Eleanor Mills (@eleanormills) - When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Eleanor Mills wrote in the Sunday Times of July 6 2014:

"Being “cool” was about rebelling: an urge to be doing what I shouldn’t — because I could. At 13 I would slink off to pubs in Covent Garden with my best mate — we’d tell her mother we were going to the cinema — and pretend to be 18 or older. We would drink and flirt and get into trouble, revelling in the newly honed power that we had over men, and then run off home on the night bus with our child-rate photocards.

And more:

"By 14 and 15 I was going clubbing (Phil Salon’s Mud Club, the Wag, Heaven) and dancing until the small hours. I was even interviewed by Paula Yates for a Channel 4 series she was making called Too Much Too Young.

She explained the report:

"Most school dropouts do not become pop stars. Indeed a large American study, just published in Child Development — a prestigious psychology magazine — found that indulging in minor delinquency, early romantic attachments and drug use at age 13, 14 and 15 might make you popular for a few years but is correlated with “long-term difficulties in close relationships... as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use [along with] elevated levels of criminal behaviour” in early adulthood."

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

Shane Smith (@ShaneSmith30), CEO and co-founder of VICE, said:

"One of the shocking things when I go back to Canada is they cut off the tall trees — it’s sort of like everyone’s the same. Everyone’s going to be the same, we’re all okay. Just the, sort of, cultural ‘we’re all okay.’" 

Shane Smith said something similar here:

"I grew up being a socialist and I have problems with it because I grew up in Canada [and] I’ve spent a lot of time in Scandinavia, where I believe countries legislate out creativity. They cut off the tall trees. Everyone’s a C-minus. I came to America from Canada because Canada is stultifyingly boring and incredibly hypocritical. Thanks, Canada."

Russell Kane (@russell_kane) said on the third episode of series 3 of BBC 3's Free Speech:

"I couldn't wait to get out [of school] and restart my education and do it on my own. Where I could be proud of getting high grades instead of being bullied."

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd Gary Mitchell

Gary Mitchell, the Rathcoole-born playwright, said in an interview with Culture Northern Ireland:

"We have this thing where we think middle class people and upper class people are better than us. They [the middle class] can write things, we [the working class] can’t. We can work in factories. And if someone proves that it is possible to go to Rathcoole Secondary – the school you got expelled into - and become a famous writer then they have to pull him down. Because they said, “you’re from Rathcoole, you can’t” and stopped their kids from becoming a writer or wanting to be famous."

Gary Mitchell then spoke of the pervasive inferiority complex of the Protestant working class. A culture that says you have to keep up appearances without thinking too much of yourself. Under this culture he was just a wee lad from Rathcoole. He wasn't allowed to be a writer.

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

The above segment from The Simpsons episode Dial 'N' for Nerder, Nelson is attacked for showing intellectual daring and ability. This is the culture I experienced in school, albeit in a milder less violent form, But yes, it absolutely was not cool to show intellectual daring and ability.

My earlier posts in the 'When it's cool to be dumb' series can be accessed here,here (UDA prisoner), here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. On the Huffington Post UK here.

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd "Gay panic"

Andtew Sullivan wrote here:

"A 2006 study found that, out of all Americans, white heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Lisa Wade blames the conditioning boys undergo in their teens: 

[M]en are pressed — from the time they’re very young — to disassociate from everything feminine. This imperative is incredibly limiting for them. Paradoxically, it makes men feel good because of a social agreement that masculine things are better than feminine things, but it’s not the same thing as freedom. It’s restrictive and dehumanizing. It’s oppression all dressed up as awesomeness. And it is part of why men have a hard time being friends. 

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

Katy Waldman thinks it’s also about gay panic:

Wade doesn’t mention the rainbow elephant in the room, but I wonder whether men are less afraid of girliness here than homosexuality. In many ways, it’s a distinction without a difference, since homophobes tend to imagine gay men as effete. But if a man ever is allowed to relax his stone face, it’s around his romantic partner. Being open, communicative, vulnerable—all of these behaviors evoke love relationships. It makes a sad kind of sense that boys trying to assert their masculinity would steer clear of playing the “boyfriend” around other guys."

My earlier posts in the 'When it's cool to be dumb' series can be accessed here, here (UDA prisoner), here, here, here, here, here, here and here. On the Huffington Post UK here.

