The Ballad of Grit
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's sitting in too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I got no addition to label this one. I'm just going to say it's Stuff You Should Know and leave it at that. Well, can we continue the conversation we're having right before we hit record? Yes. Because you said save it. Well, go ahead. Well, we said grit, and Jerry said cheese grits, and you said gross, and I said cheese grits, gross? And you went, yeah.

And I went, what? And you said, save it. Well, here we are again. And yes, I reiterate, I think cheese grits are gross. So grits, period, or just the addition of cheese to grits? Typically grits. Really? Let me qualify that. There are...

Like high-end grits with the right kind of shrimp and the right kind of cheese mixed in. Okay. I would eat those. But typically, like grits out of the box, it's like, oh, God. Really? It's like you just chewed up a bunch of gravel and vomited it out into a bowl. Are you cooking them? Because, you know, grits are soft.

Well, and I'm meeting them at the wrong places. Oh, okay. All right. Maybe it's because I was raised in Ohio or something like that. People up north look down on grits. I'm not sure why, but maybe that percolated into my being. I don't know. You know what? That might be a good shorty because I grew up in the south, and I think there is a northern anti-grit bias. There definitely is. Maybe it's because they're called grits.

I think that's part of it. I mean, I associate chicken with grits, but not like chickens eating grits or like pecking around in the grit. It just doesn't seem like something you'd want to eat. But that's not at all what we're talking about. No, no. Nor are we talking about the clever T-shirt that you used to be able to buy at Cracker Barrel that said grits that stood for girls raised in the South. I never saw those.

Well, you didn't spend enough time at Cracker Barrel. No, I was protesting. Do you remember the protest? Yeah, I did too. When I was a teenager, my parents wanted to go there. It was at the height of their whole anti-gay thing. And I was like, okay. And I went in and put on a bunch of my mom's makeup. I was like, let's go. Yeah, that one sticks with me because, and I still think it's hysterical as a chant. Do you remember the chant? No. It was, we're here, we're queer, and we're not eating breakfast.

I don't think I heard that. I think of that every time I pass a Cracker Barrel on the highway. I still think about that chant. Well, yeah. I guess they just kind of went away, right? I think their anti-gay policy maybe was reversed. Who knows? I don't know. I just think that chant is funny and awesome. It is a great chant for sure. But, yeah, we're talking about an entirely different kind of grit.

No, we're talking about and we're going to get specific about sort of how it came back into fashion as far as education goes. But we're talking about grit as an adjective or well, no, it's still a noun.

Yeah, gritty would be an adjective, I think. But grit as in, oh, you got true grit. You got real determination and real stick-to-itiveness. That's my favorite one, stick-to-itiveness. Yeah, that's a mouthful, huh? Yeah, it's anything that has to do with perseverance. And, you know, some people seem to have it better than others. Some people seem to be willing to just hang in there through the highs and the lows and just keep going. Yeah.

And that is what the average person would call grit. But the specific vein of grit that we're talking about was if you took that just kind of folk understanding of that quality of some people's personalities and turned it into a horrible idea about trying to figure out how to teach that to kids, and then even worse –

grading teachers in schools on how gritty their kids are, then that's what we're talking about today. Well, I guess I see where you fall on this. I have a very nuanced and complex view of this whole topic. Okay, good. Well, you know, when you first sent this down the old pike as an idea for a show, I figured it had to stand for something.

I didn't know it was literally just grit. I figured they took that word and made it into an acronym to apply academically. But it's not. It's just grit. It doesn't mean girls raised in the... Right. In the school? They didn't. Well, there's no S. So it just kind of ends there suddenly. That's right. But where it started was with a University of Pennsylvania psychologist named Angela Duckworth. Yeah. Yeah.

who, I mean, I think she's pretty great. And I think she watched that TED Talk and I read a lot about her. And I think it's interesting to see her come up with, I think, a pretty good idea. And then I think kind of the media went a little too far with this stuff and the government went a little too far. And then to the point where she was like, hey, listen, maybe we should back off some of this stuff. Grit was just sort of this notion of,

That if a child has, you know, determination and perseverance and stick-to-itiveness, then they can – that could matter as much or more as like just basic smarts sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.

For sure. And I feel the same way about her, too. I think she's a good person. And the way that I kind of envisioned what happened was that she ran up to everybody and said, hey, everybody, I just figured out this new awesome thing about psychology. And everybody said, great, give it to us. We're going to apply school funding nationally to that. Okay.

