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Education Debate: Which Is More Important - Grit, Or Intelligence?
HughPickens.com writes Anna North writes in the NYT that self-control, curiosity, and "grit" may seem more personal than academic, but at some schools, they're now part of the regular curriculum. Some researchers say personality could be even more important than intelligence when it comes to students' success in school. "We probably need to start rethinking our emphasis on intelligence," says Arthur E. Poropat citing research that shows that both conscientiousness and openness are more highly correlated with student performance than intelligence. "This isn't to say that we should throw intelligence out, but we need to pull back on thinking that this is the only game in town." The KIPP network of charter schools emphasizes grit along with six other "character strengths," including self-control and curiosity. "We talk a lot about them as being skills or strengths, not necessarily traits, because it's not innate," says Leyla Bravo-Willey. "If a child happens to be very gritty but has trouble participating in class, we still want them to develop that part of themselves."
But the focus on character has encountered criticism. "To begin with, not everything is worth doing, let alone doing for extended periods, and not everyone who works hard is pursuing something worthwhile" says Alfie Kohn. "On closer inspection, the concept of grit turns out to be dubious, as does the evidence cited to support it. Persistence can actually backfire and distract from more important goals." There's other evidence that grit isn't always desirable. Gritty people sometimes exhibit what psychologists call "nonproductive persistence": They try, try again, says Dean MacFarlin though the result may be either unremitting failure or "a costly or inefficient success that could have been easily surpassed by alternative courses of action."
But the focus on character has encountered criticism. "To begin with, not everything is worth doing, let alone doing for extended periods, and not everyone who works hard is pursuing something worthwhile" says Alfie Kohn. "On closer inspection, the concept of grit turns out to be dubious, as does the evidence cited to support it. Persistence can actually backfire and distract from more important goals." There's other evidence that grit isn't always desirable. Gritty people sometimes exhibit what psychologists call "nonproductive persistence": They try, try again, says Dean MacFarlin though the result may be either unremitting failure or "a costly or inefficient success that could have been easily surpassed by alternative courses of action."
intelligence = engine
grit = tires
personality=gas type (ethanol, diesel, electric, etc)
in this road of life...(get it? get it?)
I have known many persistent idiots. Things would have been much better for all concerned if they would have just quit trying and ask for help.
What does grit have to do with conscientiousness and openness? I would consider grit to be the opposite of both.
Thank you
Ditto.
let's kick this off by saying I agree!
I'll add to the mix here, memory type. My son has a massive capacity to learn things in the short term, but by the time he wakes up the next morning, he's forgotten 90% of what he remembered. This scares me! Because my own learning has always been somewhat slower than his, but my capacity to remember is much higher. To that end, I grew up thinking I was the stupidest in the class (despite my intelligence). Later on, I found I was considered quite intelligent, and went back to education on my own terms - and became a qualified software developer.
I think our kids today growing up and going to college miss basic skills of collaboration. Also the ability to inspire others. Having someone in your "group" that inspires you can be a catalyst for productivity. Intelligence I believe should be defined in such a way as to encompass this new definition.
Balance. Intelligence is knowing when to give up and go back to the drawing board.
...
Without persistence, intelligence is an unfulfilled and wasted gift. Without intelligence, persistence is an exercise in futility. Which is why less intelligent people depend on social feedback to make decisions.
It's not hard.
Psychologists relearning what has been known for centuries. Someone didn't read their own textbooks
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I had a high school English teacher give me a B on my report card instead of an A because she had given me a D on classroom participation. That B prevented me from getting straight As that period.
Why didn't I participate in the classroom? My personality made me sit and listen and learn instead of mouthing off.
Quitters never win, and winners never quit. People who never win and never quit are just stupid.
I never studied. My phenomenal raw intelligence got me through. I could listen to the lecture, instantly digest the material, and understand it better than most of my classmates did even after they spent the evenings poring over books and lectures. Could I have done better if I studied? Absolutely. Would I have had nearly as much fun hanging out at the local watering hole during the evenings? No way. Grades are fleeting. Intelligence stays with you as long as you are above ground and cannot be taken away.
So what makes great leaders also makes great students.
But not everyone is a leader. Some make better followers. How do we help them? Personality traits and values are genetic or are formed at an early age. By the time they get to school, it is pretty much too late to ingrain conscientiousness, curiosity, self-awareness, self-efficacy, agreeable, extraversion, openness.
Average intelligence matched with extraordinary work ethic beats Extraordinary intelligence matched with zero work ethic. But, life isn't fair and someone with extraordinary intelligence can get away with a slightly below average work ethic and beat and average person with a good work ethic.
In the grand scheme of things, however, we can only control our work ethic... intelligence is mostly what we are born with. So focus on becoming the best version of yourself and don't worry about what you cannot control.
