The quiet one

There he is. Sit­ting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult –and cer­tainly fe­male, too– but today at least this in­tro­vert has very lit­tle to say for him­self.

Fa­mil­iar to most of us who spend any time in group sit­u­a­tions at work or in a so­cial set­ting, the in­tro­vert is not shy by de­f­i­n­i­tion. Ac­cord­ing to North Amer­i­can au­thor (and self-ac­knowl­edged in­tro­vert) Susan Cain, shy­ness is ac­tu­ally about fear of being judged by oth­ers.

In fact, she ar­gues, it’s just that “in­tro­verts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most ca­pa­ble when they’re in qui­eter, more low-key en­vi­ron­ments.” Ex­tro­verts –their op­po­sites– are peo­ple who sim­ply func­tion bet­ter with a high level of so­cial stim­u­la­tion.

The wider point that Cain makes in her book on the sub­ject is she be­lieves that a bias has crept into “our most im­por­tant in­sti­tu­tions, our schools and our work­places. They are de­signed mostly for ex­tro­verts and for ex­tro­verts’ need for lots of stim­u­la­tion. And also we have this be­lief sys­tem right now that I call the new group­think, which holds that all cre­ativ­ity and all pro­duc­tiv­ity comes from a very oddly gre­gar­i­ous place.”

My­self, as some­one who does not fit neatly into ei­ther cat­e­gory of the out-going chat­ter­box or the silent in­ter­nal type (but rather seem to flit be­tween the two de­pend­ing on the mo­ment) I con­fess to hav­ing largely failed in my at­tempts to run a fully in­clu­sive class­room. When I was a sec­ondary school teacher I tried to de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally in­volve all of my stu­dents in being vocal but (like many ed­u­ca­tors) I was un­aware of how best to do this or that some teenagers just do not want to speak if it can be avoided.

Teach­ing adults over the last few years, I’ve learned that the pre­vail­ing cul­ture in this part of the world, too, is clearly in favour of ex­tro­verts. I have even taught in com­pa­nies where they be­lieve that they do not have any in­tro­verts work­ing along­side them as their col­leagues. In the end­less rounds of group meet­ings and chatty open plan of­fices, in­tro­verts often fade into the back­ground. It is as if being in­tro­verted is a mark of shame and sets some­one apart as “not a team player.”