And she's like, well, wait, wait, I just started looking into it. They're like, too late, we already started this. Yeah, exactly. I feel like it kind of got out of hand for her as well. As we'll see, she definitely worked to kind of like rein things in, but it just got wildly out of hand very quickly. But the whole thing started when she was a math teacher. She was a math teacher first and then stopped teaching math to go study psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, like you said. Yeah.

And the whole thing that kind of inspired her was noticing that some of her students who had lower IQs, because teachers know that about their students, have it on file. They're like, you shouldn't be doing this well in math. She noticed that some of the kids who had lower IQs were still doing better in math.

And she started paying attention, and she realized that those kids had some sort of thread of perseverance to them. So she started studying that. That was the premise of her graduate studies in psychology, and it led to this concept of grit. And the whole thing that really kind of changed everything was this idea that

You could actually test for it. You could detect levels of grit. And possibly if you could do that, you might actually be able to teach people how to have more grit, how to persevere in the face of hardship and keep going. Yeah. And I think it started out innocently enough because I think the order it went down was identify it.

By and at least in her case, initially with a questionnaire, self-reported questionnaires, which is students are answering questions like with answers like, you know, I'm a hard worker or I really like to finish projects. I don't get discouraged easily, things like that.

And she noticed, hey, there's a big correlation here between kids who answer thusly and kids who are the leaders in the classroom, kids who are achieving more. And sort of the first –

claim as far as like being a you know graduate student studying this they can't she can't just say like hey grit's awesome uh it has to be sort of quantified right so hey i think i can actually measure this stuff through these questionnaires and it can correlate to you know future success as a human

Yeah. So she and a couple of colleagues published an article in 2007. And it was like if you could have like a summer blockbuster, like academic article, this was it. It was as big as they come. I'm sure they hold those off for like June.

You know, probably like the big movies. Exactly. They're like, no, no, no, no. We can't publish this in February. You crazy. And then you got the Oscar bait research studies toward the end of the year. Exactly. And that's exactly what this kind of thing was. It contained the scale. It studied kids in a few different a few different locations. One was West Point cadets in a boot camp. Another was kids who had made it to the National Spelling Bee Academy.

Another was Ivy League students. And what they found when they published this paper, which is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is kind of a recurring character here on Stuff You Should Know. So it's a big-time journal. It was a big deal. They found that, like –

The level of grit, if you applied this grit scale, if you gave these questionnaires to these kids, the ones who scored the highest in grit were the ones who actually finished that boot camp or continued on further in the national spelling bee or actually did better on the SATs than their other Ivy League bound cohort. Like it seemed to predict success when you took all the other stuff away and

This grittiness predicted the success of those students. And that was just earth moving. Yeah. Big time article. Like I mentioned before, she did a TED talk. She would write a book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance. That was in 2013.

And took great pains to say like, hey, you know, this isn't kids getting lucky. This isn't kids that are super talented. It's, you know, it applies a little more, at least early on, according to her, for like, you know, extracurricular stuff rather than just, you know, math scores, let's say. But what it did was introduce this idea of,

Kind of for better or for worse, and as we'll see, it kind of gave us and took it away that it's that grit is just a very sort of every person thing. It's very democratic because it doesn't matter how rich you are or how poor you are or where you come from. If you have that stick to it of this and you can develop it and perhaps even teach it, then you have a greater chance and likelihood even of success as a student and life.

All of which, you know, make sense in a way. And as you can see, though, already, there are a few little holes that people were able to pick, one of which was like, hey, you're studying kids in the National Spelling Bee and at West Point and at Ivy League schools. First off, like, what does this mean for just your average classroom?

Right. And there's a flip side to that, too, that whole democratic idea that, you know, if you just work hard and persevere, good things are going to come to you. It'll be worth all of the hardship. It's a very American pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of idea. Yeah.

The flip side of it then is that if your school's not doing very well, if you're not doing that great in school, it has nothing to do with the fact that your school is like grossly underfunded. Right. Or that you are the fifth child of a single mom who works three jobs. Right.

and you're tired all the time when you come to school, that has nothing to do with it. You just need more grit. And if you have more grit, you can overcome even those kind of hardships as a child in school.

