Why Grit is Highly Overrated, The Globe and Mail:
The most significant predictor of how kids will do in school is how their parents did in school. Nothing the education system has tried so far has changed that. The latest confirmation comes from a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It assessed the data from test results in the U.K., where everyone takes a universal exam at the ageof 16. The researchers focused on the test scores of 2,321 twin pairs, who are part of a long-term study to determine the various influences of environment and heredity on behaviour and life outcomes. Their conclusion is both good news and bad news for those who think intelligence is highly overrated. They found that educational achievement does indeed depend on far more traits than just IQ. The bad news: Those traits are highly heritable, too.
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At this point, a lot of folks will be inclined to stick their fingers in their ears and say “Na, na, na, I can’t hear you.” Fifty years of social science, education theory, parenting beliefs and progressive thought depends on the blank-slate view of human nature, which holds that kids are unformed lumps of clay who are entirely shaped by their environment. Despite the evidence all around us, it is not polite to say this isn’t so. It is not polite to say that people differ in their innate abilities, and that there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. Better to pretend we live in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average and could probably go to Harvard if only they had the right social advantages...
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