Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later-it might; it does!-but because it’s obnoxious now.
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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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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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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.