Yeah, which just to be clear, like, of course, that's possible. We see stories all the time where people in those situations have overcome their hardships through grit and determination and risen to the top. Sometimes they make movies about people like this. Sure. And that's kind of the point. When you get into problems is when you start broadly applying that to like every kid in America. Well, not only that, it's...

Yes. The kid who shows up to school regularly, tired all the time because they're coming from that background and the school that they're showing up to is chronically underfunded and they have terrible teachers and yet they're still going and applying themselves. That's grit. Like pure and simple. There's nobody who would disagree with that.

Whether you can measure it or not, whether you can teach it or not, doesn't matter. That little kid has grit. The problem is, is if grit's a good thing, then you have no motivation to remove those barriers, to fund that school properly, to get rid of those terrible teachers and replace them with good ones, to try to help them out with like a meal program. Because grit and hardship builds character and it helps you get places. So actually, that kid's got a leg up over the more entitled and privileged kids who have it easy.

That's the whole – that's really honestly the biggest basic problem with applying grit to American public schools because they're so unevenly funded in different places all throughout the country. Exactly. I realize we kind of got to the end there at the beginning, but I just couldn't hold it in any longer. That's okay. You blew your grits.

Holy cow. You literally just made me spit out my water jug. That was great. I think that's a first. Right on cue. All right. So maybe we should take a break. That's a good little setup. And we'll come back. You can collect yourself. And we'll talk more about grit after this.

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All right. So like we mentioned, this paper came out in 2007. In that paper, we're going to just, you know, kind of boil down that paper a little bit because this is the just initial sort of grit statement or whatever. They had over 1,500 high school achieving adult professionals talk about people who did the best at their jobs around them, basically, in their fields, and said, you know,

the ones who stick closely to these long-term goals had more success. In fact, that accounts for their success. And as you'll see, a big differentiator, and we'll get into this more specifically between grit and something called conscientiousness, is sticking with something long-term, long-term, long-term. And that's why one of the two big main categories of the grit scale are consistency of interests and

In other words, sticking with something. Right. And perseverance of effort. And so that's kind of how they broke down the two things and even went to great pains to say, I know we're not talking about conscientiousness. We're talking about

Because you can be conscientious and still go to a different job every couple of years. Right. We're talking about people that stick to something for a long time. Yeah, conscientiousness, this is a big issue. Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits, right? Most mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists tend to agree that

on that big five personality traits. I know we've talked about them before. They're conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience. And all of those have like separate subcomponents. So for example, conscientiousness can contain self-control, industriousness, responsibility, reliability. And you can actually test for those kinds of things. And you can using those big five personality tests

very often predict how somebody is going to do in different situations, right? It's controversial because people don't like the idea of just boiling people down to admittedly super detailed set of personality traits. Yeah. But still just a set of personality traits. People don't really like that. But academically speaking, it does seem to have like a lot of validity, right? Yeah. Yeah.

The problem is you've got conscientiousness already, and that's the thing that has always kind of haunted Angela Duckworth and her colleagues who came up with this concept of grit, is that a lot of people are saying like,

hey, this is just conscientiousness. It's what you're talking about. And like you said, even in the paper, that first initial paper, they acknowledge that and recognize it right out of the gate. And they're like, no, we're not talking about conscientiousness. We're talking about something. There's something different. There's an extra layer that we've been missing this whole time. And that is grit.

That's what we're talking about. So just put that in your bonnet and hang on to it for later. Yeah. The one thing I can say about that, and this is just my sort of dumb opinion, is that, you know, even if it is sort of conscientiousness reskinned a bit, like, like, who cares? Right.

There are plenty of times concepts have been repeated and sort of disguised as something else. And it's I don't know. I don't think it was the biggest deal because it's not like she was out there, you know, raising, you know, tens of millions of dollars for her grid institute or.

I don't know. I just didn't think that was the biggest deal. It's like maybe it is basically the same thing and it's getting attention now because it's been relabeled. Like, what's the big deal? Well, yeah, but she's saying, no, it's not the same thing. At the very least, I think it muddies the field of study to where –

It doesn't if everybody agrees to just include grit on conscientiousness research. But they're fighting against that. They're trying to say like, no, this is different. You can't do that. It's something separate. So I think it does kind of muddy things. And actually it does – I'm sure it's gotten a ton of research dollars that would have otherwise gone to conscientiousness research too. But if it's the same thing, then who cares? Right.

