The case for character education hardly needs to be made. Have a glance at the motivational posters lining school hallways everywhere. “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison counsels our kids. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard,” adds NBA star Kevin Durant. Perhaps Brookings will issue a classroom poster with Richard Reeves’s face and his conclusion from this paper: “Smarts matter, but so does character.” We get it. Among the least surprising findings in social science research is that people who have certain character strengths (this paper focuses on “drive” and “prudence”) do better in life. Whether our children have great or modest gifts, we hope they will work hard, delay gratification, and persist when things don’t come easy. Still it’s easy to get nervous when Reeves suggests “too little attention is paid by policymakers to the cultivation and distribution of these character skills.” What exactly would such attention look like? Demanding that schools making AYP in grit and prudence? Character value-added measures? Likewise, eyebrows may rightfully be raised when Reeves suggests that “character skills may count for a lot – as much, perhaps, as cognitive skills – in terms of important life outcomes.” That so? A figure in the report is headlined “Drive and Prudence Matter as Much as Book Smarts for HS Graduation” (“Book Smarts?” Seriously, Brookings?), but the bar graph clearly shows “high reading skills” matter a lot more. Therein lies the mischief. It’s a lot easier to discern and measure the impact of traits like “drive” and “prudence” than to plan interventions to cultivate and grow it. And schools need no additional reasons to short-shrift academics. It’s helpful to have our faith in “performance character” issues validated, but let’s not go crazy (“teaching the whole child” is already a too-convenient excuse for poor performance). The danger of saying character matters as much or more than academics is that it might fall on fad-prone education ears as, “Academics are arbitrary. Education is all about grit!” And that wouldn’t be prudent.
SOURCE: Richard V. Reeves, Joanna Venator, and Kimberly Howard, “The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence,” The Brookings Institution (October 2014).
