Cover Story
Young Guns
by Guy Somerset
If you want to get to the top of your game, natural talent won’t be enough. You’ve got to put in the hours – 10,000 of them.
We’ve all seen them, and some of us may even be them: those parents driving their children to a daily succession of after-school activities (if it’s Tuesday, it must be violin followed by netball) and extra French or maths -tuition.
Other parents may scoff, leaving their own children to bounce dreamily on the trampoline or play with their Lego – isn’t that what childhood’s supposed to be about? But if they can afford the activities and tuition, and can get their children to them, they might do well to think again, judging from the latest book by New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-sellers The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
After reading Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, parents might also wonder whether the summer holidays should be considered downtime.
In Outliers – in a style that has earned its own term, Gladwellian – Gladwell draws on academic research and “brings it to life for a broader audience”, as he puts it on the phone from his Greenwich Village apartment. This latest book is about success and the myths that abound. “We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit. That’s not the whole story.”
The outliers of the title are the hugely successful – from Bill Gates to the Beatles. Gladwell argues that Gates was presented with an extraordinary series of opportunities to practise writing computer code, starting as an eighth-grader. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, he had been programming for seven consecutive years. How many teenagers in the world had that kind of experience? “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates told Gladwell.
As for the Beatles, their early opportunities playing nightclub gigs in Hamburg meant by the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1200 times. “Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform 1200 times in their entire careers.”
Gladwell argues that a major factor is sheer hard work – from an early age.
He writes of a study of 12 families by University of Maryland sociologist Annette Lareau. The families were a mix of wealthy and poor and had two distinct parenting styles divided “almost perfectly” along class lines.
On one hand was the “concerted cultivation” of the wealthier, middle-class parents – “shuttling [their children] from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a basketball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.”
Meanwhile, poorer parents depended on the “accomplishment of natural growth”. Their children were left to their own devices and to make up games among themselves. “What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential.”
The advantages of concerted cultivation are enormous, writes Gladwell. “The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to.”
Elsewhere in Outliers, Gladwell writes of the research of Johns Hopkins University sociologist Karl Alexander, which showed how the “achievement gap” between poor and wealthier pupils in the Baltimore public school system was not a result of how they were taught in school, but of the extra tuition the wealthier pupils received during the summer holidays. Following the summer after first grade, for example, the wealthiest pupils’ reading scores had jumped more than 15 points, while those of the poorest had dropped almost four.
To demonstrate further the benefits of extra tuition, Gladwell visited the KIPP Academy for fifth-graders and upwards in the South Bronx of New York. KIPP stands for “Knowledge is Power Program” and more than 50 of the academies are spread across the United States. Like the others, the South Bronx academy is in a poor area, with 90% of its pupils qualifying for “free or reduced lunch”. Pupils are selected by lottery.
The academy seeks to redress educational imbalances by cramming more hours into the school day, starting at 7.25am and finishing at 5.00pm, with after-school activities until as late as 7.00pm, followed by homework, sometimes until 11.00pm. Pupils go into school on Saturday mornings, and the academy continues for three extra weeks in summer. (American summer holidays, it should be said, usually last almost three months.)
The results are impressive, with 80% of graduates going on to college, “in many cases being the first in their family to do so”.
The price is high, Gladwell concedes in the book, but the bargain is worth it. For those in the South Bronx at least, he says on the phone, when I wonder about the cost to childhood of such a punishing schedule, and indeed of the schedules of the wealthier pupils in Lareau’s study.
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