Increasing grit did not solve our education woes
And cognitive endurance likely won't either
The field of education is overrun with fads. Silver bullet solutions are proposed year after year in a (weak) attempt to solve some of not just school's, but society's most pressing problems. Policymakers, pundits, and activists regularly propose grand ideas that sound profound and straightforward, but in reality aren't going to solve the problem they've identified, nor are they feasible. One can often hear them saying, "If we just did X, we could close achievement gaps, reduce absenteeism, increase graduation rates, boost the economy, etc., etc., etc. Increasing the grittiness of young people was one such fad in the early 2010s; is cognitive endurance yet another?
I first learned about the concept of grit back in 2013 when it was all the rage in education circles, thanks to Angela Duckworth and Paul Tough. Most enthusiasts I encountered thought a lack of grit was holding kids from low-income families and neighborhoods back from the educational success they were otherwise capable of achieving. The mantra was: if we could teach, or instill, some grittiness, they would perform better academically. I found the concept suspect from the get go. I had taught in high poverty, high crime neighborhoods and found my students to be some of the grittiest individuals I knew. Many of them had incarcerated parents, lost a loved one to gun violence, or went home to parents addicted to drugs, and in too many cases, some of my students dealt with all of these problems and more. Yet, they showed up to school, laughed and joked around with their classmates, and did their work the best they could. Most adults I knew would have trouble getting out of bed under less severe circumstances. Grit is something these kids definitely did not lack.
Grit is a person's propensity to tenaciously attack difficult problems they encounter rather than give up. As told by Jesse Singal in his book the Quick Fix, Duckworth became a crusader for increasing students' grit because when she was a teacher she noticed that the kid who appeared to have the highest IQ wasn't always the one who got the best grades: "Some sort of noncognitive force seemed to pull some kids up toward higher grades than one might expect and hold others down a little beneath their potential." As Singal described, Duckworth's most eye-catching claim was that people were overestimating the importance of natural talent, as measured by instruments like the SAT or IQ tests, relative to hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and that grit offered a way of revealing the truth of what really leads to success. But this claim lacked the necessary evidence to support it, let alone declare it the truth.
A recent study on cognitive endurance by economists Christina Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon, and Heather Schofield makes a similar sort of claim: that if educators could just increase a students ability to sustain performance over time during an activity that requires effortful thinking—their definition of cognitive endurance—they would increase their performance on tests and other school tasks. They consider the effects of cognitive endurance alongside traits like motivation, perseverance, and grit, but unlike Duckworth, who admitted that she doesn't know how to build grit in kids, Brown and her colleagues seem to have an idea about how to increase cognitive endurance, making it potentially less of a fad.
Brown and her colleagues witnessed an increase in sustained effortful thinking after introducing tasks meant to do just that to some students but not others. But their research was on students in learning environments who don't spend much, if any, time on effortful thinking. They were studying schools that didn't provide what would be considered a good education—one that requires students to do a great deal of thinking. Had they examined schools that offer high-quality content with sustained periods of focus and thinking, would they have witnessed increased cognitive endurance across the board as a result of their intervention? Or would they have witnessed that some students will exhibit cognitive endurance while others won't?
Singal describes grit, along with other iterations of character education, as a quick fix because the concept offers a seemingly easy solution to a complex problem and ignores the role that natural ability and access to educational resources play in student success in school. Regarding the latter, for example, a teenager can have all of the grit in the world and still not achieve educational success because other barriers, like a lack of pertinent information or adult support, prevent them from doing so. And, on the flip side, a teenager can lack grit and still succeed academically because someone has nudged, or pushed, them along the way.
Cognitive endurance seems to fall into the same trap. Although Brown and her colleagues recognize the importance of educational resources, they designed their study in a way that ignored content, thus disregarding the importance of natural ability. To be sure, they did this intentionally to prove their point, but ability does matter. All of the effort a child can muster does not automatically translate into high test scores or grades; some kids are just better at certain subjects and tasks than others.
In both the case of grit and cognitive endurance, and other similar character education endeavors, personality traits were ignored, which also matter. Character education seems not to work because it relies on the assumption that personality traits are malleable rather than innate. This is one in a myriad of examples of education policy and practice ignoring human nature. In other words, policy that does not consider that some students are born not just with innate abilities, which itself is often ignored, but born with personality traits that make them more likely to persist or endure in the face of challenges. Traits that should be considered independent of intelligence or natural ability.Â
Interest also matters. Studies that examine things like grit and cognitive endurance rely on static measures such as standardized tests. Whether or not a student endures throughout a test might have more to do with their interest in the content or their interest in doing well. If a task is of interest to a student or in line with their ability level, one would suspect that they are more likely to maintain sustained focus and do well.Â
There are no quick fixes or silver bullets to ensure that all kids do well in school, mainly because all kids will never do well in a standardized system of education. Certainly, many kids would do better if they were provided with high-quality content in an educational environment that rewarded thinking and the educational resources necessary to succeed, and we should certainly strive to achieve these. But there would still be students who struggle because although they may have talents and abilities, those talents and abilities are not in the subjects that get measured, or because they are not conscientious or gritty by nature, or because they can't, or won't, sustain focus on content that bores them.
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