How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

admonitions,

deciphering text and manipulating numbers.

Tools of the Mind, by contrast, doesn’t focus much on reading and math abilities. Instead, all of its interventions are intended to help children learn a different kind of skill: controlling their impulses, staying focused on the task at hand, avoiding distractions and mental traps, managing their emotions, organizing their thoughts.

under the rubric self-r...

“play plans,”

naturally teach children how to follow rules and regulate impulses.

verged on the gladiatorial.

dubbed

Kumon chain of tutoring centers

cognitive hypothesis: the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.

new invention.

1994, when the Carnegie Corporation published Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children,

Psychologists and sociologists produced evidence linking the academic underperformance of poor children to a lack of verbal and mathematical stimulation at home and at school.

the number of words that the children heard from their parents early in life.

By age three, Hart and Risley determined, the children raised by professional parents had heard thirty million words spoken to them; the children with parents on welfare had heard just ten million.

reassuringly linear,

Hart and Risley calculated that a child who grew up on welfare would need precisely forty-one hours of language-intensive intervention each week in order to close the vocabulary gap with a working-class child.

disparate congregation

What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

For certain skills, the stark calculus behind the cognitive hypothesis—that what matters in developing a skill is starting earlier and practicing more—is entirely valid.

Some skills really are pretty mechanical.

developing the more subtle elements of the human personality,

We can’t get better at overcoming disappointment just by working harder at it for more hours. And children don’t lag behind in curiosity simply because they didn’t start...

The pathways through which we acquire and lose these skills are certainly not random—psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot in the past few decades about where thes...

the conventional wisdom about child development over the past few decades has been misguided.

We have been focusing on the wrong skills and abilities in our children, and we have been using the wrong strategies to help nurture and teach those skills.

James Heckman,

leading a challenge to the supremacy of cognitive skill.

He is a classic academic intellectual, his glasses thick, his IQ stratospheric, his shirt pocket bristling with mechanical pencils. He grew up in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, the son of a middle manager at a meatpacking company. Neither of his parents was college educated, but they both recognized early on that their son possessed a precocious mind. At the age of eight, Heckman devoured his father’s copy of the popular self-help book 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, and at nine, he saved up his pennies and ordered Mathematics for the Practical Man from the back of a comic book. Heckman turned out to be a natural at math, more at home with equations than with anything or anyone else. As a teenager, for fun, he made a habit of taking long numbers and dividing them in his head into the prime numbers that ...

econometrics,

generally incomprehensible

impenetrable,

clout and cachet

cement his reputation

Which skills and traits lead to success? How do they develop in childhood? And what kind of interventions might help children do better?

The GED’s growth was founded on a version of the cognitive hypothesis: the belief that what schools develop, and what a high-school degree certifies, is cognitive skill. If a teenager already has the knowledge and the smarts to graduate from high school, he doesn’t need to waste his time actually finishing high school.

attractive notion,

At the high-water mark, in 2001, more than a million young people took the test, and nearly one in every five new high-school “graduates” was actually a GED holder. (The figure is now about one in seven.)

scores on achievement tests,

IQ,

At age twenty-two, Heckman found, just 3 percent of GED recipients were enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of post-secondary degree, compared to 46 percent of high-school graduates.

In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes—annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs—GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts.

it might be having a negative overall effect by inducing young people to drop out of high school.

confounding intellectual puzzle.

Like most economists, Heckman had believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person’s life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group—GED holders—whose good test score...

Those traits—an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan—also turned out to be valuable in college, in the workplace, and in life generally.

the GED has become a test that separates bright but nonpersistent and undisciplined dropouts from other dropouts.”

GED holders, he wrote, “are ‘wise guys’ who lack the ability to think ahead, persist in tasks, or to ...

soft skills.

Ypsilanti, Michigan,