It can feel quite natural for us to question the above in this way: "How does that 'I am stupid' meaning perspective get inside those students and inside us?" As with much if not almost all in life, we learn it. We aren't born with any idea of our dumbness or inadequacy. It's not genetic. We get taught it. Our teachers are everywhere in our lives, and they teach what countless others have taught them over and over, time out of mind. If we return to our child on the floor with all these pieces around her/him, we can see how such a feeling can start. It starts from "I am right and you are wrong" statements which amount to "I am smart and you are dumb" statements.
Our child decides to make some sort of form out of the chaotic pieces spread around and risks it. She/he puts one piece into another, and it works. She/he follows with another piece, and it works—sort of—but good enough for starters. The child begins to feel some confidence in the process, and she/he is mostly interested in the process rather than the result. It might even begin to feel powerful, and power in terms of making form out of chaos can feel just like smart. Along comes a caring but result oriented adult. The adult has lived long enough and been taught enough to feel and believe in results as the primary if not only real concern (another meaning perspective—ends rather than means are important). This adult sees the child at work and lovingly and caringly corrects what the child has done explaining all the while how this is the way it's really done, and when you do it this way, you get this result. The adult means no punishment, and the child may show no hurt, but the child has learned or begun to learn. There is a right way to do things, inherently the smart way, and a wrong way to do things, inherently the dumb way.
At some very real level, the child may learn that she/he is inherently dumb because she/he did not know how to get the right result. The fun and power she/he felt in the other process probably came from the same dumbness. That makes the child all the more dumb and incompetent. The child may have also learned that she/he has enough smart to pretend to know what to do by pretending to the skill and smart the adult has shown, but that would begin as a pretence and end as a pretence. The original dumbness that our child feels can swiftly become an incorrigible meaning perspective which will grow over her/his lifetime. Most if not all of her/his learning experiences will validate that original experience and make of that meaning perspective a truth of the very nature of the child, of the identity of that child, and operate as the essential part of the identity of that child well into adulthood and to the end of life itself.
When we enter the educational system, if not before, the essential question the system asks us sounds, like this even not if actually spoken: "How smart are you?" Words don't just make sounds. They make feelings. After discussing this question and the resulting feelings with many students, I know how much these words hurt. I have felt it myself. "How smart are you" works as the first learning and part of a growing meaning perspective.