“Treat a man as he appears to be and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he already were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, novelist and dramatist.

A famous study in the classroom by Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, and Lenore Jackson, a San Francisco school principle furnishes us with a good illustration of this. They asked the question: Do some children perform poorly in school because their teachers expect them to? If so, they surmised, raising the teacher’s expectations should raise the children’s performance as well. So a group of kindergarten through fifth-grade pupils were given a learning ability test and the next fall the new teachers were casually given the names of five or six children in the new class who were designated as “spurters”; the tests supposedly revealed that they had exceptional learning ability.

What the teachers did not know was that the test results had been rigged and that the names of these “spurters” had been chosen entirely at random. At the end of the school year, all the children were retested, with some astonishing results. The pupils whom the teachers thought had the most potential had actually scored far ahead, and had gained as many as 15 to 27 I.Q. points. The teachers described these children as happier, more curious, more affectionate than average, and having a better chance of success in later life. The only change for the year was the change in attitudes of the teachers. Because they had been led to expect more of certain students, those children came to expect more of themselves. “The explanation probably lies in the subtle interaction between teacher and pupils,” speculates Rosenthal. “Tone of voice, facial expressions, touch and posture may be the means by which – often unwittingly – teachers communicate their expectations to their pupils.”

Source: Alan Loy McGinnis, Bringing Out The Best in People, p.32-33