Is “Grit” Just Puritan Work Ethic in Disguise?
October 7, 2012 § 4 Comments
Before we reach the conclusion of Paul Tough’s bestseller How Children Succeed tomorrow night, I wanted to inject an opposition view into the conversation: a recent article by parenting and education author and expert Alfie Kohn. Kohn’s piece “Do kids really learn from failure? Why conventional wisdom may be wrong,” featured on The Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post, questions why exactly we think grit and perseverance are good qualities to engender and develop.
“When you hear about the limits of IQ these days,” he writes, “it’s usually in the context of a conservative narrative that emphasizes not altruism or empathy but something that sounds suspiciously like the Protestant work ethic. More than smarts, we’re told, what kids need to succeed is old-fashioned grit and perseverance, self-discipline and will power. The goal is to make sure they’ll be able to resist temptation, override their unconstructive impulses, and put off doing what they enjoy in order to grind through whatever they’ve been told to do.”
Kohn asks, “Is failure useful?” He says that no research actually shows that failure makes kids better learners, or more successful. “In fact, studies find that when kids fail, they tend to construct an image of themselves as incompetent and even helpless, which leads to more failure. (They also come to prefer easier tasks and lose interest in whatever they’re doing.) In one study, students were asked to solve problems that were rigged to ensure failure. Then they were asked to solve problems that were clearly within their capabilities. What happened? Even the latter problems paralyzed them because a spiral of failure had been set into motion. By the same token, if an adult declines to step in and help when kids are frustrated, that doesn’t make them more self-sufficient or self-confident: It mostly leaves them feeling less supported, less secure about their own worthiness, and more doubtful about the extent to which the parent or teacher really cares about them.”
He notes that often, the reason kids fail at tasks is twofold: because they don’t see a good reason for doing them, or because they were ordered to do so, without any context or decision-making power of their own.
But this is my favorite, and perhaps most substantive, of Kohn’s reasons he believes kids fail at school: ”Maybe the problem is that the educational environment emphasizes how well students are doing rather than what they’re doing: It’s all about achievement! performance! results! rigor! and not about the learning itself. Educational psychologists have found that when students are induced to think about grades and test scores — particularly, though not exclusively, when the point is to do better than everyone else — they will naturally attempt to avoid unnecessary risks. If the goal is to get an A, then it’s rational to pick the easiest possible task. Giving up altogether just takes this response to its logical conclusion. “I’m no good at this, so why bother?” is not an unreasonable response when school is primarily about establishing how good you are.”
Putting this in perspective of our Parent Book Club book, what do you think of this? Do you think developing grit is just a way to teach our kids to be compliant with orders? Or, do you think that grit and perseverance offer something more?
I believe there is a great value in “interrogating” the different words we use to describe educational processes, such as you are doing here Holly by asking the question “What is education?” We might then ask what is “grit” or what is “failure.” I think what we find is that all of these words serve as mirrors that reveal our own biases and philosophies about education. Someone who has a more conservative view of education–embracing the idea that students must pull themselves up by their bootstrap and that the teacher’s role is to only deliver content–might indeed use the conversation about “grit” as an excuse to not really design meaningful experiences for his/her students. A more progressive educator–steeped in the world of project-based experiences–might view “grit” as the need to stick with a piece, whether it be a play, an experiment, or a piece of writing, until the student achieves a high level of quality. The same is true for “failure.” Twyla Tharp claimed that 99% of her work as a choreographer/dancer was a failure. But most of this failure happened when she was alone in her studio, trying various pieces out, and rejecting much of it. But when her work became public it generally has been a tremendous success. This is a different definition of “failure” than Kohn’s and one that is much more productive to think about in educational settings. Thanks for moving the conversation forward Holly.
Yes yes! I hadn’t thought about it in that way! I love Twyla Tharp, and I love thinking about failure in the way she does (as writers, we sort of have to, eh?).
Have you read “How Children Succeed”? In the end of the book, Tough talks about an extremely disadvantaged girl working her butt off trying to make it through college (he quotes her saying something like – nothing’s going to stop me, I will never give up) and contrasts it with his own ambitions. He got accepted to Columbia, then dropped out after a semester. He tried college a second time in Canada, dropped out again. It was only through getting jobs, travelling, wandering, etc. that he found what he wanted to do. Of course, he had the luxury to do so. He points out how conditional “success” and “failure” are to us, how each means something different depending on where you are standing.
Investigating the words we choose would be a good practice in everyday life, not just in education
I just came accross the book and your site by searching Alfie Kohn on the book . Thanks for your insights . I think he gets it wrong – character education is more about meeting adult expectations and getting compliance and motivation is extrinsic
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Hi Allan! Thanks for stopping by! I read your post, and I can really appreciate much of what you wrote – I think that, as my colleague and friend Kurt and I discussed above, it’s valuable to think about these words and what they mean to different kids (and adults!). But we also know that practice makes you better (the Tywla Tharpe example Kurt used above), and we have lots of science to prove it. And the only way to get through enough practice to get really good at something – and therefore, to have fun doing it – is to have the perseverance and dedication to do it even when you don’t like it. Kohn is right, that a lot of this “pull yourself up by your bootsraps” stuff is kind of coded language, and we should be on the lookout for that.
Thanks for reading and commenting, and please come back and share more!