It is widely alleged that the mainstream model of education was designed to churn out consistent factory workers. The goal was not to produce self-actualized humans, but people with a predictable and broad skillset who were good at taking direction and slotting into any number of fairly repetitive tasks, then doing them ad nauseum. This model of education, goes the critique, is far less valuable in this century, where value comes from unique ideas and differentiating oneself rather than being a reliable and uncreative worker.
It’s certainly a one-sided argument, given that some fungibility is still valuable even in today’s marketplace. A company consisting of only free-thinking geniuses will run circles around a collection of replaceable cogs, until one of said free-thinking geniuses decides to do something else with their time and nobody knows how to replace them. Nevertheless, in terms of individuation, contemporary education has a lot of catching up to do before it can claim it’s arrived at a golden mean. Helping students develop a ‘personal brand’ is one way teachers can help close this gap. Another is a concept I call metatalented education.
Just as ‘learning how to learn’ is of central importance in education, metatalented education aims to develop the ‘talent of developing talent’. One might also call it ‘learning what to learn’. The following is a lesson plan intended for teachers who would like to bring this concept to their classroom. Though written in a neutral tone, it could be adapted to
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Today’s lesson is about Talents. When we’re learning about a complicated concept it’s often helpful to look at the history of the word to think about how its meaning has changed over time.
A ‘talent’ actually used to be a specific amount of money - eighty pounds of silver to be exact. In those days, It would take about twenty years working as a common laborer to earn a talent! Of course, people made more money if they had rare skills or their own tools even in those days, but still - a talent was a lot of money, representing years of effort for most people. So how did it come to mean something you’re unusually good at?It’s actually because of a parable from the bible. In the story, a wealthy businessman needs to go away for a while, but he doesn’t want to leave his money unattended. He has eight talents he can’t take with him and three servants that he wants to test, so he decides to lend each of them some of the money he’s saved up. He gives five talents to his most competent servant, two to his middling servant, and one to his least competent servant, and tells them to make good use of the money while he’s away.
The man comes back to find that the first two servants have invested their talents in profitable ventures and have both doubled the money he gave them. But when he asks the third servant what he did with the money, the servant says he didn’t want to take any risks with a talent that didn’t belong to him, so he just buried it in the back yard. The man rewards his first two servants and fires the third for squandering this opportunity.
The moral of this story is that we’re all given gifts when we come into the world, and that it’s not ok to just ignore those gifts - even if we feel less gifted or deserving compared to other people, it’s important to use our gifts for the community. Over time, we came to call these gifts ‘talents’ after the parable of the talents. We probably also came to associate them because a talent is something that can make you a lot of money, and it’s also something you might spend twenty years developing!
Talents can come in different forms. Some people are talented because something is easy for them - they don’t need to practice as hard as someone else to achieve the same things. Other people are talented because they enjoy something a lot - they’ll want to practice more than anyone else at that thing. Most teachers agree that if you could have only one of those kinds of talents it’s better to enjoy something a lot, because practice makes more of a difference over the long term. But if you can, it’s of course best to find something that you enjoy more than other people and that you improve more quickly at! It’s also great to discover you have multiple talents that are both relevant to one thing!
Now we’re going to do an exercise related to talents. One of the best talents to have is to recognize what talents someone has. Someone who is very talented but doesn’t know what their talents are might spend a lot of time trying things out before they start to practice in a field they have a talent for. So this exercise is to guess what talents we think people have.
Start with yourself. Write down at least one thing you think you find easier than other people to improve - either because you can tell you get better at it faster than most people practicing as much as you, or because you know you’d enjoy practicing it more than other people. There are no wrong answers here! You can be as specific or general as you like.
Me:
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Next, think about people you like and admire. This could be friends here at school, members of your family, or even celebrities. Choose two people you like and admire, and write down their name with at least one talent for each:
Person I like #1: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Person I like #2: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Now think about two people from class or your neighborhood that you don’t know very well. Even though you don’t know them very well, try to guess what these people have a talent for. Remember, there are no wrong answers! It’s ok to guess wrong about what someone else is talented in, the important thing is to think about what sorts of talents are out there and how to tell when someone has a talent.
Person I don’t know well #1: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Person I don’t know well #2: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Now think about someone you don’t like. This doesn’t have to be someone from class! Most of us have a famous person that we don’t like, and usually they’re obviously good at something or they wouldn’t be famous. There’s only space for one person because this is a hard exercise! Even when we know someone we don’t like is good at something, it can be hard to admit it or see how they’re talented.
Person I don’t like: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
IF YOU ARE DONE EARLY you have two options: You can go back and write why you think the people you named have the talents you think they have. Or, you can write down as many members of the class with the talents you think they have below:
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This exercise can act as a standalone worksheet for a day, but there are a few ways to follow up. One is for students to pay attention to the talents they believe they noticed in other people, and see whether the people they wrote about develope these talents in future years. The other is more straightforward, and that is to share with students what talents people’s classmates thought they had in a future session and have them write whether they think these assessments were accurate. It is suggested for most classes that the teacher curate and anonymize this very personal feedback before handing it to students.
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