How Children Succeed By Paul Tough Summary

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Recommended: The Correlation of Personality Traits and Academic Performance

In his book “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character”, Paul Tough attempts to push the reader to believe that the most important skills for determining a person’s success in life are character traits. For the longest time people believed that IQ and SAT scores were good predictors of a person’s future success in college and in life, but Tough believes this to be untrue. Through the heavy use of exemplification and statistics and studies, Paul Tough argues that schools, families, and the entire educational system in general should focus more on building character, or noncognitive traits, than on just trying to improve test scores. In the beginning of the book, Tough uses a study about rats and grooming habits …show more content…

One school that Paul Tough studied and researched greatly was ACE Tech, a charter school in Chicago. He followed a girl named Kewauna through her education and he watched her life change. She entered school freshman year with an education level two to three years behind where she was supposed to be, then again so was almost every kid who entered ACE Tech and joined the OneGoal program. Which is a program designed to get kids from low-income families to, and through, college so that they can have a better life. From Sophomore year onward was enrolled in this program and she turned her life around. The program taught character skills needed to get through college. Kewauna, determined to be the first person in her family to earn a college degree, used many key character traits, such as grit, self control, and optimism to put in enough work to get herself to college. She succeeded in getting into college and also continued her hard work once she got there (pg. 169-175). This example of a girl completely turning her life around with the power of non-cognitive skills, is very compelling and Tough uses it to help prove his point that with the proper character traits, people can do

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