One of the greatest tragedies in our times is the idea that all children should get the same education. It is the oddest thing. We all admit that children actually start off at different levels.
But rather than do what is best for each child, we pretend there is some sort of universal curriculum that all children should follow. It's just not the case.
Grit, self-control, curiousity are probably very important if your main goal is to get a job and provide for your family.
I was a teacher for a while, and this was the most frustrating things. Having to teach kids in a 'non-academic neighborhood' for lack of a better term, as I taught in both inner-city type schools as well as rural 'trashy' schools. I'm up there teaching math these kids couldn't care about and is going to be of little use to any of them in their future. Yet, that is the curriculum, because it is standardized and they happen to be in grade 10.
To these kids, teaching them some grit, self-control, curiosity would probably benefit them 1000x more and improve their life and the next generation.
Yet, somehow it is considered unfair if we did that because then we'd be admitting they are not as advanced as other kids. Yes, they're not. That is why people would classify them as a trouble neighborhood or whatever.
Then of course you have other kids who might not suffer the same problem and maybe for them you need to focus more on intelligence and academics.
Ultimately, I'd rather have the school system deal with the reality of children by using different methods on different groupings of children as opposed to pretending everyone is the same when they're not.
And no, I'm not saying there aren't any brilliant kids in a ghetto school. They do exist. One might say, I was one of them. I'm saying it is pretty easy to keep us happy. Just having academic streams in high school or give us other classes. Maybe school wasn't optimized for me, but in the end, I have a decent job and make decent money. Let's face it, how many children from ghetto neighborhoods are working at Google?
But as far as social issues go, our biggest problems are not optimizing intelligence for advanced R&D here. It's the basics for most of the population and it is there that grit, self-control, curiosity are really much better.
And yes, maybe that formalizes the reality that if you're in a ghetto school, you would be more educated to just get a job. And if you are in a rich area, you are more educated to do advanced academic work.
Yes, maybe it formalizes it. But it's not like without that formalization, it isn't true today.
But I guess, that's political correctness. Better to have poor people suffer, than formalize that they're different in this time and place.
Intelligence stays with you as long as you are above ground and cannot be taken away.
You're not 50 yet, are you?
That razor sharp intelligence is only marginally less fleeting than beauty.
The full list:
I read through the description for each. At first I thought maybe this stuff was all a little too touchy-feely, but the descriptions seem reasonable. My main quibble is these should be things parents are instilling in their kids not the educators. I want Educators to focus on presenting knowledge, not crafting personalities. That said, so many children lack good guidance at home it is tempting to throw this in with the educator’s responsibilities as well.
As the parent of a Straight ‘A’ gifted child I can say for a fact Hard Work is the most important factor. Call this Grit if you want. Also IQ is not static. Working hard at any age WILL raise your IQ. There are those that say it varies by at most 10 points, but I know both for myself and my daughter it is over 20 points higher than both our first testings.
Letter To Iran
Oh great, and then we get to debate who really has true grit. I introduce to you the Rooster Cogburn fallacy. "Only one man has true grit, and that is Rooster Cogburn. You don't have true grit, so you must not be Rooster Cogburn".
Isn't the point of this whole debate whether intelligence is the engine or grit is the engine?
If a person is both intelligent and curious/motivated they will do VERY well in academia. One without the other will help, but you really need both to do well. And, IMHO, you really can't teach either. They have to come from innate ability and from inside the student themselves.
Now, that's in academia. Life is a different story. Success in life depends more on charisma and luck. Intelligence and motivation play a much lesser role there.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
... One of the reasons these efforts to harmonize national education policy are foolish is that they limit what various schools are trying or can try.
I am all for any school trying something so long as the parents stand behind it.
If the parents want to try this "grit" concept... then go for it. It can't hurt so long as it is tried on a small scale.
Too often things go directly from some theory in academia to broad application without testing the concept empirically on the small scale. I am all for those that come up with new education ideas pitching them to individual schools and seeing if they work.
If they do, then broaden the application to a district or a state. And if that works well then suggest that other schools adopt the concept as well. But always let schools decide to ignore the new thing as well because they might be trying something entirely different.
Diversity is more then skin color and gender. It is also diversity of thought, ideas, and method. Let people do things their own way and judge them by the results. Concepts that are successful should earn respect and wider adoption. Concepts that are failures should earn shame and reduced application.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We're talking primary and secondary education here. You never needed that much intelligence to get through it, you only had to not more than 1 sigma below the mean. And the curriculum isn't getting any harder intelligence-wise. Further, certain common pedagogic techniques (e.g. large numbers of similar homework problems) reward persistence over intelligence. "A costly and inefficient success" gets you the same grade, if not better, than an easy one.
