Eigbrecht: When you think of the future of higher education or the future of education, what are the three first words that come up to your mind?

Fig. 10.1
A photograph of Angela Duckworth.

Angela Duckworth

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Duckworth: Curiosity, independence and connection.

Eigbrecht: Tell us about your personal “Future Skill moment”, where you learnt something for the future.

Duckworth: Well, I was very lucky to have the same teacher for writing twice when I was a high school student and his name was Mr. Carr. I was very lucky because he was so wonderful. And to have him twice, I think I had a double dose of a teacher who really helped me discover my curiosity again.

We know today from research: many of the students are, by the time they get to high school, really tuned out, there’s nothing in the hours of the school day that peaks their curiosity. But with Mr. Carr, every day was an adventure. He would come in with stories, and in one class we stood on the desks just to see what it would be like to have a different perspective. He brought his own personal stories. There were countless moments where I felt vividly alive again as a student. And I believe today that, to the extent that I’m a writer, it is because I had Mr. Carr as my writing teacher during those two years.

So, for me, the lesson of Mr. Carr is that education and teachers make enormous differences in the lives of young people.

Ehlers: Angela—I am still thinking about the three words you chose before: curiosity, independence and connection. How do independence and connection go together?

Duckworth: Those three words represent three dimensions of human functioning that all young people, especially in the twenty-first century, but frankly for all of the centuries of humanity, need in order to thrive, to lead a good life for themselves and for others. We already talked about curiosity, which is a strength of mind. When I talk about independence, I think of it as a strength of will. And when I talk about connection, I think of it as a strength of heart. Consider what you want for a young person in life: I am a mother of two daughters, as well as a scientist and an educator. And what would be my fondest hopes for my daughters to live good lives for themselves and for others is to develop these strengths of heart, mind, and will.

So, I have my stories of Mr. Carr, but there’s a lot of new science on how important curiosity is in the most fundamental ways for learning. And when I mentioned independence, I related to the fact that in the twenty-first century, no matter what you end up doing, there’s going to be increasingly a need for you to manage yourself. In other words, rather than other people managing you through contracts, through power, I think increasingly it is our responsibility to manage our own time, our own attention. There are infinite distractions and competing things that we could be doing and now more than ever again, no matter what you do for a living. You have to learn how to set goals, make plans, carry through, be clear about what you want, make sure that what you’re doing is aligned with your values and so forth.

And then when you think about strengths of heart, I think about the need for people to relate to other people. So, when I talk about connection, I mean empathy and compassion, social and emotional intelligence. So very briefly, that is why I said curiosity, a strength of mind, independence, a strength of will and connection, a strength of heart.

We already talked about curiosity, which is a strength of mind. When I talk about independence, I think of it as a strength of will. And when I talk about connection, I think of it as a strength of heart.

Ehlers: I would like to directly hook into that: we developed a Future Skills model which is centering around the concepts of learning, creativity, and co-creating. The first relates to the personal development of an individual, the second—creativity—is a dimension which refers to creating solutions for subject matter problems, and the third is referring to one’s ability to relate to the (social) world—which we call co-creation. All three are similar to curiosity, independence, and connection.

Eigbrecht: Angela, please tell us a bit about how you came to work with what you’re working with now and your pathway to this.

Duckworth: As I mentioned, I was very lucky to have not one, but a few teachers who really changed my life. Then when I went to college, I was not thinking about education in particular. I was thinking I was going to be a doctor, which is what my father absolutely wanted me to be—in fact, he had very specific plans. I was supposed to get an MD and a PhD and then become a medical school professor, like many people in my family.

I started out and studied Neurobiology, and that sounded like the plan was going exactly as he wanted. At that time though in college, I started working with children as a volunteer, tutoring them after school. I then became what we call a Big SisterFootnote 1, which is a mentor who meets with a young person every week, and I was a big sister for five years to a little girl named Maria. And the more time I spent in schools, the more I realized that not all students had the same experiences that I had. And I glimpsed, I think for the first time, the equity gap between the haves and the have-nots. To see it so young in life, to see a five-year-old on the other side of an advantage, it was to me not only heartbreaking, but I thought to myself: if you really want to change the world, the smartest way to do so is through education—to begin at the beginning.

