How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (11 page)

When you first meet him, Dominic Randolph, Riverdale’s headmaster, seems like an unusual choice to lead an institution so steeped in status and tradition. He comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and flowing, graying hair, makes you wonder if he might have played sax in a ska band in the 1980s. (The English accent helps.) Randolph is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference; it is dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster, in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary: she got the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters had sat, and he remodeled the small outer reception area into his own open-concept workspace, its walls lined with whiteboards on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a lone sheet of white paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is in his early fifties, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by IQ. “This push on tests,” he told me when I visited his office one fall day, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained, is character. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was always this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get eight hundreds on their SATs, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

Like Levin, Randolph has pondered throughout his career as an educator the question of whether and how schools should impart good character. It has often felt like a lonely quest. At the British boarding school Randolph attended as a boy, educators took it for granted that they were teaching character as much as they were teaching math or history. When Randolph moved to the United States, though, he found that American educators were more reluctant to talk about character than their British counterparts. For many years, he followed the national discourse on character, or what passed for it, but it always seemed to him out of step with the needs of a school. In the 1980s, William Bennett made the case for teaching virtue, but that effort quickly became too political for Randolph’s taste, co-opted, he says, by neoconservatives. He was intrigued by Daniel Goleman’s writing on emotional intelligence in the 1990s, but it seemed too mushy, too touchy-feely, to serve as the basis for a practical system of instruction. “I was looking for something that was going to be serious, that wasn’t going to be a fad, that would let you actually shift a school’s culture,” he told me.

In the winter of 2005, Randolph read
Learned Optimism,
and he became intrigued by the field of positive psychology. He began to read up on the work of not only Seligman but also two of Seligman’s frequent collaborators: Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan and Angela Duckworth, one of Seligman’s star protégées at Penn. At the time, Randolph was the assistant head of the Lawrenceville School, a private boarding and day school near Princeton, New Jersey, and he arranged a meeting with Seligman in Philadelphia. As it happened, on the morning that Randolph made the forty-mile drive, Seligman had scheduled a separate meeting with David Levin. When the two educators arrived in his office at about the same time, Seligman decided, impulsively, to combine the two meetings, and he invited the psychologist Peterson, who was also visiting Penn that day, to join him and Randolph and Levin in his office for a freewheeling discussion of psychology and schooling. It turned out to be the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration.

4. Character Strengths

Levin and Randolph each came to Philadelphia expecting to talk about optimism. But Seligman surprised them by pulling out a new and very different book, which he and Peterson had just finished:
Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.
The bestselling books that Seligman had published previously were relatively thin works of popularly accessible psychology with subtitles designed to catch the eye in an airport bookstore (“How to Change Your Mind and Your Life”!), but
Character Strengths and Virtues
was an eight-hundred-page scholarly tome that weighed in at three and a half pounds and retailed for eighty dollars. It was intended, according to the authors, to be a “manual of the sanities,”
a mirror image of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
or the
DSM,
the authoritative taxonomy of psychiatric maladies that sat on the bookshelf of every therapist and psychiatrist.
Character Strengths and Virtues
was an attempt to inaugurate a “science of good character.”
It was, in other words, exactly what Randolph and Levin had each been looking for, even if neither of them had quite known it.

Character
is one of those words that complicate any conversation, mostly because it can mean very different things to different people. It is often used to represent adherence to a particular set of values, which means that its definition will necessarily change over time. In Victorian England, a person of good character was one who displayed values like chastity, thrift, cleanliness, piety, and social propriety. On the American frontier, good character had more to do with courage, self-sufficiency, ingenuity, industriousness, and grit. But Seligman and Peterson aspired in their book to transcend those vagaries of history, to identify qualities that were valued not just in contemporary North American culture but in every society and in every era. They consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius,
from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the
Boy Scouts Handbook
to profiles of Pokémon creatures, and they eventually settled on a list of twenty-four character strengths they believed to be universally respected. The list includes some qualities we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom, and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest, and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions, like social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, and gratitude.

In most societies, Seligman and Peterson wrote, character strengths were considered to have a moral valence, and in many cases they overlapped with religious laws and strictures. But moral laws were limiting when it came to character because they reduced virtuous conduct to a simple matter of obedience to a higher authority. “Virtues,” they wrote, “are much more interesting
than laws.” According to Seligman and Peterson, the value of these twenty-four character strengths did not come from their relationship to any particular system of ethics but from their practical benefit—what you could actually gain by possessing and expressing them. Cultivating these strengths represented a reliable path to “the good life,”
a life that was not just happy but meaningful and fulfilling.

