There are absolutely merits to Carol Dweck's concept of the growth mindset. I know I've struggled with not beating myself up over small failures to the detriment of my overall learning ability, but I also have a problem with the individualistic nature of her Growth Mindset.
The most effective learning and teaching strategies have to look at education as holistic and social rather than something that one person can control through force of will and attitude. Economic inequality in school isn't going to be overcome because every student woke up one day and decided to just change the way their brain worked. Attitude is not going to be able to buy textbooks, supply hungry children with breakfast, or pay the family's electric bills. I believe the implication that a change in mindset can adequately bridge such gaps between chronically impoverished school districts and affluent districts based on anecdotes of only a few schools is ingenuine. It paints the problem of academic failure as an individual one rather than one heavily influenced by one's circumstances and community. It also lays the blame for academic failing on the student, their parents, or the teacher when in fact these things are often beyond any of their control.
Furthermore there's a very good reason why students develop this mindset. It doesn't appear out of nowhere, it's culturally motivated. People focus on doing what they know they can accomplish and what's easy for them because failure is punished harshly. A person can take an english class in freshman year, fail it, but 3 years later make an A in English (maybe because they changed their mindset). If they retook that old english class they could pass it with flying colors. They've learned, the method's succeeded! But their report card still shows the F from freshman year. That F still drags down their GPA despite the fact that they learned from it. Being perfect is rewarded in our society, making mistakes is punished. Hitting a rough patch in life and taking a hit to your credit score because you couldn't pay rent for a couple months stays on your score for years. Making mistakes at your job can get you fired. Changing your own attitude about Growth Mindset doesn't mean that anyone changes their mind on how they're going to punish you for making mistakes, and when the stakes are so high (getting into grad school, losing your house, losing your job), how are we incentivized to maintain a "failure is okay" philosophy? The culture needs to change. Society needs to change. The blame for fear of failure is not on the individual, but on society at large that forces us into it.
However, none of these arguments for why this method is misguided or ineffective on a large scale, community wide basis necessarily mean that it can't work on an individual scale for a financially stable person in a non-marginalized or disadvantaged situation. But that's a lot of caveats for a educational method. If an teaching method is only going to work for a very few, should we really rely on it for students to implement by themselves? Not everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Education is the responsibility of everyone as a whole. If everyone could just change their mindset on a whim, and thereby change their life, we'd have all done it already.
