Is grit just a chip off the old block?
nick cowen, 4 November 2008
For a child to do well in school, more is needed than just intelligence. Successful study also demands strong will-power. Children need to be able to resist the perennial temptation that they all will invariably face from time to time to escape the rigours demanded by serious study for the sake of the short-term immediate gratification they can obtain through play, which includes their playing around in the classroom.
As is notorious, not all schoolchildren exhibit the will-power needed for successful study. Not only do they fail as a result to do as well in school as they might. Often, their recourse to playing around in class also prevents classmates from doing as well as they might, even when these latter children are willing to make the necessary effort.
Is whether children have and do exercise the will-power needed for successful study something that is entirely unpredictable and beyond the scope of social policy? Or are there steps that any sensible government could and should take to increase the will-power that schoolchildren are able to exhibit at school in connection with their studies?
Given the importance that the present Government professes to attach to education, not to mention the vast sums of public money it expends on it, such questions might have been expected to be high in the priorities of the Government’s research agenda in relation to education. They aren’t.
Instead, this Government has forever incessantly tinkered with the curriculum in the vain hope that by making it more relevant and less subject-oriented, or whatever, their studies will become more appealing to today’s generation of schoolchildren.
This seems a vain hope, because, as has already been pointed out, all serious study demands the exercise of effort and will-power. No amount of tinkering with the school curriculum will turn children into scholars if, by the time they reach school, they are unable to exercise such will-power and make the effort needed by them to learn.
Last week’s Sunday Times contained a report that bears directly on this issue. It was about the researches of the American psychologist Walter Mischel. His work deserves far greater attention by those in this country with a professional and political interest in schooling.
Professor Mischel is the inventor of the so-called “marshmallow test”. He first invented and deployed the test in the late 1950s to measure and investigate the immediate psychological causes of why some small children were found able to exercise will-power when subjected to the test. The test involved offering them the choice between being able to have one marshmallow as soon as they asked for one or two marshmallows at some future unspecified time, which tended to be no more than 15 minutes in the test conditions.
Mischel used the test to identify which children were able to defer gratification and then, through a series of ingenious further tests, to explore by means of what mental procedures the ‘waiters’ were able to resist temptation that the ‘grabbers’ were not.
Later follow-up studies on these same children undertaken in their teens found that those who, as small children, had been able to defer gratification invariably outperformed those counterparts of theirs who had not chosen/bben able to exhibit such will-power when subjected to the test.
Last week’s Sunday Times news report was about new research that Professor Mischel is about to undertake on these same former test subjects. He plans to use ‘brain imaging’ to investigate differences in the brains of the grabbers and waiters.
It remains to be seen whether Professor Mischel’s new neurological investigations will yield any interesting results. However, there were several earlier research findings of his which do have highly important social policy implications of which the Sunday Times news report only mentioned one.
The research finding of Professor Mischel’s that the newspaper mentioned is the one to which allusion has already been made here. This is the finding that children who at four could and did postpone immediate gratification for the sake of a greater but more remote good almost invariably did better in their studies than those children who had not exercised any will-power when subjected to the test.
The second research finding of Professor Mischel’s that curiously goes unmentioned by the Sunday Times is one that has the profound implications for social policy when combined with the first one. Professor Mischel also found that an apparently crucial determinant of whether young children did exhibit will-power when subjected to the test was whether they were growing up in a household in which their father was present. Studies using the test carried out on Afro-Caribbean children at the end of the nineteen fifties revealed, to quote Mischel, that there is:
‘a significant relationship between absence of the father within the home and greater preference for ImR [immediate, smaller reinforcement] as compared to DelR [delayed, larger reinforcement]’. Walter Mischel, Father-Absence and Delay of Gratification: Cross-Cultural Comparison’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 61 (1961), p. 124.
Mischel’s conjectured explanation of this research finding was that ‘when fathers are absent differences in cultural values are less likely to be internalised by the children, since fathers may be needed to transmit such cultural values.’ [ibid., p. 122]
If Mischel is right here, and this is what would merit further research, we have an explanation of why, despite all the extra money the present Government has pumped into schooling, and all the revisions it has made to the national curriculum in the interests of making it more appealing to students, there has been so little to show for it in terms of real results.
Britain has amongst the highest rates of divorce and single-parent families in Europe. It also has the most badly behaved teenagers in Europe. Might not the high rate of children growing up in Britain without their fathers explain the high incidence of unruliness amongst British schoolchildren, and that unruliness explain the poor educational performance of British schoolchildren as a whole in international league tables?
If it did, would not this suggest that the best, and possibly only, way in which the Government might be able to raise educational standards is to devise and implement social policies that increased the incentive people have to marry and stay married?
The present Government’s favourite think-tank, the IPPR, claims that this is not a possible policy option. Its director was quoted as saying two year ago this month: ‘We can’t reinvent families or subsidise them at the expense of children growing up in poverty.’
One has to wonder. If fathers are functionally so important in producing children able and willing to make an effort in their studies in school, there might simply be no other way in which to improve the educational performance of the country’s schoolchildren. What would the Government’s proposed remedy then be: to prescribe ever-greater doses of Ritalin to the country’s schoolchildren? Not a happy prospect.
Some questions for David Conway: what exactly do these studies (or any other research) suggest that the fathers do to make a difference? “Differences in cultural values” sounds pretty vague, and for the life of me I have no idea what it has to do with attention, will power, and the ability to delay gratification. Whatever it is that they do, what does being a father have to do with it? That is, what is it about the male that makes the difference? Is it really even an issue of gender at all, or do the numbers look more or less the same for children who come from single-parent households where their mother is absent? Is there anything about what these fathers do that mothers could not do? That a single parent of either sex could not do? From what you’ve given us here, all we see is a correlation. It cries out for some kind of real explanation, but I don’t see one here so far. I’d welcome clarification.
The situation concerning lack of attention is rather more complex than your article suggests.
A recent survey indicated that 25% of pupils at comprehensive schools complained that their lessons failed to “stretch” them. A book on educational practice I once came across stated that the average teacher will estimate the range of ability in their class and aim their lessons at a point two-thirds of the way down, spending most of any remaining time dealing with children below that level. If you are at the top, you may well be entirely on your own.
I taught myself to read before starting school, motivated mainly by curiousity but to some slight extent by the feeling that, since I would be going to school to learn how to read and write, by being able to do so before entering school, I would gain a head start – an idea that did not survive my contact with the educational system.
I ended up spending hour after miserable hour, trapped in English lessons designed for pupils with a reading speed far below my own. One of my English teachers once criticised me for “fidgeting” – he said that he could understand my problem, but that there was “nothing he could do about it”.
I am a member of Mensa now, and aware of children, past and present, with abilities greater than my own, facing exactly the same problems – many teachers being actively hostile to gifted children, on grounds of equality and fairness(!).
For the past decade, there has been continuing discussion of a policy, in use on the Continent already, whereby pupils would not start learning the “3 R’s” until up to two years after starting school, spending the time in “immediate gratification”, and leaving children of the same type as myself with the possibility of being trapped in a class for that length of time, as the only child there able to read or write with all that that might imply for their development.
I wonder how much will-power, and/or Ritalin, might be required under those circumstances?