So "grit" is probably more important than intelligence in K-12 education. The more intelligence you have, the less "grit" you're going to need, except when faced with one of those teaching techniques that demands "grit".
What a dumbass comment. Hey, dumbass, ever seen mothers looking after their families? If it were not for their grit many more kids would end up in jail and or dead.
You can't handle the truth.
"We probably need to start rethinking our emphasis on intelligence," says Arthur E. Poropat citing research that shows that both conscientiousness and openness are more highly correlated with student performance than intelligence. " Or maybe we need to start rethinking why intelligence is less correlated with student performance than conscientiousness. In school i've seen a lot of stubborn idiots, who were successfull because they got on the teachers nerves until the teacher gave them good grades. or people who were just conformists and got good grades because they were more or less invisible. it depends on what the goals are - if you want a society of conformists, dominated by loud idiots, that's the way to go.
What Poropat, Duckworth, and others suggest is that multiple traits - including "grit" - contribute to success. He even provides evidence to back up that hardly-surprising conclusion. So how does Kohn respond? By immediately projecting a "one trait uber alles" mentality onto the grit proponents. To be even more clear, he's attributing to them exactly the idea they're trying to refute. Then he cherry-picks examples of excessive persistence leads to adverse outcomes, ignoring the issue of whether those outcomes would be likely to occur in people who had developed other traits such as curiosity and openness. In the end he only demonstrates further the problems with any single-trait theory of learning, supporting exactly the point he meant to oppose.
Maybe his parents or teachers should have helped Kohn develop some more of those other traits. Like honesty.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Public education wants to shift focus away from intelligence, because your rulers don't really want intelligent people, but hard working slaves without fighting spirit. That requires brainwashing your children to change their personality to the one that suits better the current wishes of the party. Instead of skills, they'll learn behaviours.
That being said, never praise a kid for being smart. Always praise hard work.
*** Don't be dull.***
Of course raw intelligence isn't the be-all and end-all about how much you can achieve.
Look at the mensa members who work as security guards.
If you're smart, but lazy, you won't achieve much either.
Hell, I think I've met more than one person who would have qualified for mensa who went on to become seriously messed up people.
Your score on an IQ test doesn't define you.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.
Which sounds about right to me. I've never scored in the upper two percentiles on IQ tests (quite frankly I always found them rather stupid) but I still finished at the top of my class at Uni. I put that down to compensating for any lacking intelligence with an awful lot of work and persistence. Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of Stephen Hawking, who is undoubtedly very intelligent. I remember him claiming in a documentary I watched years ago that if he hadn't been struck by this disability would probably not have amounted to much because he would have been drifting from one interesting project to the other like a butterfly without ever making much impact but since his disability severely limited his options he was in effect forced to stay/persist within a relatively narrow field where he has made a huge contribution. Intelligence on it's own is not enough. Upbringing also has a lot to do with whether you can make anything of it. If your parents raised you without any attempts to boost your self esteem and help you get over any timidity you suffer from, no amount of intelligence is going to make up for that.
I never studied. My phenomenal raw intelligence got me through. I could listen to the lecture, instantly digest the material, and understand it better than most of my classmates did even after they spent the evenings poring over books and lectures. Could I have done better if I studied? Absolutely. Would I have had nearly as much fun hanging out at the local watering hole during the evenings? No way. Grades are fleeting. Intelligence stays with you as long as you are above ground and cannot be taken away.
Taking you at face value, I would advise that you can only cruise for so long. At some point you have to combine a bit of work with that awesome mind to progress.
Not just because I'm less intelligent than gritty, but I've seen super intelligent people unable to "get things done" when they're asked to do anything besides pontificate (intelligently).
Given that there is some evidence that this 'grit' can be modified, potentially even at school age and during the course of school, is this really a question worth asking?
Barring advances that team neurology and team psychopharmacology have been rather less than inspiring about, 'intelligence' is what you are stuck with(or without). We know some things about what not to screw up if you want a better shot at it(lead is bad, childhood malnutrition isn't so good, etc.); but by the time kiddo hits school, your options have closed substantially.
So, instead of navel gazing about 'is grit or intelligence more important?', wouldn't it make more sense to suck it up, deal with the intelligences that you have, not those you may want or wish to have at some future time, and ask 'what is this 'grit' and how favorably does attempting to develop it compare to other possible uses of time?'
and I can sum it all up in just one word: courage, dedication, daring, pride, pluck, spirit, grit, mettle, and G-U-T-S, *guts*. Why, my son's got more guts in his little finger than most of us have in our large intestine, including the colon!
Academic performance is positively correlated with the ability to avoid browsing and/or posting to Slashdot.