For many of us,
character
refers to something innate and unchanging, a core set of attributes that define one’s very essence. Seligman and Peterson defined
character
in a different way: a set of abilities or strengths that are very much changeable—entirely malleable, in fact. They are skills you can learn; they are skills you can practice; and they are skills you can teach.

In practice, though, when educators try to teach character, they often collide with those moral laws. In the 1990s, there was a big national push for character education
in the United States, inspired partly by encouraging comments from the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, and from President Clinton, who declared in his 1996 State of the Union address, “I challenge all our schools to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship.” But before long, the Clintons’ character campaign devolved into finger-pointing and mutual suspicion between advocates on both ends of the political spectrum; the right suspected that character-education initiatives were a cloak for creeping political correctness, and the left suspected the initiatives were hidden attempts at Christian indoctrination. Hundreds of American public schools now have some kind of character-education program in place, but most of them are vague and superficial, and those that have been studied rigorously have generally been found to be ineffective. A national evaluation of character-education programs
published in 2010 by the National Center for Education Research, part of the federal Department of Education, studied seven popular elementary-school programs over three consecutive years. It found no significant impact at all from the programs—not on student behavior, not on academic achievement, not on school culture.

What intrigued Levin and Randolph about the approach Seligman was taking was that it was focused not on finger-wagging morality but on personal growth and achievement. KIPP is often considered moralistic by both its champions and its critics. In his 2008 book
Sweating the Small Stuff,
the journalist David Whitman approvingly applied the label “the new paternalism” to the methods that KIPP Academy and similar charter schools employed. These schools, Whitman wrote, taught students “not just how to think but how to act
according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values.” But Levin cringed at this notion. He disliked the idea that KIPP’s aim was to instill in its students middle-class values, as though well-off kids had some depth of character that low-income students lacked. “The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach is that it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment,” he told me. “The inevitable problem with the values-and-ethics approach is you get into, well, Whose values? Whose ethics?”

5. Self-Control and Willpower

After that first meeting in Seligman’s office, Levin and Randolph kept in touch, calling and e-mailing, swapping articles and web links, and they soon discovered that they shared a lot of ideas and interests despite the very different school environments in which they worked. They decided to join forces and try to tackle the mysteries of character together, and they turned for help to Angela Duckworth, who at the time was a postdoctoral student in Seligman’s department. (She is now an assistant professor there.) Duckworth had come to Penn in 2002, at the age of thirty-two, later in life than a typical graduate student. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she had been a classic multitasking overachiever in her teens and twenties. After completing her undergraduate degree at Harvard (and starting a summer school for low-income kids in Cambridge in her spare time), she had bounced from one station of the mid-nineties meritocracy to the next: intern in the White House speechwriting office, Marshall scholar at Oxford (where she studied neuroscience), management consultant for McKinsey and Company, charter-school adviser. She thought for many years that she might start her own charter school, but she eventually came to believe that charters weren’t the right vehicle to change the circumstances of poor children—or at least, they weren’t the right vehicle for her to use. When she applied to the PhD program at Penn, she wrote in her application essay that her experiences working in schools had given her “a distinctly different view of school reform” than the one she had started out with in her twenties. “The problem, I think, is not only the schools
but also the students themselves,” she wrote. “Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying—but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

At Penn, Duckworth initially studied self-discipline. For her first-year thesis,
she rounded up 164 eighth-grade students at Masterman Middle School, a magnet school in downtown Philadelphia, and gave them all both traditional IQ tests and standard assessments of self-discipline. Then, over the course of a school year, she evaluated their performances using a number of academic measures; at the end of the year, to the surprise of many, she found that the students’ self-discipline scores from the previous fall were better predictors of their final GPAs than their IQ scores.

Duckworth began to collaborate with Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University who is famous in social-science circles for a study known informally as the marshmallow test. In the late 1960s, Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University, developed an ingenious experiment to test the willpower
of four-year-olds. At a nursery school on the Stanford campus, a researcher brought each child into a small room, sat him at a desk, and offered him a treat, such as a marshmallow. On the desk was a bell. The experimenter announced that she was going to leave the room, and the child could eat the marshmallow when she returned. Then she gave him a choice: If he wanted to eat the marshmallow, he needed only to ring the bell; the experimenter would return, and he could have it. But if he waited until the experimenter returned on her own, he would get two marshmallows.