They'll be fine anyway

A response to being told not to bother helping smart kids learn more

A few people have written recently about how the best writing is just people saying stuff they’re angry about. I don’t claim that this post is good writing, but it is something I'm angry about!

I lead a charity that supports children “with the heart and head for maths”. We run maths circles, which are small groups of those children who come together to do hard maths for fun. Think of maths circles being to maths lessons what band practice is to music lessons.

And I am fed up with people saying that we shouldn’t be putting energy into those children because “they’ll be fine anyway”.

For a start, what is “fine”? Passing their GCSEs? Getting onto the A-level course of their choice? Getting a degree? I suspect the "fine anyway" people haven’t thought hard about this. They’ve set a threshold in their heads of what “good enough” is and determined that only those below it are deserving of help. Rather than seeing our job as helping every child achieve their best, it's just to help them get to the minimum. We'd then leave the rest to chance - meaning only the most advantaged or most fortunate succeed.

This is a colossal poverty of ambition. Why should we settle for “fine” for our children? I don’t want my children to be fine, I want them to thrive.

And how big is the gap between fine and thriving? Between a child just meeting basic expectations and achieving their full potential? It’s cure for cancer big, solution to climate change big, invention of nuclear fusion big. Each time we write a child off as “fine” we don't just let down that child. We deny the rest of humanity the benefits of what that child could have gone on to achieve.

The other angle to my frustration is that this attitude is only ever applied to children who find joy in academics. Nobody ever says that we shouldn’t coach children who are good at football because they’ll be fine at it anyway. Nobody shuts down choir because the kids who go will be fine at music anyway.

So why should the children who enjoy maths have their interest written off? Is it somehow lesser than liking sport or music? Why is it one rule for some, another for others?

The top of Maslow's hierarchy is self-actualisation. That's what we want for our children. To be able to pursue their interests and become better at things they enjoy. This is part of childhood, and is our duty to provide. It’s wrong to determine that children who love maths don’t have this chance, just because they will exceed the low bar set for them by the state.

Fine isn’t good enough.