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

The Full List

[DumbSwede]

The full list:

• Zest
• Grit
• Optimism
• Self-Control
• Gratitude
• Social Intelligence
• Curiosity

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.

Re:The Full List

[pjt33]

As the parent of a Straight ‘A’ gifted child I can say for a fact Hard Work is the most important factor.

As a former straight A gifted child, I can say that you're wrong. Maybe hard work is the most important factor for your daughter, but you can't extrapolate from her to every successful student.

The only year in my education in which I worked hard was my first year at university, partly because I didn't know how good I was relative to my peers and wanted to compete, partly because a quarter of my course was material which I did actually need to work at, and partly because my one-on-one for that material was with someone who really pushed me. When I finished in the top three and won a scholarship, I didn't feel the need to prove myself in the second and third years, and I had more freedom to choose courses which I found easy. The most important factors for my academic success were intuition, a memory which was good at retaining the things that matters for the subjects I chose, and curiosity.

Just to be completely clear: I'm not knocking hard work. The person who finished first in my course in the second year was a friend whom I met up with once or twice a week to explain the things they hadn't understood in lectures. I think they worked quite hard, and maybe I could have finished first if I'd worked harder. But I preferred to spend about twenty hours a week working and have lots of time to participate in various student societies, because university is about more than grades. (I still got first class honours, so I didn't judge it too badly!)

Re:Girls and Grit

[roman_mir]

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.

Grit?

[Feral Nerd]

Wikipedia defines grit as:

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.

Re:Grit?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I hear of somebody placing at the top of their class in college, I immediately recognize the wasted potential there. Placing at the top has little to no benefit outside of college as opposed to the things you could have been doing with your time there.

I've met people that were at the tops of various schools and they've mostly been dumbasses that could follow the rules and test well, but are completely worthless at anything that they weren't specifically taught to do. It's really sad to see all the time and effort ultimately wasted. Niels Bohr, for example, had a couple dozen ways of measuring the height of a building using a pressure gauge and the last one he tried was actually using it to measure the pressure difference.

I did go to college, it was one of the best in the country, but I never wasted the time trying to be the tops of the class. When I'd be the top of the class it was only because the class was of more general utility. But, you think I'm going to waste time getting 4.0 grades because that's what "smart people" do? Fuck no, and I'm all the smarter for not having wasted the time on such pointless bullshit.

Re:It depends on where you are in life

[conquistadorst]

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.

It's a great thought but which is worse, denying them opportunities for social mobility or teaching them only what they need to know? I know we have tons of problems in the US but the idea still survives here that you can reach for any rung in the ladder if you dare and work to climb. We wouldn't want to jeopardize that. So I think you just have to do both. I'd also further argue the primary responsibility of teaching children grit, self-control, curiosity lies with the family. Schools can only be asked to reinforce it. We really need to return to the notion that families raise their own kids and they go to school primarily for education and everything else is secondary.

I was raised in an immigrant family with humble beginnings and very high expectations. That was reinforced on a near daily basis. How could we ever expect teachers to teach that? It's just not their place.

3rd place vs 1st place.

[gurps_npc]

Grit will take you to 3rd place.

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.

Re:It depends on where you are in life

[scamper_22]

I agree with you, but here's the issue.

I'm also a child of immigrant parents. We were poor and we made it quite well.

As you say, maybe your parents taught you grit, self-control, curiosity. Mine did as well. Good for us. We are truly fortunate in that sense. More fortunate than some rich kid whose parents didn't and is now on high-end drugs.

You can sit there and say parents should do this and that. But they're NOT. I reread my post and I hope it doesn't come across as saying all poor kids should just get basic education and all rich kids should get advanced education. I can see how it can be read that way.

It is more that public education should be geared to the needs of most of the children in the neighborhood.

If the parents aren't doing the job. Great, do whatever you can to fix that. But until you do fix it and have all these kids raised by decent parents, schools have to deal with the reality of the students as is. It just so happens that if parents aren't teaching their kids grit-self-control-curiousity... then I would say schools should be allowed to focus on that and focus less on 'academics'. Right now, this is impossible with standard curriculum.

Would this deny opportunities? That's an odd question. In either case, you're denying kids opportunities if that's the language you choose to use.

If you have a class of 20 and 15 of then would benefit more from grit/self-control/curiosity and 5 would benefit from advanced academics... no matter how you focus your school you're denying some kids the opportunity. You're be holding back 15 kids from a decent job and future in favour of the 5 kids if you just blindly go on focusing on academics. Of course if you focus on the 15 kids, you might hold back the 5 kids.

Ideally, you offer different policies for all kids. But assuming you some standards in each school, I'd rather tailor the school to the 15 to get them decent jobs and life.
Kids who already have grit/self-control/curiosity can pursue their own academic pursuits especially in this day and age of the internet.
I was programming long before I even took such a course in school. That is what you can do when you already have those basic values.
Also advanced classes can be used to separate thing or after school programs...
It is much easier to provide advanced classes to kids who already have grit/self-control/curiosity.

As I said, this is why my preference would be to focus on the 15 instead of the 5. The social costs of kids not getting advanced academics is a lot less than the social costs of the 15 kids not getting a decent job and learning basic life skills. Like I said, I went to a 'ghetto' school and no doubt, I lacked a lot of things (and this is in Canada). I lacked a good computer club, good network of academic kids, connections with industry... but whatever, in the end, I'm pretty okay. Most of the academic ones from my high school are. It's the rest you have to be concerned about.

Persistance

[PPH]

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.