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I think "ladder anxiety" is a reflection on the education system. From what I've experienced, 99% of schooling boils down to this: absorb material, answer questions, get punished for wrong and rewarded for right answers. The reward and punishment of course is your grade, which becomes synonymous with the quantity of your intelligence. So when learning something, we approach it less as a series of making and correcting mistakes (learning), and more as a measure of how much intelligence we've gained or lost. It becomes psychologically uncomfortable to acknowledge any mistake (proof of stupidity).
The fault of the system being this way is probably due in most part to too few teachers per student, with too many standardized testing demands and time constraints (but this is well known already). I think a shift needs to be made from the teacher correcting and handing out scores, to students learning how to self correct and teach each other. In life you cannot always rely on an external god figure to hold your hand, correct your mistakes, and reward you with your intelligence score afterwards. You can see in various ways how many adults are stuck in this mode and crave this, rather than being comfortable failing and learning.
Incidentally, modern gaming shows a lot of influences from this standardized testing mentality. Look at all the achievement unlocks nowadays, and the various tricks developers use to hand you your competency on a silver platter. Older games tended to be a lot more punishing, and wouldn't give you constant encouragement about how awesome you are every step of the way. You felt badass for your slowly acquired skill, rather than how infallible, good looking and IQ chart shattering the game designers made your character.
So as not to be a complete Negative Nancy, I should end by saying the results of this kind of schooling, and ladder anxiety, need not be permanent. Personally I struggle too with perfectionism and fear of failure. I found chess to be really instructive at teaching me how I learn and how I react to failure. It takes some mental work, but if you can make yourself treat a loss as an instructive lesson instead of proof of stupidity, it will change how you approach a lot of things for the better. This can be done with anything that allows you to make and explore your own mistakes. Thanks for reading.
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The system doesn't help when it handholds it's students by forcing them through school, even if they aren't intelligent or skilled enough to complete the courses, just to get them out of their hair. And when those same students turn around and blame the school for not giving them the resources they needed to learn and grow, the school raises their hands like nothing is wrong, saying something along the lines of "Every student should have the same opportunities, no matter how good they are."
It's really sad to see, and it is becoming more and more evident at the drastic decrease in those who actually strive to achieve perfection and a broadening of standard intelligence much lower than previous standards. I have seen this already, and I graduated from high school 5 years ago!
Kids are so stressed about achieving test scores in any way they can, and not about actually learning the material. The rest are forced through the system and left to dry flipping burgers. Sad really.
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On April 15 2014 02:38 vult wrote:
Kids are so stressed about achieving test scores in any way they can, and not about actually learning the material. The rest are forced through the system and left to dry flipping burgers. Sad really.
Yup agreed. The result of the system is to drag both the exceptional and the ungifted, kicking and screaming, to the same level of mediocrity. If approached correctly I believe both could reach excellence in their own ways. People say that school is a right, and I agree with this, but the pursuit of excellence is an even greater right. Amazing that they should be mutually exclusive for some students.
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I think you're right that a fixed notion of intelligence leads to all kinds of terrible things like risk aversion, low self-esteem, insecurity and whatnot and can also play a role in "ladder anxiety", but I don't think standardized testing is based on or implies such a notion of intelligence - you'd have to establish that link between testing and the fixed notion of intelligence via an argument, but you merely take it as granted. I mean, the purpose of tests of any kind is to assess ability, but by assessing ability they don't force any particular interpretation of ability or intelligence on you: Ability could be understood as merely a product of past learning, so that tests would be measuring achievement (how much you have learned) rather than capabilities (how much you can learn). The point is that tests alone don't give you any indicators as to how you're supposed to think about ability and intelligence and allow you to approach them any way you wish.
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On April 15 2014 03:09 Mothra wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2014 02:38 vult wrote:
Kids are so stressed about achieving test scores in any way they can, and not about actually learning the material. The rest are forced through the system and left to dry flipping burgers. Sad really. Yup agreed. The result of the system is to drag both the exceptional and the ungifted, kicking and screaming, to the same level of mediocrity. If approached correctly I believe both could reach excellence in their own ways. People say that school is a right, and I agree with this, but the pursuit of excellence is an even greater right. Amazing that they should be mutually exclusive for some students.
If you aren't in the workforce already, just wait and see. If you are you already know what I mean.
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On April 15 2014 16:53 GERMasta wrote:
I think you're right that a fixed notion of intelligence leads to all kinds of terrible things like risk aversion, low self-esteem, insecurity and whatnot and can also play a role in "ladder anxiety", but I don't think standardized testing is based on or implies such a notion of intelligence - you'd have to establish that link between testing and the fixed notion of intelligence via an argument, but you merely take it as granted. I mean, the purpose of tests of any kind is to assess ability, but by assessing ability they don't force any particular interpretation of ability or intelligence on you: Ability could be understood as merely a product of past learning, so that tests would be measuring achievement (how much you have learned) rather than capabilities (how much you can learn). The point is that tests alone don't give you any indicators as to how you're supposed to think about ability and intelligence and allow you to approach them any way you wish.
That's true that testing can be looked at as a measure of past learning, but I would argue that for children, most probably do not take such a broad and detached viewpoint. I can't remember back much to my early school days, but intuitively I feel like a child is more likely to see it as "I'm being rewarded for being smart" and "punished for being stupid". Of course school environments and teaching style varies widely... I am thinking about schools in America during the "self-esteem" movement, where you receive gold stars and shit for adding numbers faster than your peers. It seems like standardized testing has really intensified since then (I don't know, I'm not a teacher). I think it places greater pressure on both teacher and student to jump through hoops in quickest way possible, instead of really learning how to learn. Apologies if I'm not addressing what you said... reply is rushed, gotta leave house in a few minutes.
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EPT
