.

The concept of domain merits comment. Following Feldman and his colleagues (Feldman, 1986; Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gardner, 1994), I view a domain as any discipline or craft within a culture where it proves possible to order individuals in terms of expertise. Thus chess, gardening, atomic physics, playing the piano, or writing a scholarly paper are all domains in Western society. Domains typically have a characteristic symbol system (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Gardner, 1997). One can define domains narrowly (playing classical music on the piano) or more broadly (musical performance). I have sampled a range of domains in my work: In general individuals fall into the three categories of scientist, artist, and political/religious leader.

As one approaches the phenomenon of extraordinariness, I find it useful to observe the rough-and-ready taxonomy of roles presented here.

Adults

Expert. An expert is an individual who performs at the top level of his/her domain but makes no effort to alter the domain. Strictly speaking, such a person should not be deemed extraordinary.

Creator. A creator is an individual who fashions a new domain or significantly alters the practices or forms of an existing domain.

Genius. A genius is a creative individual who discovers a significant new truth about the world. Scientists typically discover truths about the external world; artists discover truths about the world of human experience.

Direct Leader. A direct leader is an individual who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors of a significant number of individuals. Direct leaders achieve their effects through stories that they tell to their audiences.

Indirect Leader. An indirect leader is an individual who significantly affects others through the creation of some kind of symbolic object, like a scientific theory or a work of art. These symbolic objects ultimately affect work in the domain, as well as the way in which that work is carried out. Creators are typically indirect leaders.

Young Persons

A Talented or Gifted Person. This is an individual who possesses an ability, manifest early in life and possibly inborn, that allows rapid mastery of a domain. Talented individuals may or may not elect to follow the path of creativity.

Prodigy. A prodigy is an individual with a precocious talent or gift.

Note that extraordinary individuals may use their talents for benign, malevolent, or neutral purposes.

THE STUDY OF EXTRAORDINARINESS

Although the study of extraordinariness (or excellence or genius) occupies only a small chapter in the history of psychology, in fact most schools of psychology have devoted some attention to this topic. Psychoanalysts, for example, have emphasized the importance of early family experience and kinds of defenses and sublimations involved in extraordinary output (Freud, 1958; Greenacre, 1959; Rank, 1932). Eschewing internal variables, behaviorists have investigated the patterns of reward for certain kinds of output (Skinner, 1953). Some authorities have argued that extra-ordinariness is more likely to emerge in certain personalities and temperaments (Eysenck, 1995) or as a result of certain intrinsic motivational states (Amabile, 1996). Cognitivists have questioned whether extraordinary individuals exhibit any special mental processes; in their view, those judged extraordinary are simply able to reorganize universal attentional and problem-solving capacities in particularly effective ways (Perkins, 1981; Simon, 1979).

Given my focus on extraordinary individuals, I have been especially influenced by two contrasting approaches. On the one hand, there is the nomothetic approach embraced by Dean Keith Simonton (1990, 1994) and Colin Martindale (1990). This approach features the statement of a hypothesis or the posing of a question about extraordinariness and the securing of quantitative data relevant to that question. So, for example, if one wants to know whether first-born individuals are more likely than their siblings to be extraordinary, one plows exhaustively through the relevant encyclopedias and biographies for information on birth order. In skilled and resourceful hands, the nomothetic approach can secure an approximate answer to a wide range of questions of interest to social scientists. (Note, however, that the methods by which the data are selected and analyzed may still be a subject of controversy.)

The contrasting approach is the idiographic approach favored by Howard Gruber (1981) and his colleagues (Wallace & Gruber, 1990). Inspired by humanistic and biographical studies, the researcher in this tradition focuses on a single subject and attempts to secure as much information as possible about the personality, working habits, and mental processes of the subject. The idiographic worker differs from the humanistic scholar in his positing and testing of informal models of how the individual person proceeds in his or her work. (Note, however, that such models do not arise directly from the data; they involve considerable constructive efforts on the part of the investigator.) Among recent examples of work in this tradition are studies by Arnheim (1962), Holmes (1985), Holton (1996), and Miller (1986).