When in the blue fuck was the emphasis on intelligence? The entire time I was in school, grades reflected your homework scores, not your test scores. Yeah, yeah, there's an argument to be made that test scores don't necessarily reflect intelligence either (especially on standardized tests), but I'm fairly sure that they're more reflective of intelligence than crappy homework assignments. It's only become worse since I got out of school.
I don't understand how this idiot thinks there was ever an emphasis on intelligence, at least in the past 25 years.
Sounds like a quote from one of the Airplane movies
Being a member of mensa indicates you failed the selection criteria for membership in mensa.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Clearly. Oh, wait...
How about educators?
Over a century ago, Maria Montessori created an educational method that has shown to be very successful for most children. And it teaches grit and also self discovery and allows learning to be fun - because learning is a naturally pleasing activity to us humans.
Our educational system has turned a pleasurable activity into a grind where grit becomes a major component instead of something that is needed every once in a while to get through a difficult problem.
Which is why my favourite prayer is the Serenity Prayer
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Amen.
The most dangerous drug
I never studied. My phenomenal raw intelligence got me through. I could listen to the lecture, instantly digest the material, and understand it better than most of my classmates did even after they spent the evenings poring over books and lectures. Could I have done better if I studied? Absolutely. Would I have had nearly as much fun hanging out at the local watering hole during the evenings? No way. Grades are fleeting. Intelligence stays with you as long as you are above ground and cannot be taken away.
Taking you at face value, I would advise that you can only cruise for so long. At some point you have to combine a bit of work with that awesome mind to progress.
Yep, I've known plenty of people like this who eventually bombed out in the real world when they were expected to do something on their own rather than regurgitate test material.
And then on the other extreme are what we called the "try-hard-know-nothings" who didn't seem to learn from their mistakes and believed in working hard but not working smart.
The charter people say the traditional schools are wrong for only teaching intelligence, because reasons. The traditional people say the charter school is wrong for focusing more on personality, because reasons. So everyone is wrong. Who's right?
If only we had some kind of methodology for figuring out whether an idea is wrong or right. I think I'd call it...science.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
"Dictionary nerds": Spend their time arguing and fumbling over word definitions where no real vagueness exists.
Great job!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
...perhaps it's more subtle generally than some sort of "pop-psych" binary choice?
Seriously, people, are Slashdot articles really nothing more than clickbait any more?
-Styopa
Well, maybe blaming them for that is just like blaming people for buying non-winning lottery tickets. Why didn't they do like that guy over there, and buy a winning ticket instead?
You quickly run into decidability problems when deciding on optimal strategies of inquiry in the general case. The only time you know with 100% certainty whether persistence will pay off, or whether it's time to give up and look around for other solutions, is when you basically already know the answer.
There's no way good solutions can be found without "wasting" a lot of effort on fruitless paths - and whether the waste and success happens in the same person, or over a large group of people, what difference does it make?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Seriously? You're going to throw that out? Most of those kids ALREADY end up dead or in jail.
Also, you are ignoring the gap between spooner girls in academia versus the working class variety. They are worlds apart.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Intelligence will take you to 1st.
Grit will make you the head of the Physics Department.
Intelligence will let you discover Relativity while working in a Patent office.
But the thing is you can't teach or give people Intelligence. You can however, teach Grit.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No. The analogy is unsuitable.
Grit = Teeth
Intelligence = What you decide to chew
Wisdom = What you swllow
Education should be general and guide one toward wisdom. A car has extremely limited use. 'Grit' might get you through a class with apassing grade, but it's probably more analogous to tolerance for pain than anything else.
You don't 'grit' your way through the process of learning to think. Whereas it takes a tremendous amount of grit to tolerate poor instruction or poorly constructed curricula.
And so you're right:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
'Grit' is necessary for survival in a hostile, competitive environment. The suggestion that it is a necessary quality says as much about the educational environment as it does about anything else.
+1
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
My intelligence helped me in the areas that I had a natural aptitude. My grit got my through the areas that I didn't. I needed both to get me where I am today.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Neither of those is important. What's important is how wealthy your parents are. That's the biggest determining factor in your success in education.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Intelligence is a meaningless label assigned to a collection of attributes. Those attributes change with time and circumstances.
Keep in mind that the ultimate test of intelligence is survival.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you have higher intelligence, then you can see how stupid or far too easy most of the things you are expected to lean in school are. You can also see how full off themselves many teachers are, while possessing mediocre to bad actual skills. Hence people with high intelligence have to overcome significant motivational issues in school. Of course for actual academic achievements (at university in a non-fluff subject), you need both higher intelligence and determination to be successful.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In Obama's America, where everyone gets everything for free, you don't need grit, personality, intelligence, nor persistence. You just need a pulse to be successful.
