Arnold has spent 17 years following the lives of 81 Illinois students who graduated at the top of their class. These valedictorians, she found, relied less on native intelligence than on effort. They were hardworking. They were persistent. A new book by Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption, has caused a sensation by claiming that parents matter less than peers in shaping a child.
Educators tend to disagree.
When the kids make mistakes, it's looked upon as a chance to learn to do something better, rather than as something punitive. When she was 10 months old, she suffered a seizure and fell into a coma for 24 hours. Doctors warned her mother Cheryl that Enjolique would probably be mentally disabled. Cheryl didn't buy that prognosis. If you can capture their imagination right then, it seems to last forever, but if you let that window close, it's lost forever.