The Inequalities of Birth Month

"We do ability groupings early on in childhood. We have advanced reading groups and advanced math gorups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability. And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year the same thing happens, and they do even better again."

In "Outlier", Malcolm Gladwell explains how our culture, opportunities, and the people around us contribute to success. In the chapter entitled "The Matthew Effect" he examines hockey players, soccer players, and schoolchildren and demonstrates some extraordinary parallels between the month of birth and success in both soports and academics. At a young age, the difference between being born near the beginning of the year and the end of the year is significantly large in terms of maturity and size. In both sports and academics, there are groupas at an early age depending on "skill". However, at such a young age, skill and maturity are indistinguishable. The older kids get special treatment on select teams and advanced school groups, while the younger kids get less training in house league and less advanced groupings.

I was amazed when I saw the statistics that Gladwell reels off; I hadn't realized that our culture makes such arbitrary decisions on who will have a greater opportunity to succeed. If someone is a true "genius" (though Gladwell later redefines what genius means) or if they have an inordinate amount of natural skill, they can succeed, but the fact that such a huge percentage of our population is at a disadvantage due to their month of birth is disheartening. Gladwell does give alternative options, however; he explains that Denmark does not have the same difference in academic success throughout the months as the rest of the world because they do not do advanced academic groups until the age of ten.

The discrepancy of success in cohorts of different birth months continues even through university. Gladwell mentions that in universities, the "students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are under-represented by 11.6%" (29). The repurcussions extend beyond mere marks, however. With the stress of having a harder time in university and poorer school performance, students born during the later months tend to have higher suicide rates.

Our entire education system as well as many sports systems is rife with inequalities for its youth. Gladwell demonstrates this precisely and illustrates how we could change this to give a fair advantage to all children. In the rest of his book, Gladwell expounds upon the successes of household names from the Beatles and Bill Gates, to wealthy lawyers, and entire races. From the first chapter he made me realize that there is a lot more to success than hard work- there is a lot of luck involved with where, when, to whom, and into what culture you are born. Though we consider our country to be very equal for everyone, the opportunities given to each individual are completely unequal.