I use SVN, you insensitive clod!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Really? I'm 42 and feel I understand things better, and more quickly, than when I was an SAT champ 25 years ago.
Add talent and sheer luck to every factor for academic and general success named in the summary.
You won't get far if one of them is missing. If you have a minimum of all these, that's probably 30% of success. The missing 70% can be provided by any of those factors. IMHO.
bickerdyke
Stupidity
I would agree that grit is critical to success, but not actually accomplishing anything. Years ago I was offered a Dilbert like bit of advice in an office which was "Don't go anywhere without a clipboard or file in your hand; even if you are heading to a meeting or doing something productive, enough people wander around socializing that not looking productive for even a moment will lump you in with the useless sorts."
But I have seen variations of this in the school system with my favourite example being my nephew going through engineering. They tortured him and his classmates with overwhelming amounts of stuff to learn and work to do. But what they taught him and how they taught him was a combination of useless, out of date, and just the wrong approach. While his innate ability to learn was amazing and resulted in top marks, he still had to work very hard. So the primary thing they tested was his "grit" but they hardly did anything with his near total lack of a single engineering gene in his body. He was completely in the wrong course and should have been in pure mathematics. I suspect that this same course would be repelled by an engineer with a natural Hillbilly/MacGyver ability who wasn't so keen on completing yards of work that their common sense told them was never going to be used and was effectively busy work.
One of the things that I think has happened in much of modern education is that it won't acknowledge that there are two types of people in things like science. There are the great minds and there are the bottle washers; with the bottle washers greatly outnumbering the great minds. So the bottle washers have created a system that gives them a chance to rise to the top while many of the great minds end up becoming garage mechanics because they just didn't have the "grit" to jump through the hoops that the bottle washers set up as an initiation rite.
A near perfect example of the bottle washers taking over would be the ITER fusion project. This is a perfect long term project where whole careers can be spent doing "science" without having to deliver a single thing beyond marketing, hype, and spreadsheets. But I am willing to bet that many of the top people working on that project have qualifications coming out their asses. Qualifications that can only be obtained through pure "grit". While I don't doubt that a few people working on that project are making actual science happen it would be almost despite the top leadership as opposed to because of them.
But seeing that any real scientist must pass these initiation rites it is absolutely a requirement that they have the ability to grit their teeth and appease the stupid gatekeepers.
That said it is very difficult to accomplish much if someone is not willing to put in a huge amount of hard work. The critical difference is that students of today have to do a huge amount of stupid before they are allowed to do anything smart.
Given my experience with public education, I expect someone will take this idea seriously, and then we'll see classes on "grit" and "persistence" which will consist of a teacher telling kids that they should have "grit" and "persistence". Of course, they won't explain what these concepts mean to the children, because the teachers themselves won't understand it. But they will punish the students and generally try to make them feel bad for failing to live up to these ideals. A student seems hesitant to participate? Perhaps a little humiliation will help. A student acts out? Detention. A kid doesn't show persistence? Give him an F and hold him back a grade.
Wonderful.
It took me many years to realize that laziness was the best quality a person could have. A lazy person invented the shovel while the gritty geterdoners were still digging with their hands. A lazy person invented the backhoe when the industrious were busy digging with their shovels. A lazy person invented the automobile when their hard working neighbors were grooming their horses.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Another option would be to question the system itself. There are multiple problems with current educational systems that could result in people with intelligence not learning the same way as the mass (understanding vs learning by heart for example), and personal chemistry affecting things too much.
Whats the current perfect student? Excellent concentration, learns things by heart quickly, never questions authority etc. Many can run into serious problems where the correct solution might not be to modify their personality.
Americans have True Girth.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
People who are able to bullsh*t others into believing their bullsh*t will always trump those with real intelligence and experience who try desperately to pull back the curtain on the "wizard."
50? Try 40.
Mostly random stuff.
Folks, there are literally a thousand studies on this subject, and dozens of twin studies over the past 100 years.
IQ is the sole determinant for intellectual and educational ability on average. There isn't even a debate any longer.
This only caters to people's narcissism, who wish to dream that they too can become geniuses, if only they work hard enough.
The problem is people who are significantly below average. They will always fail, but thanks to lies like the Tabula Rasa myth, they will blame others. First, it was poor schooling. After 50 years of massive experiments in education, we now have the only possible culprit: white racists.
This ideology is evil.
It seems like they are conflating success in school with success in life(as if success in school is intended to be any more than an attempt to approximate success in life-> IE measurement by proxy).
