Paul Tough asks the question, “How do our experiences make us the adults we become?” As his last name suggests, this is a tough question to answer. Tough examines the conditions that inhibit children’s ability to succeed. His point highlights how poor children face inherent adversity while those who are more advantaged are typically devoid of it. The book’s subtitle, “Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character,” underlines how impoverished children can overcome adversity in their lives. Through personal stories he describes how poverty has had a distinct impact on their lives. While some succumb to poverty and its negative cycle, there are also those who are able to pick themselves up and move on.
There is much to praise about this book, a natural follow up to his previous book, Whatever It Takes, that chronicles the efforts of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem’s Children Zone. Canada champions how just saving one out of the many was unacceptable. Instead, he had the vision of trying to save them all. In essence, Canada was attempting to create a pathway for children from infancy to primary, to secondary, through college in order to provide an opportunity to break the chain of poverty. His monumental approach to using a variety of data-driven and researched-based techniques to save all the children is one to be relished.
In How Children Succeed, Tough revisits research on how stress and resultant personal trauma have affected children, and he finds that their ability to handle and process stress is an important component of their success. Examples of character building are demonstrated by KIPP and Riverdale County schools. He chronicles I.S. 318 in Brooklyn and flow, a person’s passion or driving force. These examples follow true as the big ideas from Tough’s book and identify how success in life depends less on IQ or formal learning, but rather is built upon the executive functions of self-control, delayed gratification, managed emotion, grit, perseverance, and optimism.
“Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after about age 8. But the executive functions can be improved, sometimes dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood.” As an example, Tough introduces us to Keitha Jones, a high school senior hardened through sexual abuse, a narcotic family, and violence. She was assigned to a Youth Advocate Program and partnered with advocate Lanita Reed, a church going spiritual person. “To forgive me for all the bad things I did,” was one prayer of many that eventually turned Keith’s life around. She went from a troublesome senior, with little chance of graduating, to a freshmen in college on the North side of Chicago studying for her cosmetology degree.
Keitha’s character transformation is a successful story that Tough presents as a turning point. Early intervention is important to altering behavior, but even the teen years are not too late. Keitha’s story is an example of how the adolescent transformation from certain failure begins to steer a course towards success.
In the later chapters of the book, Tough recognizes his own transformation. In 1985 he dropped out of Columbia College and now speculates he was most likely lacking important executive functioning skills at the time he made his decision to leave. “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure” according to Dominic Randolf, the head of Riverdale County School.
Not all children will be academically successful. While this may be true, most can improve their character traits through self-control, delayed gratification, managed emotion, grit, perseverance, and optimism to contribute to their own future success. A strong take-away from this book is that failure can be positive if nurtured and skillfully dealt with. This book is a must read for any educator who believes that programs do not change difficult students. It is the commitment to building their character that is the change agent.
