The Marshmallow Test
In 1960, a popular study known as The Marshmallow Test was conducted at Stanford University. This test had children choose between eating a marshmallow immediately or waiting 15 minutes and receiving two marshmallows. Seems pretty simple, but the implications of the results were groundbreaking. Two decades later, they found that those who waited had higher SAT scores by a whopping 210 points, higher GPAs, and better school attendance.
Something deceivingly simple separated those who waited and those who didn’t: grit. These findings catalyzed many classroom reforms, with schools everywhere hoping to help their students develop this new grit superpower.
But although these efforts were well-intentioned, perhaps they were a bit misguided. This new obsession with grit has led to grit-building activities and character report cards that explicitly teach and quantify grit in the classroom. However, these efforts to forge a new pathway to success were applied within an antiquated system. Instead of rethinking schools to accommodate this grit-ification, schools used grit to justify old practices. The ability to power through mindless worksheets and to memorize countless facts was seen as success, but now in the name of grit. Grit accidentally perpetuated an outdated system of brute force learning.
No one stopped to think that perhaps schools simply require too much grit.
In the real world, it’s important to be able to work towards and achieve long term goals, but you never need to do things for no reason. A capitalist society driven by immediate supply and demand would not ask for that. The emphasis in schools on high stakes tests, rote memorization, and abstract content requires an unnecessary excess of grit. Schools today don’t prepare students for the real world.
In order for these lessons in grit to be useful, we need to build more authentic learning models for them to operate within. There’s no denying the importance of grit to future success: being able to set long term goals and achieve them, be resilient in the face of failure, and delay satisfaction are all essential traits. But then those are the use cases of grit we should be focused on teaching, not on these tangential scenarios that students currently struggle through. The focus should not be on teaching about grit for the sole purpose of struggling through the system. Grit should be taught as a means to achieve real goals. Schools should focus on building a system that requires grit in a realistic way rather than expecting impractical levels of it. Instead, students today seem to be subject to a relentless pop quiz. Topic: grit.
Layering band-aid solutions like assigned readings about grit or character assessments will not fix a broken system. Authentic learning environments require rethinking the fundamental questions of what is worth learning and how it should be learned. Students should be able to practice applying grit in contexts that prepare them for the future, as all subjects should be taught. There’s a reason why both KIPP and IDEA schools have concerningly low college retention rates among their graduates, despite touting “No Excuses” models that are supposed to foster a gritty character. When being able to memorize more or do more homework are celebrated as evidence of success, these gritty behaviors don’t translate into the real world where there are no more worksheets to complete.
Luckily, some schools are slowly changing. Some new schools focus on emphasizing a more constructivist, student-centered approach that hopes to better engage students with authentic learning. On the other hand, grit advocates are still hoping to find out how to get kids to put up with boring routine as proof of success.
Which do we care more about?
