Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/14/children-hard-work-social-mobility-estate-background

by paulpauper • 5 years ago

15 14 5 years ago

theguardian.com

TheRealNGenius• 5 years ago

But a beautiful one nonetheless

Koshkin• 5 years ago

It’s not a lie. They just need to specify what kind of work that is.

cosmotic• 5 years ago

And clarify that it's closer to the top, not the actual top.

jpxw• 5 years ago

First off, I think even assuming this was a lie, it’d still be useful to continue telling kids it - we tell kids lies all the time, for their own goods.

Secondly, I dispute the thesis of the article (that education equality has become worse over time). The data doesn’t appear to concur with hat conclusion. The number of underprivileged kids at Oxford and Cambridge has increased significantly in the last decade. 68% of Oxford’s intake last year were state school students. When the author studied, the number might have been 45% at best (I don’t know his age).

tlogan• 5 years ago

It was ALWAYS A LIE. Duh... But hard work is not going to hurt.

The article is spot on: it is nearly impossible to succeed in your life with crapy education our "inner city" public schools offers.

slowmovintarget• 5 years ago

Hard work is necessary for success. It is merely one of many prerequisites. That's the thing about prerequisites. Miss one and you don't get the same outcome as someone with them all.

The real lie is that there is only a single factor that leads to success, or, conversely, that there is only a single factor that holds one back from success.

These attractive deceptions are offered to people unwilling to think. For children, however, teaching them that hard work and perseverance are critical characteristics successful people have is absolutely valid and useful. Those habits are built between age 6 and 10. Then you start introducing the other textures of life. But there you see one of the other prerequisites: parents willing, and having the ability or circumstance, to spend time and effort to teach their children.

anm89• 5 years ago

But it's nearly a guarantee that not doing hard work is not going to get you to the top for those not born with money.

Whereas hard work will work for many.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

I think effort/work/grit is a necessary but still insufficient condition . The people who rise to the top of prestitous,intelelctually-demanding jobs also tend to be very smart too. Elon Musk was coding at the age of 12. He got a lot more mirlage for this grit than someon who works in retail. Same for Google founders. The meritocracy creates a lot of opportunity but also inequality.

maroonblazer• 5 years ago

I'd also add that, for lack of a better term, 'not being a dick' can go a long way towards getting ahead.

People tend to prefer working with others who are respectful, conscientious, considerate, understand the limits of their knowledge, don't make assumptions, don't take things personally, are curious, etc.

These traits won't make up for a complete lack of expertise, but in my experience they'll jettison the 'average' professional ahead of the 'expert' who lacks these characteristics.

rektide• 5 years ago

hard work with outsized expectations is how your burn out a human. how you make them fragile & overextended in their beliefs, in a narrow dimension. teaching them that some one part of a vast equation is important is a horrible lie. it takes a lot of things.

jariel• 5 years ago

There's some wilful misattribution or straw-manning by the Guardian here.

'Hard work is an essential ingredient in success' is much more consistent with common beliefs, and it's more or less true.

Nobody is saying 'Just work hard and you will achieve the highest ranks of society'.

It's a 'lie' that anyone actually says that, hence the straw man.

The Guardian however, doesn't really want this to be true, and so like most ideological papers, they shift the goalposts of their supposed ideological opponents and misattribute the logic.

The flaw is right here:

"I have come to understand that the systems that underpin the top professions in Britain are set up to serve only a certain section of society: they’re readily identifiable by privileged backgrounds, particular schools and accents."

Yes, of course, British people, of all people know that.

They've known that for 1000 years.

But saying that 'the top corridors of power are hard to achieve' is a fundamentally different thing then (direct quote): “if you work hard you will get on”.

"If you work hard you will get on" is not "If you work hard you will achieve the top ranks of society".

Finally, there's a woeful lack of gratitude in the author's premise, that he, as an immigrant somehow deserves one of the most choice spots among 60 million residents 'because he worked hard'.

Ironically, as a 'extremely poor immigrant son of a single mother with 12 chilren and a person of colour' - the fact that he was able to receive considerably more and better education than his peers, and has had a very successful career and is a respected member of society actually demonstrates how relatively open, kind and tolerant the UK is at least overall.

He's almost a living, breathing contradiction of his own argument.

This misattribution is a daily, constant problem in the press (almost all of them) and it's a primary source of false information and social malaise.

The G has some great writers, I wish they would try harder.

zozbot234• 5 years ago

Work smart, not hard.

WheelsAtLarge• 5 years ago

I don't think most people put enough emphasis on learning how to sell their talents. I always pick Albert Einstein as my example. Yes, he was brilliant and yes, he was a hard worker but the reason most people know of him is that he made sure that the media and the world knew it too. Most people know of him and know he was a genius but they don't really know why. He was so successful that generations after he died people still equate him with genius. He was a brilliant marketer in addition to his other accomplishments.

I truly believe that selling your talents is super important to get to the top and staying there.

dmarchand90• 5 years ago

I really disliked this article and borderline consider it dangerous.

What exactly are people in the lower classes supposed to do? The author seems to imply that should just give up. Infuriatingly, the author states that they benefitted immensely from hard work and social mobility, but that will no longer work. Why does social mobility no longer work, what numbers back this up? The author provides nothing to back any of this up except some imagination exercises in the lives of the rich and poor.

To me the important question is not: will hard work make you the most successful but will hard work make you more successful.

Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

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