When you were at school, how long did you ever go without doing your homework? People tend to be puzzled by this question: “What do you mean, how long? Maybe a week or so? Everybody skives off once in a while, after all.”

I have a very precise answer to this question, which is that I did not do my homework for a straight seven months, as an experiment to see if anyone noticed.

When I was 10, I was very ill and missed the first six weeks of term. There was a great deal of susurrating concern about what I had missed: teachers and parents made plans for reintegration and assigned studious classmates to help me catch up.

But when I finally did come back to school, I simply didn’t notice any difference. I kept expecting it to open up, that great big gap of what I’d missed, in the form of a question to which I couldn’t figure out the answer or a task I couldn’t finish by reading ahead in the textbook. But it just didn’t come.

Being a curious and empirically inclined child (who hated homework), I thought: “If it worked like that for the first six weeks, let’s see how much longer the rule holds.”

I decided not to do any homework and to measure the time it would take me to get caught. But I never was caught: I made it to the end of the school year with pristine exercise books and straight As.

After that, nobody really taught me. I don’t mean they didn’t teach me well - they just didn’t teach me anything. When presented with most of the academic demands placed on my cohort, I always seemed to know the answer and understand the concepts already.

So my teachers merely watched me perform, like some combination of a high-wire act and an exotic bird. Because I seemed to always know, they didn’t see what job was left for them to do. The verdict on me was always the same, parents’ evening after parents’ evening for 12 years of education: she is very clever but doesn’t apply herself. Oh, well. What can you do? She gets such good grades!

A few weeks before my biology exam, aged 18, a friend invited me over so we could revise together. I remember being pleased by the invitation but puzzled by the activity: what were we to do, I asked? She described a complicated protocol of note-taking, summary-writing and revision. I had … read the textbook (mostly). Needless to say, I was a useless study partner and nobody ever asked me again. I got 87 per cent.

My relationship with my biology teacher was, in retrospect, telling. I felt picked on by him; he would criticise me, ask me snap questions out of the blue in front of the class, write long comments on my test papers about how I ought to apply myself more to my studies. I thought he hated me but, with hindsight, I can see that he was trying to get me to show my workings out: how did I know that the ribosome was the engine of RNA replication when he’d seen me doodle all through that lesson? Why did I get an A in my practical lab test when I’d cut every class in the final term (can you blame me: they all started at 8am)?

He would call me lazy and unserious, and loudly wonder about my future. While I saw these as attacks, they were really attempts to encourage me to actively engage in the process and practice of learning.

What does ‘working hard’ mean?

Of course, I didn’t really know everything. Nobody does. I was just faster at taking information in and better at retaining and synthesising it than was normal for my age.

And the crucial thing is that I had absolutely no idea how I was doing it. If you had asked me, aged 10 or 15 or 27, how other people come to know things, I would have said they’re just … talented. Geniuses. Ineffably successful at an irreducible level, which is, in essence, binary: you can either do something or you can’t.

This learning blindness went further than the merely academic: other skills, perhaps not critical to my chances of economic success but nevertheless life-enhancing, were an equally black box. Singing, for example: I simply thought that you either woke up every morning sounding like Barbra Streisand or you just “didn’t have the voice”.

Looking back, I can see that this belief worked in a circular manner, generating its own catch-22 of helplessness: given that I did not already sound like Barbra Streisand, singing lessons to help me sound better than I did were a pointless luxury. When I finally took singing lessons in my thirties and was shown how to hold a note longer and project my voice, I was astonished. (I still don’t sound like her, mind you - there is only one Babs.)

There are long-term consequences to this way of approaching capabilities, ones that reach further than the immediate satisfaction of childhood fantasies of Broadway. Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, of Columbia University in New York, conducted six studies that demonstrated that children who are told they are intelligent perform less well than children who are praised for effort (bit.ly/PraiseforIntelligence).

Later research, led by Elizabeth Gunderson of the University of Chicago, showed that children whose parents praised them for effort were more open to challenges and likely to believe they could improve their results (bit.ly/Praiseeffort).

This knowledge has trickled sufficiently far down from academia that ambitious middle-class parents can be heard to praise their children for application and persistence (bit.ly/parentingscience).

But, even here, there is a step missing. “Working hard” is no more understandable to a child than “being a genius” is. Adults need to show them how to work hard - we need to teach a child what “work hard” looks like when you apply it to a specific challenge. Is it repetition? Is it breaking it down into smaller bits and solving them separately? Is it looking it up in a dictionary? Is it erasing bits and fixing them, little by little?

