The Value of Struggle

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"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically... Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education."    Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. 

While mission is the heart of what drives a successful community, how does an organization then accomplish that mission?  As an independent school for a very particular population, we wrestle with this question when we think about admissions and who will benefit most from our program.  Related to these discussions, the buzz among us has been the concept of grit and how this fits in our admissions process.  Will every gifted kid benefit from the rigors of a program where the focus is on daily high expectations for production?  How about when he or she does not have inner tenacity to succeed?  Can we develop grit when a student does not have this resolve?  If so, how?  How important is support from parents?

Canadian author Paul Tough has released a new book on just this topic entitled, Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  In his book, Tough argues that character traits such as resilience, self-control, curiosity, and perserverance are better measures of determining potential academic success than indicators such as IQ scores.  For us, IQ testing is an important component of our admissions application and needs to be, yet the focus on developing these components of character is really the heart of what we do, and it is affirming to learn that we are on the right track.  We start with the premise that gifted kids need to be challenged in a loving, nurturing environment that will allow them to stumble and to recover, so they will develop the ability to recover and press on.  These aren’t new concepts, and history is full of references to the importance of developing these inner strengths as a goal for education.  If our kids fret when the answers are not easy, and they must think intensively, we tell them, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress,” relying not only on our own encouragement, but also on the genius of Frederick Douglass to comfort them. 

In an interview with NPR, Tough said, "Right now we've got an education system that really doesn't pay attention to [noncognitive] skills at all. ... I think schools just aren't set up right now to try to develop things like grit, and perseverance and curiosity. ... Especially in a world where we are more and more focused on standardized tests that measure a pretty narrow range of cognitive skills, teachers are less incentivized to think about how to develop those skills in kids. So it's a conversation that's really absent I think in a lot of schools, to the detriment of a lot of students."

We still have a lot of questions to be answered and have not yet worked out all the details, yet I am proud to be a part of a community where this conversation is happening and where developing the character of our students is our most important value.

Note:  Since I posted this, Tough's concept of "grit" has received a lot of pushback, especially as regards socioeconomically disadvantaged students and students of color.  See Paul Thomas's excellent blog, The Becoming Radical for discussion.  SCV 6/6/16.