And if you want to solve any problem, climate change, how to help people live longer lives, everything starts with young people and education. So, I shifted—and I told my father that I was not going to go to medical school. Instead I was going to do something in education. He literally stopped speaking to me for six months, he wouldn’t even answer the phone. He was very disappointed, because for him coming from his background—he immigrated to the United States from China—it was a lower status job than to be a medical school professor. So, he thought I was in a way sort of throwing away all of the opportunities he had worked so hard for.

So, I became a teacher. I created and I ran a summer program for low-income children. I worked in non-profit education policy, and now I’m a psychologist who studies the development of young people in order to help them develop the skill sets and mindsets that enable them to thrive.

You know, my father has now passed away, but I will say that before he died, I think we reconciled in one very important way. He came to understand that education was my passion. You’re right: I am burning for it. And I haven’t changed my mind at all about the importance of education as the lever to change the world—and I think he came to respect that. I’m very grateful to have had the personal experiences that led me to this lifelong interest in education.

To see it so young in life, to see a five-year-old on the other side of an advantage, it was to me not only heartbreaking, but I thought to myself: if you really want to change the world, the smartest way to do so is through education—to begin at the beginning.

Eigbrecht: You are a podcast host and host the podcast show “No Stupid Questions”. Can you tell us a little bit about how this contributes to what you aim at with your work?

Duckworth: I have a podcast with Stephen Dubner, who is a journalist. It’s called No Stupid Questions and part of the Freakonomics podcast family. The idea behind Freakonomics is that you can actually take any question that you would want to, like a question about public policy or social welfare or air pollution or dogs, apply a social science lens and ask yourself what’s really going on here. The reason why I think this is so relevant to our conversation about education and young people is that when you think about our grandparents, our great-grandparents and maybe even our own parents, they were raised by adults who just used their own intuition and their own experience in this—but now we have science. I think intuition and our own personal experience are important. But if a teacher is trying to help young people develop a growth mindset about their abilities or trying to help a young person overcome frustration or learn how to get along better and make friends, there’s now science on literally everything that I mentioned—and more. For me, the podcast No Stupid Questions is part of a much larger movement to introduce science into the mainstream. If you asked me what’s my magic wand vision, it’s that every child in the world will grow up with a psychologically wise adult in their lives. By that, I mean somebody who is saying and doing things that in the wisest way possible enables that young person to grow up well. And again, intuition is great, personal experience is great, but why not harness modern twenty-first century science just like medicine and just like the most vibrant areas of the economy?

If you asked me what’s my magic wand vision, it’s that every child in the world will grow up with a psychologically wise adult in their lives. By that, I mean somebody who is saying and doing things that in the wisest way possible enables that young person to grow up well.

Ehlers: When I read about you and your work, the concept of character and character strengths comes out strongly. How would you describe that and why is it so important for you? Why did you focus on this particular concept?

Duckworth: Character is a word that some people love and other people hate—I love it. Let me tell you how I define character and why it’s important to me: to me, character is what Aristotle said was important for a life well lived. A more modern definition with a little more specificity is: character is how we think, act, and feel in ways that are good for us and good for others. I think this is what Aristotle meant by character—and that the relevance to young people is obvious then. That’s also why we use a phrase like character development. Some people would say they prefer other terms like social, emotional learning, or twenty-first century skills. Economists often talk about non-cognitive skills, or soft skills. I personally am almost agnostic about these alternative terms—I think there are good reasons for each of these terms, but they can be used almost synonymously.

So, character to me goes all the way back to Aristotle, and, more recently, Martin Luther King, the civic activist. When he was only 18 years old, he wrote an essay for his college newspaper—he went to Morehouse College. Martin Luther King, in so many words, had been reflecting on what education is for. And he said: character and intelligence, that is the true purpose of education. And by that he meant: it’s not only that we learn math, it’s not only that we learn to write well and express ourselves. It’s not only that we learn knowledge. When we grow up in schools, we also must learn character. We also must learn all the ways to think, act and feel that are good for us and good for others. So, by character, I mean gratitude, compassion, curiosity, creativity, humility, grit, a growth mindset, optimism, productivity—I mean, everything that I want for my own daughters and for myself.

Ehlers: Angela—when I talk about Future Skills in my community, there is usually an initial fascination and then people start to think about it more deeply. They start to question the normative framework our development is based on and want to discuss the fundamentals. So, let me ask you the same question about your research subject: what is a good character? What is a wise person? What is “developing well” in life and society, and to which degree can we as educators create this idea of wellbeing and impart it on the pupil or the learner? Actually: to which degree are we allowed to do that? Because education is, is in a way, looking from a different perspective. It is also about this small line of educating somebody for freedom and autonomy so that they develop their own ideas. What is your reaction towards that dilemma? Character, in my community here, would be understood as a very normative concept. To have a good character means: you don’t steal, you don’t drink, you don’t lie and so on, this has this biblical, Christian heritage to it. How do you deal with that as a psychologist? Also, when you go into a school that you tell the teachers that we are going to develop character strengths now, how do you bring the message across without going into this danger of being seen as somebody with just another list of important things?

