A myth that keeps growing and growing

I had lunch recently with an assistant head of a leading independent school and he told me about their ‘growth mindset’ work. He was excited about this and he’s by no means exceptional. Eton, Wellington and Stowe have all enthusiastically embraced it, as have thousands of state schools. Highgate Wood, a comprehensive in north London, says on its website that ‘growth mindset is the cornerstone of our learning ethos’.

I hesitate to call growth mindset a ‘fad’ because that implies it lacks the imprimatur of academic respectability when the opposite is true. The term was coined by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, who made a startling discovery in the course of researching children’s cognitive performance in the 1970s. She noticed that children who believe intelligence is learnt are better at solving problems than those who think it’s innate. ‘In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits,’ she wrote.