Like, do you see what I'm saying? Like, if everyone's saying it's the same thing as conscientiousness, then dollars going toward quote unquote grit is still studying conscientiousness. But I guess they're saying, like, why are you going off and studying something that is conscientiousness, calling it something different and insisting it's different? Like, what are you doing in doing that? That's what I think people have a problem with it. Like, even if it is the same thing, it's being promoted as something different. No, no, no. I...

I get that. I think that my problem is like, no, I just think my thing is like, so the end of the sentence is, and that means that like, uh, people get confused or like, it just doesn't seem like a bad, awful thing. I understand. Um, like the result wouldn't be some bad, awful thing. It's just like, well, okay. So now they're calling it something else.

Yeah, I got you. I guess I think also like if it's a field of study and you got a bunch of people trying to contribute to that field, having somebody come along and just name something different because they wanted to and telling everybody that it's actually different when everybody else can see it's the same, that just it makes it harder on everybody else. Does it? I don't know. I'm not an academic. So I'm not sure. But I know that the people who think that conscientiousness and grit are the same thing –

don't tend to think very highly of grit. Interesting. Okay. And there's a reason why I think maybe we just haven't sussed it out. All right. Well, hopefully someone will let us know too. But here's what happened. This thing blew up in a big, big way. Like you said, it was kind of the, you know, a media darling as far as research papers go. To the tune where there was one study that found 150 academic articles that

About Grit appeared within a decade of that first one. I think the 20 publications from Duckworth have been cited over 60,000 times. According to Google Scholar, she got a genius grant. Or I could see that then. Maybe somebody...

else could have gotten a genius grant. So there's a good example. Well, yeah. Also, I mean, yeah. And I think just other funding too, but just going back to that citation thing, 60,000 times for 20 papers, that's about an average of 3,000 citations. So that means- Seems like a lot. Each paper, 3,000 other papers cited it as evidence to support their point, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So in one sense, talk about muddying the field. In another sense, that is just mind-blowing. The average psychology paper from a 2021 survey was cited about 200 times. This is 3,000 times per paper, 20 times over. It's just like it just changed everything. Like everyone heard of grit.

And again, like there was nothing that Angela Duckworth seemed to be doing that was nefarious, underhanded, mean, um,

You could even make the case misguided because she genuinely is like, this is something else, you guys. The problem was it came out at a really specific point in time in the history of the American public education system. And it was at a time where No Child Left Behind had been in place. It was a federal program for everybody who doesn't live in America. The No Child Left Behind Act was basically like, look –

There's a lot of kids who aren't getting a good education. So what we're going to do is we're going to bring the bar down. We're going to teach everybody the same tests, and those tests are going to determine whether your school gets funding or not next year. So you better make sure that they're prepared for the test and all kids learn for –

half a decade or longer was how to ace this one test that came at the end of the year. That's what you learned in school. And everybody was tired of that. They realized that we needed way more to teach kids than something like that. And grit just happened to come along right at that precise moment. Yeah, exactly. So it was definitely a little bit of a lightning in the bottle situation as far as the media is concerned.

And in 2007, she said Duckworth said something about it being teachable. She said the direct quote was, I don't think anyone's figured out how to make people smarter, but these other qualities of grit may be teachable. And sort of the combination of No Child Left Behind and how people were feeling about that in general and the fact that she was saying grit could be a teachable thing all of a sudden combined to –

Where she had genuine influence on the national pulse of education kind of out of nowhere. And that was, I don't think she probably expected that, but it happened pretty quickly. Yeah. And one of the other ways that it became so widespread or widely known, Chuck, was Grit found a champion very early on. There was a writer, a journalist named Paul Tuff.

who started like writing articles on grit, was just a true believer. I'm not quite sure how it, why it struck him like this, but he really, really got the word out about grit. He wrote a book before Duckworth even wrote a book on grit back in 2012 called How Children Succeed.

Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. And it's basically about Duckworth's research on grit and how it applies, how it can apply in schools. And that really kind of put the pedal to the metal on the grit train. Yeah, like his whole thing and, you know, sort of grit's thing is about what he called non-cognitive skills. That stick-to-itiveness that we were talking about, building character is kind of what we're talking about.

And that schools should teach this and there should be lessons in character and determination, which, you know, I mean, I think that stuff's always kind of been there. Yeah.