Duckworth: I think it’s an excellent question. There is a normative connotation to character, maybe it’s even built into the definition. When you talk about character, we mean good character, not bad character. And then the question is: is that okay? Is there a place for that in schools? And how much agreement is there about what is normative? If you asked parents and teachers to make a list of the things that they would put on the good side and then a list of things they would put on the bad side, how much disagreement would there be? If there’s a lot of disagreement, then maybe you would say that it should absolutely not be in schools. For example, there’s a lot of agreement that young people should be numerate and they should be literate—so we have math and writing, and there are not a lot of parents or educators who would disagree that numeracy and literacy are important goals for all young people to achieve at least at some level.

So, I think for me, the question is, well, how much agreement is there first? And then we can kind of cross the bridge of how much of a role should schools really have in it. I think that most parents actually agree and most educators agree that it’s better for a child to be grateful than ungrateful. A child who says ‘thank you’ sincerely is a child who’s learning something which is good for themselves and good for others unambiguously at really no cost to themselves. I think likewise, the same for curiosity or empathy. What about honesty? When’s the last time I met a teacher who said: ‘No, I actually like my students to be dishonest’? Of course, everyone agrees that that’s a good thing. What about believing that you can make a difference in the world, a kind of optimism that I think in a way is so important now more than ever in the twenty-first century? What about hard work? When’s the last time I met a teacher who said: ‘Oh, I believe all children are born knowing how to work hard’?

Teachers know that children need to learn how to work hard and how to work smart. I think there is enormous consensus about the list of things that would go on the good side, and then the contrary side of bad. I think the question then is: is there a place in schools for character to enter? Because even if you agree on that list, maybe you say that really happens in the home, that’s the job of the parents. For me, like Aristotle and like Martin Luther King, and like Maria Montessori, and I think John Dewey and other great thinkers in education, I think there is absolutely a role.

Children spend more waking hours in school and doing school-related activities than pretty much anything outside of the home. And in some cases, it actually is literally more hours than hours spent under their own roof and all that time where they are with other young people watching adult role models who are their teachers, they’re learning lessons about how to live life, how to act, think, and feel in ways that are good for themselves and good for others. So, to me to say no, we don’t do character development in schools, we don’t care about helping children learn how to be grateful, how to be honest, how to be hardworking, how to discover their curiosity, that to me, first of all, is naïve, second of all, that’s never been the way that education has been. Simply by not talking about it just means that you’re being unintentional, but children are still going to learn. And because there is new scientific research, new understanding about how the brain develops, about healthy child development, to me, it would be almost immoral not to allow educators to make use of these new insights.

Ehlers: Super interesting, thank you. I was once visiting Bogotá in Columbia. I was invited by the Ministry of Education to work with some school teachers in 2004. They had just won the election and they were thinking: How can we create better schools for our country? And what they did is that they were making a big television campaign, newspaper campaign, and social media campaign and asked people to call on hotlines and internet portals and tell their story about what they believed should be taught in schools. They had 47,000 inputs coming in within three months. Amongst the top five were learning how to live in, keep, and develop peace, and the second one was learning to deal with technology, and there was learning to live together as well. These are normative objectives as well—I think it’s just important to be explicit about the normative basis.

But there is another concept you work on which is grit. As a scientist, I had the pleasure to work with John Erpenbeck in Germany, who is one of the big researchers in competencies and skills. I remember a phone conversation with him after I had done a lot of work on frameworks and questionnaires. What he told me is that after all the years of research on competencies and how they should be developed—subject-matter competencies, personal and social competencies and so on—one thing always came up as very important in his research and that is what he called “activity competence”, or “action competence”. And he said that it seemed that apart from all other competencies, this kind of competence that somebody takes the initiative, that somebody is curious, that somebody wants to go forward, wants to learn more, wants to go beyond, is a driver which makes people successful. Everything else doesn’t matter as much as this particular issue. Is that what you would call grit?

