This week I am
only giving you a summary of one article.
Even though I
am a big fan of schools emphasizing student grit, perseverance, and
stick-to-it-iveness (as illustrated in Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed), there is a danger of following any idea
so zealously that there’s no room for flexibility or recognition that there’s
always a different perspective.
Hence the
article, American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist Kids, provides a
nice counterbalance to our emphasis on developing grit in students.
A quote by Mark
Twain (is anyone quoted more?) fits nicely here: Good judgment comes from
experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
-----
Of the
possible child heroes for our times, young people with epic levels of the
traits we valorize, the strongest contender has got to be the kid in the
marshmallow study at Stanford in the 1960s. Having been told that if he
abstains from eating the marshmallow in front of him for 15 minutes, he’ll get
two marshmallows later--and he doesn’t eat it!
This kid is a
paragon of self-restraint, a savant of delayed gratification. He’ll go on, or
so the psychologists say, to show the straight-and-narrow qualities required to
secure life’s sweeter and more elusive prizes: high SAT scores, money, health.
‘Self-regulation’,
‘self-discipline’, and ‘emotional regulation’ are big buzzwords in school right
now. All are aimed at producing ‘appropriate’ behavior, at bringing children’s
personal styles in line with an implicit emotional orthodoxy, which is embodied
by a composed, conforming kid who doesn’t externalize problems or talk too much
or challenges the rules too frequently or move around excessively or complain
or have passionate outbursts. He has a keen inner minder to bring rogue
impulses into line.
What we are
teaching today is obedience, conformity, and following orders. We’re certainly
not teaching kids to think outside the box. The message is: it’s up to you.
Grit means it’s your problem. Just bear down. So in addition to reading,
‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, add the fourth R of self-regulation.
Emotional
intelligence sounds unassailably great. Who wouldn’t want high ratings for
oneself or one’s children, especially given Daniel Goleman’s claim that
emotional intelligence is a more powerful predictor of career success than IQ?
A recent study
on the effects of social and emotional problems, however, found that emotional
intelligence in kindergarten was completely unpredictive. Children who started
school socially and emotionally unruly did just as well academically as their
more contained peers from first grade through eighth grade. A recent study at
Florida International University also found minimal correlation between
emotional intelligence and college students’ GPAs.
One way to
measure the population of kids who don’t meet today’s social and behavioral
expectations is to look at the percentage of school-age children diagnosed with
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Over the years, that figure
has risen 41 points. (A lot of these kids were just born at the wrong time of
the year. The youngest kindergarteners, by month of birth, are more than twice
as likely than the oldest to be labeled with ADHD. This makes sense given that
the frontal cortex, which controls self-regulation, thickens during childhood.
The cortexes of children diagnosed with ADHD tend to reach their thickest
pointcloser to age eleven than age eight.)
The Torrance Tests of
Creative Thinking judge
originality, emotional expressiveness, humor, intellectuals vitality,
open-mindedness, and the ability to synthesize and elaborate on ideas. Since
1984, the scores of America’s schoolchildren have dropped by more than one
standards deviation; that is to say, 85% of kids scored lower in 2008 than
their counterparts did in 1984. Not coincidentally, that decrease happened as
schools were becoming obsessed with self-regulation.
Enjoy the
weekend and the beautiful weather!
Joe
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