Put succinctly, in my work I begin with the idiographic but proceed toward the nomothetic. That is, I begin with careful case studies of individuals, selected because they are extraordinary in a certain way (e.g., all are 20th-century artists who have contributed to modernism). Poring over autobiographies, biographies, secondary sources, and original manuscripts, I attempt to secure as much information as I can about their personality, developmental history, and manner of working within their chosen domain. Proceeding beyond the practices of the idiographic scholar, I then compare the subjects in my sample. In the manner of a more nomothetically oriented scholar, I search for patterns that apparently characterize all of the subjects (e.g., moving during adolescence to a major city); patterns that characterize some of the subjects (e.g., joining a group of “young Turks”); and those features that seem idiosyncratic to one or two individuals. These emerging patterns can then be tested, against other individuals in the sample, or in the light of data secured about new subjects. So far, my identification of patterns is informal, rather than systematic. However, in recent work, I have laid out the data on which those patterns were identified, so that other researchers can determine whether they discern the same patterns (Gardner, 1995).

To be sure, this method cannot yield the robust generalizations that emerge from a nomothetic study that tracks hundreds or even thousands of data points. Only a concerted program of research, involving many studies, could yield data of that degree of certitude. On the other hand, my modified nomothetic method allows one to gain a better understanding of the ways in which these pattern emerge, as well as detailed insights into apparent exceptions to the generalizations.

PRINCIPAL DISCOVERIES

So far, I have studied about 20 individuals in some depth, another dozen more superficially. Any claim about “findings” or “discoveries” is evidently tentative. Nonetheless, it is useful to step back and to indicate some of the patterns that have thus far emerged.

Nature and Nurture

Without question, some extraordinary individuals manifested unusual talent or gift early in life. It seems reasonable to conclude that these individuals have inherited some kind of skill from their parents or, to express it with more precision, have inherited the potential to master one or more domains with great rapidity. Certainly it is difficult to explain the musicality of Mozart, the graphic skills of Picasso, or the mathematical skills of Gauss in the absence of heritability of relevant traits.

Yet, at most, prodigiousness opens up possibilities. In every case, the prodigy has to work with an adult, usually a parent, who exposes him to material in the appropriate domain and helps him to gain the requisite skills. By most estimates, it takes around 10 years for the gifted individual to attain mastery of a domain; this process involves thousands of hours spent working with the relevant materials, be they patterns of notes, moves on the chess board, or ballet steps (Hayes, 1981). Of course, in cases where the individual begins training in the first few years of life, he may have attained expertise by adolescence.

By no means is extraordinariness restricted to prodigies—individuals who exhibit adult level skills when they are still children (Feldman, 1986). Indeed, most individuals who ultimately alter domains were not prodigies of the seven “creators of the modern world” whom I studied, only one (Picasso) is generally considered to have been a prodigy. And most prodigies, although achieving expertise, do not go on to alter domains, though some of them may seek to do so.

Choosing a Domain

The prodigy and adult creator face contrasting challenges. The prodigy receives his or her domain as part of his or her birthright. Mastering the domain itself is not a great challenge. However, in mastering a domain, the prodigy is exhibiting behaviors that the adult society has already consolidated and that it especially cherishes in the young. To become a creator, the prodigy must ultimately turn his or her back on conventional practice—and this rebellion requires an unorthodox, rather than a compliant personality.

In contrast, the adult creator is typically an individual who, from earlier years, exhibited a strong and somewhat rebellious personality. This person already has the temperament to be creative. What may be lacking is sufficient mastery of a domain. Young adult creators typically select a domain that they must first master and then alter, but they make this selection from a constrained range of options. Thus T. S. Eliot had the option of becoming a scholar or a writer; Igor Stravinsky showed talent in the dramatic, graphic, and musical art forms.

An intriguing question is how an individual comes to intersect with a given domain. Clearly, individuals can only select from among those domains that exist within their society. And, at the outset, individuals have only minimal influence on the course of a domain. Thus, unless one believes (as I do not) that a talented individual could excel in any domain, it is extremely important that the domain be selected ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Preface
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I The Individual Pursuit of Excellence
• Part II Culture, Society, and the Pursuit of Excellence
• Author Index
• Subject Index