Grit Should Not Be Taught In Schools Essay

456 Words2 Pages
The Christian author, John Ortberg, once declared, “Over time, grit is what separates fruitful lives from aimlessness.” While this concept is not new, how we go about developing this trait, is a lively and contemporary debate. On one side there are, as I call them, the critics. They believe that grit cannot be taught because of the lack of standardized teaching of it, and that it is an environmentally induced trait that cannot be developed in a school environment. On the other side, there are the optimists. They have confidence that grit can be taught, not as a whole subject, but rather it is to be incorporated in existing school curriculum. Critics also say that if grit was attempted to be taught, students would undergo unfair grading of their…show more content…
The critical standing of this opinion is that despite countless tries to establish a fundamental way to instruct students how to increase their grit, there still has been a substantial lack of success. David Levin, CEO of McGraw Hill Education, stated, “There is no science of teaching character” (qtd. In Snyder). There have been several theories and propositions; however, it seems that each strategy is incomplete in some way. Taking it one step further, Toby Young, a British journalist and educationalist, says that, “character traits are inherited, not taught.” Here, it is apparent that this critic of teaching grit believes that this trait is a hereditary quality. It is something that is in our DNA. While this is one opinion, many other critics reason that grit is developed from our culture and our upbringing, or in other words, our environment. Jeffery Aaron Snyder, with a PH. D from Carleton College, gave an example of students from China who were considered to have grit. He pointed out that these hard working students had put extremely long hours into their homework. Snyder subsequently brought up the fact that they never had taken any “character building classes.” They did not have to be taught grit, they acquired it from their environment. In the end, it is apparent that critics believe that grit cannot be taught because there is still no substantial science to teaching grit and because grit itself is an
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