The Marmot’s Hole

Here’s an example of something I notice from time to time with the Korean media.

The February 19 issue of New York Magazine reported in “The Inverse Power of Praise” on some new findings from a Columbia University study that showed it just might be beneficial to not praise your kid too much for being “smart” but better to emphasize the “hard work” done. What’s important in this is the fact that if performance flags, you can’t say “you’re not smart” although you can say “you didn’t try hard.”

The most important thing is that since there’s an image of the kid “being smart,” if there is failure, the kid feels bad. And when there are new things to try, new skills to falter at, the kid is often scared to try, for fear of not living up to that expectation. Of course, there would be none of that if the kid is expected to “try hard.” The money quote in the article:

“I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.”

OK – all good, all good. I don’t have a kid yet and it all sounds fine to me. I’m not writing here to debate the fine points of child-rearing; I am, however, writing to talk about cultural contexts and how amazingly little this is conveyed in the information that Korea gets from the West.

So when this report first came out in New York Magazine and started getting reported in American media, of course the Korean media picked up on it a few days later. It appeared, as far as I can tell, here first, then on television, then quoted widely in places such as cafes and blogs, and most likely on the morning radio news before being passed around the virtual water cooler.

What’s the problem, then?

Well, the whole thing is taken out of cultural context. When it comes to education and child-rearing in the States, the cultural backdrop against which this article appears is one of excessive praise and a feel-good emphasis on “self-esteem”; however, this is certainly not the case in Korea.

Read “The Inverse Power of ‘The Inverse Power of Praise” on your own.