The children who can coast on their innate ability without these skills tend to fly under the radar. We get the good grades; we’ll be fine. It’s the children who have neither the native ability nor the learning skills who attract a lot of the effort in a classroom setting. In the debate about the knowledge-rich curriculum, the argument that teaching facts over skills is a social leveller, for example, is based on the (not unreasonable) implicit premise that under-performing children’s needs should guide teaching strategies (bit.ly/KRChelpspoor).

Teachers are rightly conscientious about falling victim to the fundamental attribution error: they are aware that when they see a child - especially a child who also meets some minoritised condition, such as having a black, Asian or minority ethnic background - behave in certain negative ways, there is a risk of misdiagnosis in calling them “disruptive” or “disturbed”.

It is perhaps understandable that there is less awareness that it can also be damaging to see a child not apply themselves to learning and call them “lazy but smart”. The system focuses on the children who are failing, not on the children who haven’t failed yet.

Sink or learn

But both children are in distress, albeit of different kinds. Smarts will only get you so far - sooner or later, every young adult will reach a level of academic or professional complexity that will exceed their innate ability. Many young people who were “gifted” children hit that wall at university, and then it’s sink or learn. Most swim. I sank: falling further and further behind, and helpless to analyse or overcome the causes of my bewilderment, I dropped out. So, too, do too many others.

And, I foresee, the numbers of “gifted” students who will drop off the academic conveyor belt is set to increase, because our knowledge landscape is undergoing its third great transformation since the invention of writing and the spread of literacy.

It’s hard to write about the digital age without falling into cliché or prediction, but one of the things it has already unarguably caused in its two decades of transformation is the utter redundancy of making children memorise facts and figures. When almost any fact - from the birthplace of Michelangelo, to the name of the fourth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (it’s Raphael. I always forget Raphael), to the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow - can be checked by literally reaching into one’s pocket for the answer, there is little value in spending time providing children with information. Information, if anything, is something that we all have too much of.

Knowledge is also increasingly contested: enlightenment notions of a single truth withstood the assault of postmodernist critique but are crumbling in the face of old-fashioned premodern atavism of the Trump and Russian propaganda variety. The amount of misinformation in the intellectual water supply has been rising inexorably since the 1980s, but seems to have undergone a hockey-stick-like acceleration in the age of digital media.

From the beginning, the misinformation economy presented insurmountable social challenges. The debunking and scepticism movements of the 2000s comprehensively failed to inoculate society against quackery, the anti-vaxxer movement and political propaganda. Techniques such as “critical thinking”, or awareness of biases and statistical probability have been mostly reduced to aggressive debating tactics. In this environment, knowing how to learn - having a coherent toolkit that we can consciously reach for when presented with decisions or disagreements - is arguably not just the most valuable educational outcome but the only thing that education retains a monopoly on.

The world of corporate training, as well as the lifestyle and wellness industries, are increasingly invested in the “learning mindset” and “lifelong learning”, the inner property that enables the capitalist subject to adapt quickly to technological and social changes, and not be left on the employment shelf by the next big workplace shift.

Everything is an elephant

But learning is not a mindset, it’s a skill set. Learning something is like eating an elephant: you have to break it into smaller pieces first. A proficient learner begins by separating unfamiliar material or practice into its constituent parts and applying the best techniques to mastering each separately, then rebuilding the pieces into a whole. The key insight of learning is that anything can be approached like that. From playing an instrument to physics to how to make friends and influence people, there is a way of breaking down all new challenges into simple (not necessarily easy, but simple) steps. Everything is an elephant.

To fail to teach people how to learn and then tell them to get in the mood for it in order to keep their job isn’t just cruel: at the scale of a globalised, interconnected society, it’s counterproductive or even dangerous. Some of the children with the highest cognitive potential are liable to be handicapped most severely, surviving only on the margins of donnish professionalised occupations that replace learning with status and class position. The world needs only so many Oxford Assyriologists and, moreover, only a limited number of people are either suited to or interested in the decipherment of cuneiform tablets.

What we do need - desperately - are people who can change their minds, acquire new expertise, shed the assumptions of their formative years, and reach for creative and adaptable solutions to the staggeringly complex set of problems that we as a species face. We need learners - urgently.

Marina Strinkovsky is a writer and campaigner. She blogs at It’s Not a Zero Sum Game

This article originally appeared in the 30 AUGUST 2019 issue under the headline “Young, gifted and slack”