I remember teachers when I was a kid that, you know, certain teachers, it just wasn't part of the curriculum necessarily. But I think any good teacher worth their salt or parent is going to teach these lessons of character and sticking with something just sort of inherently. Yeah, but there's a debate in the United States that's been going on forever and is still going on now. There's some people who think that.

And school has no role whatsoever in that. You go learn math and you go learn science. You go learn history in school. That's what you learn. You don't learn how to be nice to other people or how to control your temper. That's what your family teaches you or that's what church teaches you or whatever. And there's other people who are like, a lot of people, a lot of kids don't have families that teach them that and don't go to church. So we need some place to basically learn.

raise good citizens? And why would we not teach elementary school kids how to be good people? And that is where grit really kind of got pulled into the fold. Because I think in around 2008,

The early 2010s, that whole shift from No Child Left Behind was moving toward to more encompass a kind of like a whole school of thought for what role public education plays in creating young Americans.

And it was based on what's called social emotional learning or SEL. And it basically is it encapsulates all of that stuff that we were just talking about, how to be nice to other people, how to exert self-control, how to listen to somebody else's opinion without arguing with them or interrupting them. Like just the normal stuff that if everybody behaved this way, we would probably get along a lot better than we do now.

So social emotional learning says you should learn that in like elementary school. Yeah, for sure. And that was an idea.

You said early 2010s. That's kind of when it really reared its head as far as being actually adopted in district criteria or curriculum, I guess. And it had been around for a long time in the 60s and then 70s and 80s here and there. So it wasn't like a brand new thing. But that's when it was, like I said, officially adopted regularly.

President Obama in 2015 came out with the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA.

That got No Child Left Behind out of there. And one of the things that required was kind of getting on board with SEL, getting states to sort of invest in that kind of learning, providing block grants. And that you had to it couldn't just be purely academic outcomes on testing and things moving forward. You had to include at least one non-academic outcome in accountability standards.

Right. So that means that now, in addition to your students' reading comprehension and math skills being tested, you have to figure out how to teach something that's not a cognitive skill that's traditionally taught or tested in school. You have to figure out how to start teaching it, and then you have to figure out how to start testing your kids on it because we're going to start tying federal money to that. Yeah.

That was a big deal. And so it just so happened. That's where it gets complicated. Yeah. This is exactly, this is really, this is the exact point where that happens. Because people looked around, they're like, man, this grit thing is all the rage. Have you seen this TED Talk that Angela Duckworth gave? Let's just start doing that. Because again, it's a tailor-made idea for Americans. Just...

work hard and persevere no matter how much adversity you face and you will be rewarded richly on the other side. Why wouldn't we want to teach kids that? So grit,

This really brand new concept that a lot of people in the field of psychology were like, that's not something different. It's conscientiousness, everybody. It got folded into the national curriculum in the United States less than a decade after that first paper was published. Yeah. And Duckworth was brought on to the federal government as a consultant.

So all of a sudden she finds herself in these meetings with the president of the United States and the secretary of education about like, all right, so how do we implement this kind of thing? I'm not sure exactly how that went for her. If she was, I tried to find some articles about whether or not, I mean, we did find out some stuff about how she felt about it, but I was just really curious how overwhelming that might've been for her.

Or if she immediately was just like, oh, this is great. Or, oh, geez, like, now what do we do? I don't know. She's really kind of kept mum on that, actually, it seems like. I have not found an interview where she's kind of talked about that period.

And that would be really interesting because she was just a normal person. She was a math teacher. Yeah. Who went to the University of Pennsylvania for psychology, published this paper and became a rock star and is now like holding meetings advising on education policy with Obama. Like I can't imagine what that did. But very quickly she started to see like this is not a good idea, you guys. What you're talking about doing with this concept is not a good idea. Right.

Well, yeah, because she was like – and other people were basically saying, well, we're not even – this is such a –

The way it's framed, at least, is a new concept as far as being part of a curriculum. So, like, we're not even sure how to teach it if it can for sure be taught. And all of a sudden teachers had this mandate. You know, states basically control how much time is spent teaching different things. And teachers follow these standards. So all of a sudden states were tasked with, you know –

How do you implement this as an actual, like in a lesson plan? Yeah. And California said, hold my beer, everybody. Watch this. Totally. They did a pilot study where schools in cities like Oakland and Los Angeles, their funding would be tied to how gritty their students were, how much grit improved in them. Right. Mm-hmm.