Duckworth: I would need to learn more about action competence or activity competence—you’ve really aroused my curiosity and I would like to learn more. In general, I think there must be some overlap, because grit is about effort. Grit is something that, when I first started my training as a PhD student in Psychology, I began to want to understand. It was a term, a name, a label that I gave to a specific combination that I found in my research.

From the very beginning, when I looked at super achievers, people who are in the Olympics, for example, or win the Nobel prize, they have this combination of two things: they have perseverance over very long periods, which is kind of obvious, because the things they do are very hard and require long hours. They require resilience in the face of many setbacks and failures, because how else are you going to get to the Olympics or become a Nobel prize scientist? But they also had passion for the same long-term goals. In other words, when you come back to somebody who’s really gritty five years from now, 10 years from now, if we have an interview a decade or two decades from now, and you say: ‘Wonder what Angela Duckworth is thinking about. Maybe she’s moved on to something else. Maybe now she wants to be a chef. You know, maybe she’s retired early and maybe she doesn’t care so much about children and psychology and education.’ But I will guarantee you that if I am alive in 20 years, I will be interested in exactly these topics. I will be like: ‘Oh, remember we had that conversation about activity competence’. Like I’ve been thinking about it for 20 years. And that’s what I find about Olympic athletes, about Nobel prize winners, about people who are really at the top echelons of any field. They have perseverance over extremely long periods of time.

It’s really more about stamina than it is about intensity. And then they have this kind of abiding devotion. It’s like they are voluntarily obsessed with something, but not just for a day or two. So that’s what I mean by grit—and when I say that this plays into what I think must be overlapping with activity or action competence, and that is effort, I mean that in the following way: there is the rate at which young people or you or I learn, and that’s what is usually called talent—so if I’m very talented, I learn so fast. I was a math teacher, and some children, I could show them once and they would get it—so they were talented. Other students were like, what? I don’t get it. But they would try it another time and then eventually get it. What I actually want to say is: the rate at which a young person or an older person learns is talent, but that is separate from how much effort they put in.

Take that very bright student: I teach them once and they understand it. Well, are they going to go home and try to think about their math? Are they going to do their homework? Are they going to study? To me, these are two very different categories of things that actually we have to develop in young people. One is talent, the other is effort. And in the effort family lives grit, that’s effort towards very long-term goals, but also delay of gratification and self-control. Can I do things that are good for me? That’s proactivity and initiative. Do I start the effort without being pulled?

There are many things in the effort family, but when I look at education and I say, what’s going to happen to young people? To me, people are not born understanding how to optimize their efforts. They’re not born knowing how to avoid procrastination.

Think about phones and screens and games—young people need our help in developing strategies to not be on their phones all day so they’re not completely distracted. They need our help to learn how to set goals, how to make plans, how to learn when our plans don’t work, how to take initiative.

I think taking initiative is a skill—it’s not something you’re born knowing how to do. So, to me, whether we call it activity competence, action competence, grit, delay of gratification, self-control—when I said that when I think of three words that leap to mind for my hopes for twenty-first century education, when I said independence, many philosophers and every religious tradition have said that true freedom is to be able to rule yourself, your own conflicting desires. That independence, self-rule, self-management, self-reliance to me is going to be more important, not less, with the technology and changes that are coming in the twenty-first century and that are already here.

I think taking initiative is a skill—it’s not something you’re born knowing how to do. So, to me, whether we call it activity competence, action competence, grit, delay of gratification, self-control—when I said that when I think of three words that leap to mind for my hopes for twenty-first century education, when I said independence, many philosophers and every religious tradition have said that true freedom is to be able to rule yourself, your own conflicting desires.

Eigbrecht: That’s an interesting aspect, the time perspective. Thinking about character strengths, would you say they’re timeless or are they more important now than ever—and why is that?

Duckworth: You can call them character skills—just as some economists like James Heckman, the Nobel prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago, in order to emphasize that they can be learned. I would say that they are timeless and they are timely—timeless in the sense that since the dawn of humanity, there has been a need to develop curiosity, kindness, gratitude and all the things that we’re talking about. In every religious and philosophical tradition, going back to its very earliest writings or even its oral tradition, you can see evidence that people were talking about these exact themes. It’s not only Western traditions, it’s also Eastern traditions, every tradition. But another question is: how are they timely? What is happening in the future of work? I have new research that I haven’t even published yet, where we are analyzing data from millions of workers in the United States, partly from the bureau of labor statistics kept by the U.S. government. We’re looking at wages and job growth, and at the characteristics of jobs over more than a decade of recent history, asking what the trends are.

