Salon: Your new book “Helping Children Learn” is subtitled “What Works and Why.” But if I may, I’d like to suggest a different subtitle: “Just About Everything We’re Doing to Low-Income Kids in School is Wrong and Here’s the Neuro-Biological Research to Explain Why.” Was it just me or does the research you write about upend some pretty fundamental assumptions?
Paul Tough: I was struck by that too. Some of the basic principles we have, in terms of discipline, in terms of pedagogy and how we run our schools are not advantageous to kids who are growing up in adversity. This research on just how boring school is really resonated with me, especially the research about how when you’re growing up in a low-income community, school is more likely to be repetitive, boring and unmotivating. I hadn’t really picked up on that as being a significant problem before doing this reporting, but this research was really persuasive to me, not only that it’s true for a lot of kids but that it really matters in terms of their motivation. I think I was also more attuned to what happens in American schools and in classrooms because my older son is now in school.
Do the curiosity worksheets your son is filling out indicate that he’s going to be curious? And note that I didn’t take this opportunity to make a crack about predictive “grit” measurement.
He’s not filling out curiosity worksheets. He’s in first grade so there’s still a lot of play and interesting stuff but it’s this glimpse of what public school is like for so many kids, and how different it is from the way that he actually learns things—by doing experiments, by getting interested in something and staying interested in it for a week or even a month. The expeditionary learning model is how he naturally thinks, and I think it’s the way most kids naturally think. You get interested in something and you ask questions, and if you have a parent or a teacher or a tutor who can help expand your interest rather than quash it, you can have a great experience with learning. But very few kids in school today get to have that experience and the ones who do are more likely to be well off.
[For more of this story, written by Jennifer Berkshire, go to http://www.salon.com/2016/05/2...lly_fix_our_schools/]
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