How Do You Know You’re Smart? lessons from children’s drawings

{Tanushree Sarkar likes to read, write, make friends with cats (okay, also dogs) and tiny humans, and try her hands at different ways of making art. She teaches at the University of Missouri. Vivek Vellanki likes to look at photographs, make photographs, and think about how photographs shape our understanding of the world and each other. He teaches at Indiana University, Bloomington.}

How do children think about their own abilities? How do they learn whether they are smart or ordinary? According to children, what makes someone intelligent? My (Tanushree) interest in these questions comes from a curiosity about children’s understandings of the social world and from a theoretical debate within developmental social psychology. There is a tension in the field about how to conceptualize children’s notions of intelligence. Put another way, this is a tension about how adults conceptualize children and children’s relationship to society.

One set of scholars believes that children’s ideas about intelligence are about development. That is, as children grow older, their ideas about intelligence evolve to become more sophisticated and closer to those of adults. In this view, children are always adults-in-the-making. A second set of scholars is interested in how beliefs about intelligence affect academic performance. This is what is popularised as growth mindset theory—the idea that children (and adults) who believe that intelligence is malleable are more resilient and more likely to have better academic performance than those who believe intelligence is a fixed trait. In this school of thought, adult interventions can put children on the path to success, and children are largely passive recipients of the adult world.

My academic training was split between these two theoretical camps. As I spent more time interviewing children, I realized that they are not simply future adults or passive receptacles for adult ideas. Instead, they actively construct, resist, shape, and reshape the adult world. I found another set of scholars who believe that children have their own cultures, beliefs, and ideas that are worth engaging with for what they are. In 2015, as part of a broader project, I asked 107 seventh-grade students across two private schools in New Delhi, India, to share their ideas of intelligence through drawings. I had them divide a piece of paper in half. On one side, they drew an intelligent student and on the other, an ordinary student. I then asked them to write about their drawings. 

Given my training, my initial interest in these drawings was to count: how many children drew particular hairstyles, spectacles, clothing, or location? What was the gender distribution and difference in the drawings? I did the calculations, compared the means, and computed the statistical tests, but something was missing. There was something that children were trying to show me that I wasn’t ready to look at. It took me almost a decade to see what it was. This is when I invited Vivek to look at these drawings with me. 

When Tanushree and I (Vivek) started looking closely at the children’s drawings, we noticed some recurring themes. The children were drawing distinctions between the smart child and the ordinary child using gestures and objects. There was a nod to how one spent their time, whether one was being productive or not. We noticed how hairstyles, clothes, and food showed up as markers of intelligence. The children’s drawings made us reflect on our own schooling experiences. We saw ourselves making paper planes in the classroom, studying while our friends were playing, or dreaming of ice cream and video games while inside the classroom.

We thought back to instances when we were labelled as the smart child or the ordinary child. We wondered how we came to adopt these labels. What started as a curiosity about children’s worlds led us back to our own childhoods. The drawings were not simply portrayals of what the children thought about the idea of smartness. They were more like mirrors, a reflection on how notions of intelligence are constructed and reproduced within our schools and society. Through our conversations, we realized that the labels and experiences from our time in school continue to linger, haunt, and mark our lives as adults.

We decided to interview other adults and to listen to their stories about intelligence. We reached out to teachers, students, and artists. We asked them to reflect on their ideas of intelligence from when they were 12 years old, the same age as the students who made the drawings. Our conversations led us to some soft and vulnerable spaces. 

First, smartness was a category that was conferred on you by an authority figure. Our adult participants shared that the first time they thought of themselves as smart or ordinary as a child was because an adult (most often a teacher) labelled them as such. Second, the label of smartness/ordinariness continues to haunt and linger in people’s lives. The label would resurface when hanging out with friends and family, comparing grades. Sometimes, in the middle of completing a task, the memory would surface unexpectedly. 

What would begin as nostalgia often resurfaced the same apprehensions they experienced as middle-schoolers: Did I get good grades? Am I smart enough? Do others think I am intelligent? Third, smartness was seen as a rare commodity. It was not about having certain qualities, dispositions, or abilities. It was relational. If some people are smart, then other people have to be ordinary. 

We realized that we need spaces for adults to reflect on their ideas about intelligence and society. Perhaps this might be a way to interrupt how we reproduce these labels in our everyday lives, in our conversations with young people around us. We created a book, a little notebook on smartness*, that brings together the children’s drawings, our reflections, and activities created by the adults we interviewed. We hope that this book offers space for reflection and dialogue on this topic. 

*This book is forthcoming from Eklavya Foundation.

As part of this reflection, we invite you to participate in the drawing task.

Take your drawing, find a friend, and make them draw too. As you look at your drawings, share stories about school, how you developed a sense of what intelligence is, and how you think these ideas shaped your experiences. Here are a few questions we asked the adults we interviewed to get you started:

1. Think about yourself at age 12. Did you think of yourself as a “smart” or an “ordinary” student? What made you think of yourself in this way?

2. What, if at all, did other people say or do to make you feel “smart” or “ordinary”? Can you share some examples?

3.What, if at all, did you say or do to feel “smart” or “ordinary”? Can you share some examples?

4. Has there been a change in whether you see yourself as smart or ordinary over the years? If anything has changed, what/who do you attribute this change in perspective to?

5. If you could meet your twelve-year-old self now, what would you tell them about the concept of intelligence/smartness?