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.