In his 2012 New York Times best-seller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, author Paul Tough writes that it’s not about how much information a child can accumulate, and it’s not high SAT scores, but skills like curiosity and optimism that truly matter in determining whether a child succeeds or fails in school.
Tough will be in Tampa this Wednesday night, April 24, at 6:30 p.m. at Jefferson High School (4401 Cypress St.) to discuss his book in an event for the Hillsborough Education Foundation’s Teaching Excellence Lecture Series.
On Monday afternoon, I spoke with Tough about his book. Here are some selected excerpts from our interview:
CL: You write that cognitive hypothesis — the belief that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills — has been the dominant idea in education reform, but that’s changing now.
Paul Tough: I do feel that the cognitive hypothesis, the idea that the one quality that matters the most in a child’s success is his IQ, I think that’s still predominant and … we put so much emphasis on standardized tests, because those tests really measure cognitive ability. And yet when I was beginning to start reporting on this book a few years ago, what I found in a lot of different and unexpected places is increasing sentiments that are not as reliable as we always thought and the reason for that is a different set of skills. People call them non-cognitive skills, you can call them character strengths that seem to make a big difference, in terms of which children succeed and which children don’t. I think that a lot of educators were intuiting for a long time and different researchers from economic psychology were finding that evidence in different places, and I’m hoping that research is coming together and will change policies.
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2013.