If they focus 100% of school on playing basketball they'll find height to be one of the most important "measures of success" in life(more so than it already is). Instead of trying to measure the snake with it's own tail, it would probably be worth asking: "Why intelligence is correlated with success in life more strongly than it is with success in school?" and make the value judgement at that point to determine if that's a GOOD THING TM(since the purpose of schooling hasn't been defined as certification of economic signaling, a bludgeon for forcing the curve to fit our desired social justice outcomes, or the further advancement of already advantaged individuals).
It's like they've been tasked with identifying the best and the brightest, but along the way they are expected to cull the heard such that opportunities of birth do not interfere with their desired vision of outcomes which should be distributed according to "hard work".
When your measurement methodolgy is so conflicted, it's not really a huge shock that the education programs(which have abused their function/monopoly position to achieve social reform) are losing relevancy to coding bootcamps and merit badges in the eyes of employers(who are unwilling to support the salary premium required to maintain the education debt aqcuired while studying rape-culture). Hilarious enough, the same blunt instruments are now being used in these academia alternatives in a similar attempt to engineer the desired demographics in the talent pool.
My suspicion is you can feed white/asian students Polonium-210 and give them twice as much recess with no lunch and they will still outperform on standardized tests/race-blinded private-sector hiring selection against hispanic and black students so long as we continue the flawed policies of the war on drugs insuring that the majority of their fathers are incarcerated/convicted of drug crimes.
But you can take intelligence away, with as simple a device as asking a poor person to imagine an expensive car repair.
By the time one begins first grade (6 in the U.S.), this is set. The Jesuits know this.
LEAD RESEARCHER: Hey I don't have enough money for my 6th summer home in the Bahamas! If only there was some way where we could somehow get more money from the government.
SLAVE INTERN: Ughhh....
LEAD RESEARCHER: Intern, what is your issue? Why do you even bother to come into work today if you're not demonstrating the proper professional mannerisms.
SLAVE INTERN: Achooo! Sorry, sir. I needed to sneeze. Here's all the calculations you wanted and all of your administrative services complete.
LEAD RESEARCHER: This won't do at all! You've graduated top at MIT and Caltech, so much for your so called smarts. It's an insult... Hey how does this lever work again?
SLAVE INTERN: You mean the doorknob sir?
LEAD RESEARCHER: Nonsense! Are you a fool? This is clearly a lever, and not a knob! How could an idiot such as yourself make it through college and muster the brain cells needed to go to work?
SLAVE INTERN: I guess I'm trying, gripping at straws right now sir. *stumbles half-asleep*
LEAD RESEARCHER: *distracted by a shiny object* Oh, what was that? Something about gritting?
SLAVE INTERN: Sure. *barely conscious*
LEAD RESEARCHER: Yes, I am right! Clearly grit has something to do with your intelligence and success! I request an immediate experiment of this important feature. Hurry along while I complete this literature review. *sits down and plays MS solitaire*
Wish this wasn't so close to reality. Remember kids, life is arbitrary.
As a 32 year classroom teacher I agree that intelligence alone isn't a good measure. Given a dozen 'gifted' kids and a problem to be solved you end up with a dozen gifted kids and a problem. Given a dozen kids who know how to work and there will be progress on solving the problem (and a dozen kids who are better for having struggled with it).
I'm amazed that the most basic universal human rights are still not effectively taught in schools. It would help the world a lot if people simply understood the most basic one. It's almost as old as humanity itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule/
This is not the sig you're looking for.
then there is clearly something horribly wrong with our education system. And not just what we already knew was horribly wrong - a brand new horrible wrong to worry about.
Did you just say 'grit'?
From TFA:
There's other evidence that grit isn't always desirable. Gritty people sometimes exhibit what psychologists call "nonproductive persistence"
I've worked at companies where the bosses pay is based on how many people report to him. He wants a large staff with 'grit'. Not some smart-ass engineer who trys to clean up the process and do the same job with 1/10th of the staff.
Have gnu, will travel.
There are brilliant research scientist willing to experiment and try something new. There are also people willing to jab a needle full of heroin in their veins for an experience. Both are experimenters, but one is good for society and the other is bad. Try and differentiate the two on a personal level and they may seem more alike that you are comfortable with.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I often pursue a "fruitless path" trying to find a solution to a particular problem. Funny thing is, that is often when I learn something about some unrelated problems in IT. You can learn from all experience. Some are more useful than others for a particular problem, but learning in general is useful.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Conjecture: achievement = intelligence * grit .75 is the same as .75 * 1.5, so you can get to the same place with the right combination of either.
