From Discomfort to Resilience

The following highly-stimulative pieces (here and here) appeared on The New York Times website a few days ago. The first is entitled, "What if the secret to success is failure?" and the second, "My family's experiment in extreme schooling." Both are very interesting, and taken together can provide some curious insights into the idea of character development. 


"What if the secret to success is failure?" follows the efforts of two modern, non-public schools to teach character to their students. One of these schools, the now-famous KIPP Academy system, founded their efforts in reaction to surprising data emerging from their earliest graduates. While highly touted for its extreme-yet-successful method for helping disadvantage kids get into prestigious high schools (see such works as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (a review)), recent data began revealing unexpected insights into the success-rates of KIPP's graduates. While the vast majority of graduates went on to high school and college, only 33% of KIPP's former students actually graduated from a 4-year university program. As the article points out, that's four times higher than the average (8%), but far from what KIPP supporters expected. Something wasn't working with their approach.


Further research found that those KIPP alumnus who did graduate from college were not necessarily the best and brightest students during their days at the Academy. As the author of the article--the aptly named Paul Tough--relates: 


"They [KIPP alumni who graduated from college] were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class."

In short, the successful students weren't the most intelligent, or the most intensely prepared; rather, they were the most able to deal with set-backs, distractions, and failures.

From where does this feature of one's character emerge? One suggestion is through experience. But as Mr. Tough comments:

"It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts large and small. Yet we all know--at some level, at least--that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can."

At its root then, a central feature of character growth seems to stem from the experience of working to overcome difficult and sometimes dangerous situations, or indeed, failure. As Dominic Randolf, the headmaster of the other school highlighted in the article, Riverdale, suggests, "'The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure...and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails at anything.'" Succeeding at character development--to say nothing of any other achievement in life--appears rooted in the experience of and the reaction to failure.

This is a point which the second article (linked here so you don't have to return to the top of the page ;)...) brings out in an interesting way. Entitled, "My Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling," NY Times writer Clifford J. Levy writes of moving his family to Russia for work approximately four years ago. The "experiment" involved his and his wife's decision to enroll their children in a Russian-only private school called "New Humanitarian," the idea being essentially to give them a chance to experience a new culture in an involved manner. With only 150 students enrolled at the school, the hypothesis seemed plausible.

From the start, however, things did not go so well. All three children experienced extreme discomfort trying to  adjust to the new surroundings, finding themselves isolated, unhappy, and at the bottom of the academic standings. The family seriously considered whether their experiment had gone too far. Hoping to provide some relief, the parents offered to let the kids switch to an international school at any time.

The first few months passed, and a ray of hope emerged. As Mr. Levy writes:

"Yet even as we [the parents] fretted, they [the children] were developing survival skills on their own. They asked teachers for extra help after class. To prove to classmates that they were not clueless, they tried to do well in subjects that did not require a lot of Russian, like math. The girls employed a tactic that they called the smile-and-nod when they didn't understand what someone was saying. They remembered the words and furtively looked them up."

The children, in other words, began to grow into their new surroundings. They suffered months of confusion, discomfort, and challenges, yet managed to make choices--getting extra help, mastering Russian-light subjects like math, and listening intently during social interactions--to help  improve their overall situation, not simply their academic standing.

These actions seem in line with what Mr. Tough, Ms. Levine, and Mr. Randolf suggested about the development of character in the first article we discussed; namely, that character--an essential element of academic and life success--develops in the process of dealing with and overcoming discomfort and failure.

It should be noted that constant pressure and hardship can yield the opposite of character development, as the popular documentary Race to Nowhere suggests. As Ms. Levin writes, being "emotionally distant" from one's children, yet still "insist[ing] high levels of achievement," from them would seem, more often then not, a recipe for disaster. Character development then seems to require more than just rigorous demands and the experience of hardship.

Which is where the example of "My Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling" again comes into play. The parents did not simply throw their children into an uncomfortable environment and say, "well now, figure this out...or else." They considered the challenges their children would face, and made a bold-yet-informed decision to give a Russian-only school a try. When their children began running up against the extreme hardships that the experience produced, the parents provided such support and care as they could muster, going so far as to offer a less rigorous alternative (an international school) if the current experiment simply became too much. Given these circumstances, the experiment--which began with such difficulty and hardship--ended in a resounding success.

What can we learn from these examples? First, it seems that character is an important element of success and happiness, be it in academic or regular-life settings. Emerging studies suggest that one's ability to remain committed to a task, even through hardship, and to keep one's self motivated through failure, is at least as important as intelligence.

Second, that character appears to grow and develop in the context of rigor and difficult situations. In short, a person seems to have to learn how to fail and bounce back in order to grow as a person, if you will. While some people seem to possess this ability to a greater extent than others naturally, the experience of overcoming difficult situations seems to promote character development in people generally.

Which leads to the third point, namely, that character development requires a context where failure and difficulty is an accepted outcome of everyday life. Parents who shield their children from hardship and failure appear to limit the growth of their resilient character. Yet parents who offer their children nothing but hardship can lead the latter toward severe emotional instability, and even suicidal thoughts and actions. The optimal approach, so far as I can tell, is one of offering both challenges as well as support. Providing a supportive--but not a shielded--context appears to offer children both the opportunity to improve their resilience, as well as the emotional tools to teach themselves how to handle tough times.

It is a relatively simple, if important, step to articulate these ideas into words and ways of thinking. It is quite another task to implement them in reality. Failures and set-backs are likely. But as these articles seem to suggest, these negative outcomes can lead to very positive development. So perhaps we should not be discouraged if our first few tries do not succeed.

Happy Thursday friends :)

Update: J.K. Rowling talks about the value of failure at Harvard's 2008 commencement.