Adam Gopnik Quotes
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With all the effort in the world, the results of cramming kids are likely to be more ambiguous than we can predict, not because the child rearing was done wrong but because all such results tend to be ambiguous.
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The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one-the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective. The one artisanal, teachable thing is outer conduct.
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Math prodigies are set somewhat apart from the more general-capacity prodigies, being seemingly possessed of a weird bit of wiring more than an over-all enhanced capacity for learning to do things.
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Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation.
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We wince at the brutality of parents who ship their young kids around to perform for adults at the expense of their childhood - but, then, that was Mozart’s childhood, and though by the end Mozart may have wished for less attention as a kid performer and more as a grownup composer, he never for a moment wished not to be Mozart.
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We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t Wayne Gretzky’s platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.
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The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country-Canada, Norway, Britain-has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do-as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue.