True Grit? Notions of Numbers and Mind in Making “Grit” a Scientific Object

• In Event: Curriculum Studies and Historicizing the Present: The Political and the Impracticality of Practical Knowledge

Abstract

An emerging common sense in education reform today is to argue that ‘non-cognitive skills’ are as strong a ‘predictor’ of future success as achievement test scores. These non-cognitive skills are treated as ‘basic principles’ of traditional education in the United States, even as arguments for their inclusion in curriculum are couched in the discourse of cognitive psychology. It is in within this debate that I examine how one element of resurgent character education—‘grit’—has gained newfound validity through psychological research identifying it as a “highly predictive trait of successful people” (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, Kelly, 2007).

Following Latour and Woolgar (1986), I hesitate to take the facticity of grit as a statement shorn of the historical encrustations and theories that produced it. Instead, I explore grit’s historical emergence as an assemblage, and dependent upon theoretical assumptions of the mind and its functions, the techniques of statistical reasoning, the disciplinary boundary objects of psychology, and the epistemic authority of science for its sense of naturalness. By treating grit as an assemblage, its appearance as an explanatory object for why certain people succeed and others fail can be better understood as a political production and its potential to produce new forms of social exclusion in the impulse to include can be made visible and contestable.

I explore ‘grit’ by following multiple strands constitutive of its ‘reason.’ First, I historicize the grounds that made grit possible a category of psychological investigation, by examining notions of the individual, the mind, and experience in the psychology of William James. Second, I examine methods of statistical reasoning to make visible the means by which grit’s validity as a scientific phenomenon permits the trait to be claimed as a universal and timeless scientific fact of successful people today. Finally, I examine the cultural boundary work of science (Gieryn, 1999) as a means to understand grit’s epistemic authority in education reform. In other words, the question of grit is not whether it exists, but how best to teach it!

Grit’s transformation from cultural value to scientific fact is particularly noticeable in schools responding to communities defined as underserved—that is, communities of poor and racialized groups. Grit promises educators a neutral and objective way for teachers to think about themselves and their students, for parents to think about their children, and for children to think about themselves. Yet the transformation of grit from a cultural value into a scientific fact has particular consequences when it enters pedagogy through the epistemic authority of psychology. It reifies a ‘proper’ mode of conduct while ignoring its tethers to provenance in the 19th century American West. For poor and racialized groups, their grit, or the lack of it, becomes the hidden cause for writing stories of why certain kids succeed and others fail—and places the blame for social inequities upon society’s most-marginalized members.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin-Madison