Adam Gopnik

Quotes

• We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans.
• [M]ath 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.
• There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement—the competition won, the reward secured.
• What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle.
• Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all.
• Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.
• We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later—it might; it does!—but because it’s obnoxious now.
  • Adam Gopnik (January 29, 2018). How to Raise a Prodigy. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 27, 2018.