And the way that they did it was through the grit questionnaire. So when they, the whole idea was that in California public schools, you would give these kids this grit survey, the grit scale. I think it originally was 15 points and I think Duckworth whittled it down to 10 these days. But again, it says things like, you know, I finish whatever I start or my interest change from year to year. Depending on your answer, you're either gritty, kind

Kind of gritty, not so gritty. I think it was not quite put that way. But depending on your answers, your teachers would be held accountable for that. And then the teachers at the school would be held accountable cumulatively for how well the teachers were imparting grit to their students.

And there's so many problems with this that I think even the second graders were like, this is a really bad idea. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But California went ahead with it. And Duckworth was like, I think she was a consultant on California trying to implement grit. And when she saw what they were doing, like making high stakes accountability measures

For like maybe firing teachers, funding schools, passing a kid to the next grade based on how gritty they were, not gritty. She was like, I don't want to have anything to do with this. And not only that, I'm going to start writing op-eds telling everybody to not go along with this. Yeah. She said, this is really just conscientiousness plus everybody. Right.

She did. There was a quote. She was in an interview with NPR in 2015 where she said, and this is where I really am like, you know, I like –

where she stands on this because she says, I feel like the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science. Yeah. And she said that in one of the op-eds for the New York Times, she condemned the idea that students would face high stakes character assessment because that's the other kind of part of this that we, I was about to say dance around, but we just really haven't talked about yet is that's kind of what you're doing is assessing the character of an eight-year-old

Um, especially if one of the questions questions is like, you know, I have the same interest, you know, year after year, like at those ages, at least with, with Ruby, like she's all over the place with what she's interested in. And I think those are the ages where you're kind of figuring out what the heck you like. So I don't like the idea that she might score lower on a grit test because she's played the piano for a month and then decided to do parkour for a

nine weeks. And, you know, that's just that feels very normal to me for a young kid. Well, so that ties into a huge criticism, which we'll probably talk more about later, but called deficit thinking and deficit thinking is that there is a such a thing as a norm that everybody should ascribe or subscribe to and aspire to. And that anything outside the norm is operating at a deficit in

And so that's what things like grit teach. Like, hey, you're operating at a deficit. Try harder so that you can be like everybody else that we've deemed in this window of normal. That's exactly what you're describing. And it's a really great critique and criticism. Like deficit thinking is, it's just, it's what most people who send their kids to public school don't want for their kids to be taught to be like everybody else. Yeah.

For sure. The other thing, too, that sort of came out was that –

it's a self-reported test that given to children and any kind of self-reporting test given to someone of any age can be highly problematic. But in this case, um, Duckworth herself found that like a lot of times in low income neighborhoods and maybe schools that were underfunded and didn't have the resources that there would be exceptionally gritty kids who would rate themselves lower than kids who thought a lot more of themselves that went to, you know, uh, uh,

a nicer school or a school that was better funded. So these kids that had like a, I don't know, I guess like a poor self-image of their own character were grittier than they self-reported. So it's a flawed study to begin with. Yeah, and that applied to entire regions even. I think East Asia typically scores very low on self-reported grittiness tests and

But in other measures of grittiness, they score really high. So it has to do with, like you said, your self-image or your frame of reference. Like if you go to a really, really tough school, you can't possibly measure up. So you're not going to self-report that you're really good at grit and hanging in there. But if you go to a middling school and you are kind of good at

or better than, you know, most people in your class, you're probably going to over-report. So, yeah, the whole basis of testing for grit that Duckworth herself came up with, she came out and said, like, this is, you can't, this is no good. Like, you don't use this to grade teachers in schools on. Stop doing this, you guys. I say we take a break. Hey, you took the words out of my mouth. Well, you took the water out of my mouth last break, so turnabout is fair play. All right, we'll be right back.

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The more you save, do not delay, dear listener. Experience the fashion revolution that is snag and visit snagtights.us today. All right, Chuck. So this is one of those ones where we just couldn't keep the criticism to the end part. We've kind of been peppering it along. Yeah. There are a lot of people who have really –

good criticisms of grit and the whole concept and the idea of teaching grit and the problems with it. There are also really baseless criticisms and problems with grit. And one of the big ones is that there is a huge backlash that they're like, wait a minute, this sounds a lot like critical race theory. So let's ban teaching grit in this whole social, emotional, snowflakey learning kind of stuff.