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

@brianjohnspencr @YsabellGiles In the working-class world I grew up in, to succeed was seen by many as 'rising above your station'.
— Ian Livingstone (@IGLivingstone) November 28, 2013

The deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast, Christopher Stalford tweeted in response:

@IGLivingstone @brianjohnspencr @YsabellGiles Ian, absolutely spot on.
— Christopher Stalford (@CDMStalfordDUP) November 28, 2013

Ian Livingstone also shared on his blog his experience and perception of schooling in the context of growing up in a Belfast family:

"I daydreamed my way through school. I paid no attention to class-work and my truancy had now become very regular. In my family there were no expectations from education at all. My parents saw it in a sense, like a glorified baby-sitting service - somewhere I could go during daytime while they were at work. The previous hopes they had for me when I had gained entry into grammar school were by now gone after I had been expelled. I was destined to enter into an apprenticeship as an electrician, plumber or a welder in the Harland &Wolff shipyard, like the majority of males in my family. A good education didn’t really matter."

My previous posts in the "Cool to be dumb" series here, here, here, here, here and here. On the Huffington Post UK here.

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

India Knight wrote in the Sunday Times of November 17 2013:

"Privately educated children are taught that being clever is cool; some state-educated ones get given the feeling that it is sometimes wiser to hide one's light under a bushel."

My previous posts in the "cool to be dumb" series here, here, here, here and here.

Matthew Syed - schools should do more to inculcate grit and resilience

On August 22 2013, GCSE results day, Matthew Syed wrote a piece in the London Times entitled, 'Dare to fail and train those mental muscles.' He said:

"Yesterday Nick Hurd, a government minister, argued that one of the most important qualities in life is grit. He is right. Grit, or resilience, is a powerful predictor of success in everything from maths to music. It is those who take risks, who keep going even when they mess up from time to time, who ultimately reach their potential. Mr Hurd argued that schools should do more to inculcate this virtue, along with other aspects of good character. He was right about that, too. 

But where does grit come from? When you speak to young people, it is striking just how often they blame their innate deficiencies when they are struggling with a subject such as, say, maths. “I don’t have a brain for numbers” is a phrase heard up and down the country. 

This may sound trifling, but it has deep effects. After all, if I lack the mental equipment to understand maths, what is the point of persevering? Surely it is as pointless as someone without hands trying to master origami. In effect, the belief destroys the grit that is essential to success. 

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd with Matthew Syed

Matthew Syed spoke on Radio 4's series Four Thought, Original Thinkers and made a very insightful comment on how young people see hard work. He said:

"It was an eye opening experience for me at university. Just before going into a tutorial I would say to a fellow student:

"Have you done much work this week?"

And they would reply:

"No, none at all. Been in the bar the whole time."

And I would think after the tutorial, "how on earth did you write such an insightful essay on Plato, when you haven't read anything about him?

And of course the reason is that often young people see hard work as an indictment."

Read the original source here.

Matthew Syed - The Growth Mindset

The author of 'The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice,' Matthew Syed (@matthewsyed) recently spoke on Radio 4 about 'the growth mindset' and his philosophy on how to succeed in the world.

Boiling things down, his belief is that we as a society have vastly overstated the talent-effort continuum to the point where our view is that success all comes down to talent. This has huge implications for our behaviour. On the episode, 'Original Thinkers,' on the Radio 4 series, Four Thought, Matthew Syed went into more detail and began with a probing question. He asked:

"Where does excellence come from? How do we get better at stuff?"

He responded bullishly that challenges the very basis from which we look on the world:

When its cool to be dumb, Ctd

Irish Independent columnist Kevin Myers wrote in the August 18 2013 edition of the Sunday Times:

"Many working-class communities cherish a deep hostility towards any upward mobility, which is enforced by a variety of societal pressures so as to make the bright conform with failure. This perverse culture even had a laureate, Roddy Doyle, whose novels celebrated such weird and negative norms. What in other countries would be regarded as antisocial lunacies, in Doyle's fictional Barrytown were fetishised into a vainglorious victimhood."

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

A UDA ex-prisoner said:

‘When we grew up, ‘Education’s for fruits!’ You know. It was for gays. You know. ‘Pffft, don’t touch that, we want guns! Gimme guns, gimme guns!’’

In full on eamonnmallie.com here. My earlier essay on the Huffington Post here.