So 1.5 *
Maybe the really great people are good at both.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The way "intelligence" is used falls more under the heading of what I'd call "the skills you have". Some are innate physical abilities, many are probably learned but we don't really know when or how so they end up just being things that naturally come easy to you. They're the hand you're dealt. Grit and persistence are useful then in making the most of the skills you have, practicing and refining them to get the most out of the hand you're dealt. Both are needed. We all know people who just don't get math, or have bad hand-eye coordination, or other things they're just bad at that pretty much preclude them being theoretical physicists or world-class tennis players and so on, no matter how much they might work at it. All the grit in the world won't help much if you're focusing on something you're just bad at. We also all know people who're very good at something and have the potential to be very successful in some fields, except that they won't put in any effort they don't absolutely have to and so they never become successful. All the potential skill in the world won't magically make you good if you don't apply yourself. The key, of course, is to apply grit and persistence to the things you're good at and the things you absolutely need rather than at things you're bad at.
I agree that there are many other factors to consider besides intelligence. The question is how many points will you spend on each?
strength
dexterity
constitution
wisdom
charisma
intelligence
Did they compare their results to countries without sports scholarship programs. Grit might be more important in sports than in acedemic pursuits
I'm also 42, but I can already tell that I can't concentrate nearly as well as I could when I was younger. Maybe that's different from intelligence, but I can't keep track of as many things at once and it is starting to affect my work.
Idiocracy continues. As the stupid continue to out-breed the intelligent, standards are again lowered and the system is manipulated to accommodate the huge numbers of "intellectually limited" people in our society. God help us all.
You haven't spent much time around today's students, have you? Out of the few hundred students I taught during my short teaching career, I encountered lots of girls that worked their asses off academically, and only one or two boys.
That's what they judge as performance right?
"My teacher told me the sky is blue because rainbow faries decided it to be" Grit - Studies rainbow faeries exaustively, scores high on test! Great personality! Very open! Pat on back, here's your fucking marks!
Intelligence, "My teacher tells me that the sky is blue because of magic faeries. This of course, is silly and can be explained in more detail scientifically"
Intelligence: Submits paper on light refraction within the atmosphere.
Scores lower. This wasn't the report the assignment was asking for.
Questioning people, having people not like you, not doing exactly as they say are all trade mark things you can do to lower your performance in school.
Tests are not graded by machines. Teachers have been known to be pissed at a student and deliberately give them lower marks.
Anyone trying to claim personality is more important potenitally will spread it from school to life and in a lot of ways it's true.
But you can see this popular people are on the rise thanks to things like social media, so here it is.
"If I don't like you, you will be less successful. Do what I like, because that means you are open and have a great personality"
Manipulation at it's finest.
The debate seems to wander into the territory of considering persistence separately from "intelligence", and essentially suggesting that persistence can also amplify stupidity. In which case perhaps a more useful question is:
Does possessing persistence significantly contribute to process of improving an individuals intelligence?
If true then an individual possessing this character is likely to ether be or become more intelligent given the right conditions, regardless of a particular combination of traits.
Solving problems you didn't know you had. I know a lot of people that try to hold on to work. I am constantly trying to be rid of it. This is usually done by automation where possible, or solutions to fix an issue causing more work.
Though you do have to watch out for this from time to time:
http://xkcd.com/1319/
I also agree that "intelligence" is more than just that. I think I am a pretty smart guy, but it is probably other qualities that enhance that into something a bit more. It is one thing to be curious, but another to be driven to figure something out because it bugs you not to. Likewise if like being engaged and questioning, but do not want to look foolish, then there is a impetus to figure out as much of a subject as possible to be able to do so. I think much of it is also environmental, parents, siblings, culture, etc... I'm a pretty laid back guy for the most part, however when it comes to efficiency I may have a touch of the OCD in that regard. It sort of bugs me when I or others do something that isn't optimal? Even running errands, the route taken, the order of tasks, etc.. I can be pretty obsessive about, because why would you do it any other way? :) Even to the point of not doing something one day because I can batch it more effectively with other tasks on another day... Though I try now to be a little more relaxed about that sort of thing...
I thought grit was what you put under the tyres to stop them slipping when it's -30C and icy.
That people miss the point of the article completely. This not a philosophical debate. You have a bunch of charter schools that emphasize teaching certain personality variables as their solution to improving education. The problem is, that approach misses the point. Improving education requires: “asking about the environment in which kids are placed, what kids are being asked to learn, how they’re being taught, what voice they have, if any, in the experience...” One needs to address the the systemic questions.
It's a snake oil pitch which isn't going to solve the problem. Not too mention it won't produce the workforce that businesses want. Business want creative problem solvers. The focus on "grit" does not promote creativity.
Here's the thing: this is a discussion that needs to happen, because the truth is that all sorts of things that are part of success in any school experience (getting homework in on time, understanding directions exactly, handling conflict and disputes well with the teacher or other students) are really measures of conscientiousness, not intelligence. This is also appropriate, because these same skills will help you be successful in life.
