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."

Comments

I have met successful useless people with "grit"

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.