Upward March

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

It’s the forest, it’s always been the forest. So simple. So profound. We may not have know, but this is what we were looking for :

• • Visionary headmaster Dominic Randolph and David Levin are prodding at our paradigm for education. Their vetoing homework and advanced placement classes and claiming IQ is BS and doesn’t predict success. All in favor of — Character.
• “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, 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.”
• cultivating these strengths represented a reliable path to “the good life,” a life that was not just happy but also meaningful and fulfilling.
• • Coupled with the help and ideas of Seligman and Duckworth, they established their core values.
• People who accomplished great things, [Duckworth] noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”
• After a few small adjustments (Levin and Randolph opted to drop love in favor of curiosity), they settled on a final list: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.
• For Levin, the next step was clear. Wouldn’t it be cool, he mused, if each student graduated from school with not only a G.P.A. but also a C.P.A., for character-point average? If you were a college-admissions director or a corporate human-resources manager selecting entry-level employees, wouldn’t you like to know which ones scored highest in grit or optimism or zest? And if you were a parent of a KIPP student, wouldn’t you want to know how your son or daughter stacked up next to the rest of the class in character as well as in reading ability? As soon as he got the final list of indicators from Duckworth and Peterson, Levin started working to turn it into a specific, concise assessment that he could hand out to students and parents at KIPP’s New York City schools twice a year: the first-ever character report card.
• • Perhaps we now “… live in a nation where [we] will not be judged by the color of [our] skin, but by the content of [our] character.
• As Fierst put it: “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it O.K. for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.”
• Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character — that’s huge in our population.
• If your premise is that your students are lacking in deep traits like grit and gratitude and self-control, you’re implicitly criticizing the parenting they’ve received
• • … but their not entirely to blame – They themselves have never been ‘taught’ these things… The chain has to start somewhere.
• “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
• • Failure is an option, and it is backed by Coolidge’s claim that education, genius, and talent are no substitute for pure persistence and determination.