Education
Published03/31/2026
4 min read
My child is not smart
There’s no bigger success metric for most African children than school grades! Say what you want about African parents, but they’re really intent on pushing their children for academic success. When I was a child, the grades didn’t even matter as much as the rank in your class. The school report issuing day at the end of every trimester was a big day. Before you even got home, every adult on the way would ask you “Wabaye uwa kangahe?” (How did you rank in your class?). The glorious answer of course was “uwa mbere” (the first of the class) but any position in the top 5 was acceptable. When you arrived home, you handed your school report to your parents; they looked straight at the bottom to the rank box, before diving into the detailed grades with surgical precision, like a financier looking at the bottom line of a financial statement before diving deeper. It was a big deal! I know children who were beaten by their parents for being the second of their class with over 80% grades!
What if we've been measuring the wrong thing all along?
Although, striving for excellence is indeed a virtue and something we should instill in our children, this overfixation on the child’s grades (or class rank in the case of my society), sends the wrong message to the child’s definition of success and leaves gaps in other equally important aspects of the child’s development thus hurting the child in different ways.
The alienation of children labeled as ‘not smart’
Placing an oversized importance on the child’s grades often leads to children put into distinct categories: those who are ‘smart’ and those who are ‘not smart’. In my native language, the latter category is labeled with a very offensive word ‘umuswa’. Children labeled as ‘umuswa’ suffers constant criticism and humiliation that border on psychological abuse even from their own parents. Children’s poor performance in class is often equated with inadequacy, lack of effort, and worse — a verdict on their entire future. Those children are often told that they are incapable or that they will not amount to anything in life. The academic ‘failure’ is perceived as an indication of future general ‘failure’ in all spheres of life.
Redefining ‘smart’
In his famous book “Frames of Mind”, the developmental psychologist Professor Howard Gardner argues that intelligence is not just one thing. He defines eight distinct forms — and most African schools only ever test two of them.
- Logical-mathematical: The ability to reason, solve problems, and think in patterns and numbers. The one that school tests most.
- Linguistic: A gift with words — spoken or written. The child who tells stories that hold a room, or who reads everything she can find.
- Musical: A deep sensitivity to rhythm, melody, and sound. The child who hums tunes perfectly before he can read a word.
- Visual-spatial: The ability to think in images, navigate space, and see the world in three dimensions. Architects, designers, and surgeons live here.
- Bodily-kinesthetic: Mastery of the body — grace, precision, physical coordination. The athlete, the dancer, the craftsman who builds things with his hands.
- Interpersonal: The ability to understand and connect with other people. The child everyone gravitates toward. Leaders are often built here.
- Intrapersonal: A deep awareness of one’s own emotions, motivations, and inner world. Quiet, reflective children often have this in abundance.
- Naturalistic: An affinity for the natural world — plants, animals, patterns in nature. The farmer who reads the land better than any textbook ever could and the animal trainer who possess magic-like abilities to communicate with animals.
A child who struggles to compute multiplication may possess genius-level musical or bodily-kinesthetic intelligence — and once he finds his lane, everyone around him will call him a genius. The school report simply did not have a column for that.
The A-student trap
There’s a second trap beyond the eight forms of intelligence: the assumption that a high class rank means a child worked harder. It doesn’t. Any form of intelligence — including those measured in school — is shaped by two factors in varying ratios: natural predisposition due to the child’s own genetic makeup (often called nature) and instruction, effort and practice (often called nurture). The A-students are not necessarily those who made the most effort; they are often those with high innate abilities in the forms of intelligence assessed in class. By simply judging the school report, a D-student who gave their all will seem less diligent and less hardworking than the A-student who doesn’t need to invest as much effort because it comes to her easily and naturally. Not rewarding the D-student’s efforts is highly discouraging.
What is ‘success’ in the first place?
We often go to great lengths to push our children towards academic excellence justifying it as ‘setting them up for a successful life’ in the future. We punish them when they are not getting good grades, we call them names. We sacrifice enjoyable hobbies, play, and friendships — things that paradoxically may be more determining in that future success than the grades and class rank we’re so fixated on. We all know successful business tycoons, who did not do well in school when they were children. We all know A-students who graduated on top of their class but remained unemployed for long periods of time or were trapped in unfulfilling careers unable to advance at top of their professions. There is a Hospital Executive somewhere who earns ten times more than a neurosurgeon in that same hospital. The neurosurgeon was an A-student, the Hospital Executive was a C-student. There is a millionaire somewhere who committed suicide and met his untimely death, while many people thought his life was perfect and envied his ‘success’. So, what is success?