How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough

Journalist Paul Tough argues that many more students would thrive in life if their schools focused more on teaching character.

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)

Try as they might to help our children succeed, most classroom teachers do the job only half-right, said James Sweeney in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In a book that “takes readers on a high-speed tour of experimental schools and new research,” journalist Paul Tough argues that many more students would thrive in life if their schools focused more on teaching character, rather than just content. Tough, who writes for The New York Times Magazine, brings to light various recent studies that suggest that IQ is less predictive of a child’s success than harder-to-measure traits such as persistence, optimism, curiosity, and self-control. But he also peppers his account with anecdotes indicating that this suite of traits—call it grit, for short—can be learned.

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