That's right. There was a political backlash generally on the conservative political right. Didn't like the idea of a lot. Didn't like the idea of SEL to begin with. Social emotional learning certainly didn't like the idea of critical race theory, which is a topic that I keep pushing down the line to cover, but I've wanted to for a while.

And then grit kind of got mixed up with all of these, which is really ironic, I guess, from a macro view when the whole idea of pulling up by the bootstraps and anyone can make something of themselves is sort of an idea championed by the political right generally in this country. But it got mixed up with, like I said, those other two things. And and I think a lot of times there's just a.

there's a little bit of laziness sometimes politically on both sides in this country to lump things together and be threatened. For sure. But...

On the other hand, I'm sure there were plenty of conservative parents who were really paying attention to what was going on in schools and did not like the idea of their kids being taught how to behave. Yeah. Because they were at home maybe teaching their kids how to behave and they didn't want the schools to do that. So it's not like there were just totally illegitimate reasons. It was more getting it mixed up with other stuff.

That just seemed a little touchy-feely. And so just by virtue of that, like it was bad. That was kind of like the baseless criticism of grit. The idea of teaching your kids behavior, I don't think that's baseless. Like that's a bona fide critique. Yeah, but it became part of – it became wrapped up in a progressive idea about teaching. And I think that was the enemy. Yeah. So –

I guess grit is actually, it seems to still generally be around. It's not like the buzzword or hot topic any longer, but it doesn't seem to have just gone away. People didn't abandon it. I think in part because nothing's come along to replace it.

And then also in part because Angela Duckworth, despite mounds, mountains of negative attention and criticism and probably personal attacks, has stuck by it. She's like, no, I'm like, this is a real thing. It got way out of hand. That was not my fault. I didn't mean for that to happen. It's still a real thing. We just haven't figured out how to really test and teach it.

So but she's she's still standing by it in the face of other criticisms. You might say she has grit.

Yeah, that didn't even occur to me. That would have been hilarious if she was like, oh, forget that. I've moved on. I'm sorry I cut you off, though. What were you saying? No, it was totally worth being cut off. That was a great one. There are other criticisms that are super legitimate that come out of academia. We've covered a bunch of them. One is that it's the same thing as conscientiousness.

Another one is that it's a technique of instilling deficit thinking. You're not normal. You're outside the norm. So pull yourself up from your bootstraps. And then my favorite is that it just takes away responsibility or the need even to remedy problems for the kids who are facing the hardest hardships in their education because they're

By definition, they're the ones who are getting the most practice at being gritty and therefore will succeed. They can pull themselves out of the worst kind of poverty if they just have stick-to-itiveness and persevere. Yeah. And another criticism that came out that I thought was interesting was,

Uh, people that were saying like, well, what you're teaching students to do is that like, there is no other way, uh, other than to, um, stick to something and you shouldn't give up on anything. Right. When like some stuff you should give up on and some stuff isn't a worthwhile pursuit.

And that's sort of part of the process of learning and growing as a child into adulthood is figuring out the things that you want to stick to and that are worth sticking to for you. Whereas if you have grit just drilled into your head, you're like, well, you know, you feel like you maybe shouldn't quit the soccer team, even though like soccer may not be a good thing for you.

Exactly. And that really kind of ties into this idea where – I can't remember who wrote it. Let me see if I can find it. But it was on, I think, Ed Week. I've been exposed to so many strange educational websites that I've never heard of before. Edutopia, MPR. Yeah.

Anyway, I can't quite find it. Oh, yeah, it was editorial by Jal Mehta, M-E-H-T-A, back in 2015. And Jal Mehta is a professor or was at least in 2015 of education at Harvard. And they made the case like,

Kids show grit like all the time, like a teenager who has their heart broken and then like gets back out there after, you know, a month or two or whatever and starts looking for love again. That's grit. Or if you're the quarterback of a football team and you like lose the game single handedly and yet you go out for quarterback again next season, that's grit. But the thing is, these are things that kids care about.

They're showing grit because they're pursuing something they actually feel passionate about. And grit, like as it was generally applied in the public education system was like, it doesn't matter whether you care about it or not. Persevere. Yeah.

