What if much of what we think we know about success is wrong? What if the metrics we use in college admissions, for example, aren’t capturing the qualities of character and mind that we should actually care most about?
And what if the content of one’s character truly does matter more than anything else?
Paul Tough, a former editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (2008), has written a new book about these very questions.
In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough looks at character traits integral to success — curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, perseverance and self-control, among them — and considers their relation to raising children and running schools.
The Hechinger Report spoke with Tough last week to get his take on college admissions, education reform, poverty and the Obama administration’s education agenda.
Q: To what extent does it seem like U.S. colleges are using the wrong metrics in admissions?
A: From a general point of view, I think there’s a real case to be made that at a lot different points in the education system, we are being too narrow in what we measure — that all of the measurements that we use, especially standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, are narrowly focused on cognitive skills, and what we’re finding out from a lot of different places is that non-cognitive skills — character strengths — are just as important, if not more important, in terms of kids’ success in college and beyond. But we don’t really have a good way to measure them, and so it’s that classic problem of social science that you pay attention to what is easy to measure. And it’s really easy to measure reading and math skills, and it’s much harder to measure grit and persistence and these other things.