To me, that’s a much more scientifically evidence-based way of thinking about the future of work. And I will tell you that the clearest trend that we see is a trend where the jobs requiring a, what we’re calling, “intellectual tenacity” are not only growing, but most importantly, the wages are increasing, in a kind of monotonic, steady way.

So, what do I mean by this? These are the jobs that require a kind of curiosity and lifelong learning. Every day I’m solving a new problem. I’m learning something new and I have to take some initiative, I have to keep going because these problems don’t solve themselves. Some might have predicted that with artificial intelligence and with automation, maybe people would not need to have intellectual tenacity because computers and machines and the internet do all of our thinking, our problem-solving for us. But I think digital technology is making it more important, not less important, for people of all ages to be lifelong learners, and to have that strength of will, the sort of effort to rule themselves and say: ‘Okay, I could give up on this puzzle that I can’t figure out or I could keep going’. That, to me, is some suggestion that there is a timeless, but also a timely need for strengths of mind and strengths of will. I want to add one other piece of evidence because it’s important research from David Deming who was an economist at Harvard, and his research suggests that in addition to these strengths of mind and will, or intellectual tenacity, there is increasingly a premium on social skills, these strengths of heart, being able to relate to other people, knowing how to work with each other, how to read others’ emotions, finding out how people are feeling. This to me says strengths of heart, mind, and will are timeless and are timely and there is an important role for education, from an equity perspective, to enable all young people to develop these capabilities.

Eigbrecht: In your book on grit, you had an example of Teach for America, and I’ve been a fellow in Germany myself for a year doing that program. It was really nice to see in practice how it can work, promoting a growth mindset with students that maybe normally in our school system, in Germany with being graded all the time, is kind of hard to promote—to see that it’s possible to help people along the way to get that idea. How would you describe the changes that have happened in the last years for promoting character strengths, Future Skills, et cetera, and what still needs more change?

Duckworth: When Jim Heckman won the Nobel prize in 2000 for his contributions to econometrics, things really changed for him as an economist. He started to look at what he began to call the non-cognitive and, eventually, the character elements of human capital. As a labor economist, he began to see that there was an enormous, unexamined aspect of human capacity that was not being picked up by standardized tests, that was not exactly the same thing as knowing how to do math or how to write or read well. These dimensions are what we’ve been talking about—character. In in those 20 plus years that have passed since Jim won the Nobel prize, shifting 100% of his scientific research towards illuminating these other aspects of human capital that one could call character, there has been a groundswell of research interests across all sciences, neuroscience, economics, sociology, psychology, to try to better understand how these capabilities develop.

And I think that is the thing that needs to be done. I think we have an enormously deeper appreciation that when young people grow up, when we think if education has been successful, it can’t just be if they can do math problems. Can they read and write well? It also has to be: can they relate to other people? Can they regulate their own effort? Can they maintain curiosity and honesty? What needs to be done is to now move beyond an appreciation of these capabilities being important and getting more into how—how do we support that?

And if you ask me like, you’ve been thinking about it for 20 years, you must have a curriculum. You must have maybe a five-page memo that you could simply hand out to school leaders and say, okay, this is a recipe, just do that. But I’m nowhere close to that, and I don’t think anybody is—we’re at the beginning of the beginning.

I think this to me is the important work—and this is why I’m so excited about this project that you have underway, understanding how to teach these things. Maybe it’s not even the right word, teach, it’s got to be some combination probably of modeling these things, embedding the programs within the school day, but maybe even if it’s in sports and in music, things that extend beyond the classroom that support growth mindset, collaboration, et cetera. So, we’re at the beginning of the beginning and I don’t want to rush into a simplistic solution. I have no curriculum to sell.

I do think, though, that it’s important to say one thing as we move into this exciting new chapter: as a psychologist who studies the data on this, one thing to assure those policymakers who are worried that this is going to crowd out traditional academics, saying oh, no, we can’t focus on these things, it’s very important that our children are able to read and to write and to do math. Well, I have two daughters and, also, I have a lot of data and I will tell you that both my personal experience and also the scientific research suggests that these are complementary. Young people cannot succeed academically without these strengths of character. And when you have both, you’re enormously more effective, not only as a student, but as a person.

Ehlers: That was really fascinating—thank you!

Duckworth: And there’s nothing more important than what we’re all working on together. So, I’m happy to be, in some ways, I say on the same team.