And that just teaches you to become an automaton to a degree. You hate your factory job? Don't go out and improve yourself to, like, get a better job. Just push through and make it to Friday, and you'll have the reward of a case of beer on Friday night if you just hang in there through the rest of the week and push through, right? Like, that's what it teaches. And so, Jal Mehta said what schools need to do is not teach grit. Schools need to figure out how to

change their curricula to make students more passionate, to figure out how to inspire passion in kids the same way that like high school love or going out for a play or playing on the football team can. Like, how do you figure out how to inspire that kind of passion for science or history or whatever, math?

That's what schools need to focus on, and then kids will really start excelling. I tend to agree with their take. Yeah, because I think about my own, you know, well-documented on this show, at least, problems with science. I'm just, I'm not good at it. I mean, that's a broad, broad topic. I've found I'm better at earth sciences and things like that than some other stuff. But let's just say, like, chemistry or physics or economics. My brain doesn't work in a way that...

makes that stuff very understandable and no amount of grit and determination. Like I could technically go,

you know, probably learn that stuff if I had the grit and kept at it and kept at it and kept at it. But it doesn't take into account that people's brains are different and like, forget about interests, like just how people learn and what they're capable of learning. Well, it varies from person to person. So, uh, you know, what you said about what they said speaks to me. Yeah. Good.

There's also been some studies too that are basically like, hey, we're actually doing meta-analyses and using statistical analysis to really study this. And we're finding like grit and conscientiousness are the same thing. I think they found – also there was a study in 2016. It seemed to be the year of doom for grit as far as studies go. But there was one study that basically found that point –

0.5% of difference in exam scores could be ascribed to what was considered grit.

and that only 6% explained any difference in exam scores. So it had to do with a whole lot of other stuff, and it didn't have anything to do with grit. And then another study found that 95% of the variance in exam scores was shared between grit and conscientiousness. So there's basically no difference between the two. So again, in the face of all this, Angela Duckworth is like,

I'm sticking to it. She's showing the stick-to-itiveness. Yeah. So I want to read this quote from her, from Duckworth.

Because the way she talks about it here makes me like the concept more, you know, as far as just being a piece. She says, caring about how to grow grit in our young people, no matter their socioeconomic background, doesn't preclude concern for things other than grit. Grit may not be sufficient for success, but it sure is necessary if we want our children to have a shot at a productive and satisfying life.

I mean, it's hard to argue with that, you know? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, again, I think she's a very nice, good person from what I can tell. And I feel bad for her that her...

Her study just got just got completely distorted and taken out of context and out of hand. But the idea that she's still sticking by and is still with it after all of like that whole roller coaster ride is really just hats off to her for that. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, if you kind of look at the big picture, one of the villains here was was the media, you know. Oh, yeah, for sure. And the public education system. Yeah. And who else?

Paul Tuff. Cracker Barrel. Let's blame him, too. George Bush. Sure. Senior and junior. Yeah. Obama. For good measure. Yeah. Everything's his fault, right? For sure. Yeah, we'll descend it on that. All right, great. If you want to know more about grit, there's plenty to read about it. A lot of people spill a lot of ink on it. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. This is just a little trip down memory lane from a longtime listener.

Hey, guys. Been listening since, I believe, 2009. Nice. I'm not sure. It might have been 2010. My earliest memories of the show, though, were listening to episodes on things like Murphy's Law and Delta Force. Well, that's old. That's, say, 2009. Yeah. I remember listening to the Murphy's Law episode while driving down a country road in Indiana and thinking it would be so ironic if I got a flat tire.

Unfortunately, for the story's sake, it didn't happen. I need to go back and listen to the Delta Force one now that the military has all but admitted it was real. The attached photo is a screen cap of a post that just popped up and made me think of this from my Facebook memories. And it was from 14 years ago, Josh. Can you believe that? Yeah. Wow. I used to try and tell everyone I could about Stuff You Should Know and podcasts in general back then, but no one really showed any interest.

Funny how time changes things. Thanks, both of you, for what you do. The world is better for it. And that is Sincerely from Dan. Nice. Thanks a lot, Dan. I love that one. Yeah, his Facebook post was a podcast on Vikings. Yeah, wasn't that fun? Man, it seems like a bazillion years ago. Yeah, it was. A berserker years ago. That's right. Nice tie-in.

Thanks. If you want to get in touch with us like Dan did, we'd love to hear from our longtime listeners. You can wrap it up, smack it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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BuyAToyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then, there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking.

It's human. Amica. Empathy is our best policy. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasen, featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today.

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