The problem is, nobody really talks about (or understands) what school is for. The prevailing idea is this very shallow concept that it is about filling your head with factual knowledge. That is an almost useless pursuit now that the answer to just about any question is trivially easy to find.
The truth is, it is about developing juveniles into successful adults, and this involves social skills, intellectual pursuits, and character development. There's also the unavoidable truth that school is a high-efficiency means to keep children contained and relatively safe, freeing parents up for work. If we don't recognize that, and have hard conversations about which elements to emphasize and why, we'll continue getting this haphazard approach that ends up working fairly well, but mostly by accident. In some ways I think we haven't had any coordinated rationale for our schooling practice since the early 1800's, when simple literacy was the big objective.
You absolutely can make people more intelligent through education. The brain is the most adaptive organ in the body, and a child's brain puts an grown-up's brain to shame in terms of learning aptitude. It is true that some people are better at this than others, apart from extreme cases most people can do quite well with the right stimulation.
A better education will make your child smarter, and those who disagree are usually unable to cough up the cash and hence taking a sour grapes position.
Karl Benz was the opposite of lazy.
The desire to avoid work is not laziness. The inclination to weasel out of your own responsibilities and leave them for someone else to take care of for you, THAT is laziness, and it is NOT a virtue.
Very diligent, hard-working people LOVE labor-saving devices because they can get so much more done with them.
You are just justifying your own vices using specious reasoning.
How well do you sleep? How much aerobic exercise do you get? How healthy is your diet? How much novelty and variety to you incorporate into your intellectual recreational activities? How much face-time do you get when socializing with people you actually care about (friends/family)? How much time do you spend in focused relaxation and/or meditation?
These things are known to play a significant role in age-related cognitive decline.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.
W. C. Fields
Not really - in this analogy grit would be the engine, intelligence would be knowing where to drive it. As Einstein put it “Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”. You need the 'grit' to get you through the perspiration and your 'intelligence' to provide the inspiration. So it is just like a North American road trip: you spend 99% of your time driving down a long, boring motorway getting to the city but once you get there you need some intelligence to navigate the one way system to get somewhere interesting.
Common Core.
I'm fairly well educated, but this past weekend I tried to help a first grade with his math and I was totally stumped. Ten minutes trying to show why 6+9=15!! And what the fuck is a "number sentence"?!? Is that supposed to be something like an equation?
Since then I've looked over the Common Core standards for math for first graders. They look like they were written by somebody who has never even known a first grader, much less taught one. It's pure bullshit. It's immoral to teach such garbage to our young students.
Let the dumbing-down begin!
Instead of rewarding students for being able to absorb and regurgitate information, schools should make accomplishment of tangible goals their criteria for scholastic success. If, instead of passing an exam covering gravitation, students were required to successfully position a box so as to catch a toy car that is rolled down a ramp and launched into the air, this would demonstrate applied knowledge - what many would call wisdom. Better yet, schools should require the student to choose some tangible long-term goal such as "build a ping-pong playing robot", and teach whatever the student asks to know that will help achieve that goal. We could make objective measures of progress toward that goal the criteria of success. We'd have graduates with demonstrated ability to get stuff done instead of graduates with demonstrated ability to record and recall.
One of the advantages of getting my son into a very advanced math program is that he hit something he found difficult in math while he was still in middle school. One real danger of phenomenal intelligence is that people with it may not learn how to work hard, or for that matter how to learn efficiently.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
First of all, you've writen an excellent comment, as usual !
I have a question: Why do they want to dumb down the curriculum?
I mean, what benefits would dumbing down the curriculum bring?
They are trying very hard to reelegate 'intelligence' into the backburner but why? Why do they want to make the kids dumb?
I mean, why the fuck they want to do that??
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
- Calvin Coolidge
They've (re)discovered that you can trade off hard work for intelligence, within limits. And a certain amount of each is essentially a prerequisite for success.
Any successful adult already knew this.
I Will > I.Q.
I think when it comes to grades in College going to class and participating trumps just about everything else. I went back after I graduated and took 2 semesters of business classes and the second semester I failed to make any of my finals. I thought wow I"m in trouble. I got all A's and B+'s anyways. I guess I"m very likeable and the professors didn't have the heart to give me an incomplete...
Paul E. Bahre
If you're brilliant and rely upon rational thought and ruthlessness to get ahead, intelligence is more important.
If you're stupid and rely upon belief and ruthlessness to get ahead, grit is more important.
If you're not ruthless, neither approach will get you ahead, so guess which trait is really the most important, eh?
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
Casteism
Which is more important?
Water or food?
Air or heat?
Money or supplies?
The only difference is the time delay, lack of either is fatal.
But of course, that was not what the article was about...
https://johntaylorgatto.wordpr...
"Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were ov
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.