I used to be a schoolteacher, and the Growth Mindset was one of the Theories of the Year that I was expected to wholeheartedly believe in. Educational psycholog

I used to be a schoolteacher, and the Growth Mindset was one of the Theories of the Year that I was expected to wholeheartedly believe in. Educational psychologists keep coming up with this stuff, and teachers lap it up, because teaching is all about morality, because there's no fair way of measuring efficacy in teaching. In fields like physics (which I taught) or computer science, there's an underlying mathematical formalism that ties the whole thing together and gives it structure. Do an image search for 'map of physics' and there'll be a fair few interpretations of that structure. But in the humanities and the social sciences, there's none of that. My friends who did physics PhDs were told by their supervisors what they would research; when I did my Masters of Education, I was expected to decide on my own research question. Everyone in the humanities is building their own little hovel, whereas in the mathematised sciences, everyone is working together to build a magnificent castle. As a physicist, if I were doing serious research in psychology, the first thing I would do is try to work out everything about how a neuron works: how it takes input, how it produces output, what information storage capability it has, and so on. Having done that, the next thing would be to study two neurons working in connection, and then gradually increase the complexity of the system until it's an actual brain. This bottom-up approach is key to the success of the mathematised sciences. But in the real world of psychology, everyone comes in with their top-down questions and tries to answer those. Studies tell us we can only keep seven things in working memory, but what does that even mean? How can we be sure of that - how is that information stored, where can we find it in the brain? No one is building any knowledge of how the brain actually functions; it's just an expensive game using (often inappropriate) statistical techniques to extract (or manufacture) correlations from noise. Any explanatory theories, like Schema Theory, are 'just-so' stories - none of these theories have been subjected to any real attempts to experimentally refute them, because there's nothing falsifiable about them. Dweck's Growth Mindset is particularly attractive to teachers because it's ruthlessly pragmatic with respect to the work of teachers. Intelligence used to be regarded as a fixed, innate quality of a pupil, so there was no point in teachers engaging with it. On the other hand, teachers can affect a pupil's effort, so it makes sense to encourage teachers to do just that. But thanks to Dweck, intelligence has been demoted from 'useless' to 'non-concept'. When a teacher tells you a pupil is 'good', they're talking about behaviour and attitude, never aptitude. But for Microsoft, none of this really matters. Microsoft is a huge organisation, which means the people have to do a lot of work to force the organisation into a structure that they can make sense of (because humans have limited cognitive capacity). They've chosen Dweck's Growth Mindset, but it could have been anything. In 2016, when Dweck came out with her 'False Growth Mindset', I was in my first full-year teaching job. (Previously I'd just been employed one term at a time to cover teachers on leave.) At the end of the year, I was let go, alongside twenty other teachers. That was nothing to do with Dweck - the school had its own, long-standing cult. I still don't know what you had to do to be part of the 'in crowd', but it doesn't matter now. You can blame any management practice you want, but in the end, it's just managers punishing and rewarding according to inappropriate criteria.