1 . By now you’ve probably heard about the “you’re not special” speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the anger and protest was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.
Such inflated (膨胀的) self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with co-author Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their wry ineptness (笨拙) prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.
In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they guessed they were in the 62nd. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill" (元认知技巧): the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox (悖论) here, the authors note: “The skills that develop competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain. "In other words, to get better at judging how well we’re doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.
There are a couple of ways out of this double bind (两难). First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.
If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement(毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.
1. The underlined phrase "took issue with" in paragraph 1 most probably means .| A．totally approved of | B．disagreed with |
| C．fully understood | D．held discussion about |
| A．we don’t know whether our young people are talented or not |
| B．young people can't reasonably define themselves |
| C．no requirement is set up for young people to get better |
| D．we always tend to consider ourselves to be privileged |
| A．They lack the capacity to monitor how well they are performing. |
| B．They usually give themselves high scores in self-evaluations. |
| C．They tend to be unable to know exactly how bad they are. |
| D．They are intelligently inadequate in tests and exams. |
| A．are not confident about their logic and grammar |
| B．tend to be very competent in their high-scoring fields |
| C．don't know how well they perform due to their stringent self-judgment |
| D．is very careful about their self-evaluations because they have their own limits |
| A．the best way to recognize excellence is to study past success and failure |
| B．through comparison with others, one will know where and when he fails |
| C．we need internal honesty with ourselves and external honesty from others |
| D．neither parents nor a commencement speaker can tell whether one is special |
| A．Special or Not? Teach Kids To Figure It Out |
| B．Let's Admit That We Are Not That Special |
| C．Tips On Making Ourselves More Special |
| D．Tell The Truth: Kids Overestimate their Talents |
2 . British children used to play conkers (板栗游戏) in the autumn when the horse-chestnut trees started to drop their shiny brown nuts. They would select a suitable chestnut, drill a hole in it and thread it onto a string, then swing their conker at that of an opponent until one of them broke. But the game has fallen out of favour. Children spend less time outdoors and rarely have access to chestnut trees. Besides, many schools have banned conkers games, worried that they might cause injuries or nut allergies.
That sort of risk-averseness(规避风险) now spreads through every aspect of childhood. Playgrounds have all the excitement designed out of them to make them safe. Many governments, particularly in societies such as America, have tightened up their rules, requiring parents to supervise(监管) young children far more closely than in the past. Frank Furedi of the University of Kent, a critic on modern parenting, argues that allowing children to play unsupervised or leaving them at home alone is increasingly described as a symptom of irresponsible parenting.
In part, such increased caution is a response to the huge wave of changes. Large-scale urbanization, smaller and more mobile families, the move of women into the labor market and the digitization of many aspects of life have unavoidably changed the way that people bring up their children. There is little chance that any of these trends will be changed, so today's more intensive(精细化的) parenting style is likely to go on.
Such parenting practices now embraced by wealthy parents in many parts of the rich world, particularly in America, go far beyond an adjustment to changes in external conditions. They mean a strong bid to ensure that the advantages enjoyed by the parents’ generation are passed on to their children. Since success in life now turns mainly on education, such parents will do their best to provide their children with the schooling, the character training and the social skills that will secure access to the best universities and later the most attractive jobs.
To some extent that has always been the case. But there are more such parents now, and they are competing with each other for what economists call positional goods. This competition starts even before the children are born. The wealthy classes will take their time to select a suitable spouse and get married, and will start a family only when they feel ready for it.
Children from less advantaged backgrounds, by contrast, often appear before their parents are ready for them. In America 60% of births to single women under 30 are unplanned, and over 40% of children are born outside marriage. The result, certainly in America, has been to widen already massive social inequalities yet further.
All the evidence suggests that children from poorer backgrounds are at a disadvantage almost as soon as they are born. By the age of five or six they are far less “school-ready” than their better-off peers, so any attempts to help them catch up have to start long before they get to school. America has had some success with various schemes involving regular home visits by nurses or social workers to low-income families with new babies. It also has long experience with programmes for young children from poor families that combine support for parents with good-quality child care. Such programmes do seem to make a difference. Without extra effort, children from low-income families in most countries are much less likely than their better-off peers to attend preschool education, even though they are more likely to benefit from it. And data from the OECD’s PISA programme suggest that children need at least two years of preschool education to perform at their best when they are 15.
So the most promising way to ensure greater equality may be to make early-years education and care for more widely available and more affordable, as it is in the Nordics. Some governments are already rethinking their educational priorities, shifting some of their spending to the early years.
Most rich countries decided more than a century ago that free, compulsory education for all children was a worthwhile investment for society. There is now an argument for starting preschool education earlier, as some countries have already done. In the face of crushing new inequalities, a modern version of that approach is worth trying.
1. What can we learn from the first two paragraphs?| A．More attention is placed on children’s safety. |
| B．More and more parents are becoming irresponsible. |
| C．Children are no longer interested in outdoor activities. |
| D．Parents are advised to spend more time with their children. |
| A．Chances are that this style could be changed. |
| B．Financial pressure forces parents to be stricter. |
| C．Rich families adopt such style to keep their advantages. |
| D．Such style is largely influenced by the size of the family. |
| A．Economists offer practical advice to guide parenting. |
| B．A happy marriage secures children’s social positions. |
| C．Unfair division of social resources drives parents mad. |
| D．Parents are struggling for their children’s edge over peers. |
| A．Parents are persuaded to give birth to babies in their later years. |
| B．Funds are provided for poor children after they are admitted to school. |
| C．New babies in low-income families are sent to nurses or social workers. |
| D．Children from low-income families are ensured to receive early education. |
| A．Supportive | B．Disapproving |
| C．Skeptic | D．Unconcerned |
| A．show competition overweighs cooperation |
| B．imply educational inequalities should be broken |
| C．make readers aware of the rules of the game |
| D．indicate the game has lost its appeal to children |
