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.
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