If you're a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. You're not getting to the crux of the problem.
Brooks is basing his arguments on the famous "Marshmallow Test" performed by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960's: Small children (about age 4) were given a marshmallow and told that they could have a second marshmallow if they waited until a researcher returned to eat the marshmallow they had; longitudinal follow-up found children who were able to wait had better life outcomes down the road. Brooks is joining a litany of researchers and commentators who have seized on this result to argue that "emotional intelligence" or psychological traits, such as the ability to delay gratification, may be more important to children's longterm success than academic skills. I doubt that many reasonable people disagree with that conclusion, but what kind of pragmatic guidance that's supposed to offer policymakers is far less clear than Brooks seems to think it is.
After all, it's not as if schools have never tried to impact children's emotional and psychological development or personal habits. In fact, the history of the Progressive education movement is littered with efforts to inculcate specific habits and values--from personal hygiene, to how to make friends, to good work habits, to self-esteem--in youngsters, often at the expense of academic content. Far from a lack of interest in intervening in what Brooks labels "the murky world of psychology and human nature," politicians and educators have evidenced a seemingly insatiable desire to do so, but one which history shows us has often been poorly implemented or focused on misguided ends. And fights between different schools of educators and idealouges over precisely what aspects of children's psychology and nature our public schools ought to seek to alter, and in what ways, have consumed an extraordinary amount of energy and produced a great deal of unproductive division within our nation's education system.
Contemporary education reformers focus on structural and organizational concerns not because they are myopic but because these tools are the most effective levers policymakers have to drive broad change. For example, high-quality preschool programs--the very type of structural reform Brooks derides--have shown positive long-term impacts in children's lives in large part because they focus on supporting children's social and emotional development--including the type of self-regulatory skills the Marshmallow Test measures--at least as much as academics. More broadly, when policymakers set clear expectations, hold educators accountable, and give them the freedom to run schools effectively, teachers and school leaders--who realize the importance of fostering children's moral, social and emotional as well as their cognitive development--choose to run schools in ways that foster the very skills Brooks wishes to see inculcated. Parents who are given choices also tend to choose such schools.
Throughout the country we find examples of high-performing public, private, and charter schools that seek to educate children to high standards in both academics and such virtues as responsibility, self-control, integrity, and respect. But numerous structural policy barriers conspire to prevent the creation or expansion of more such schools. Eliminating these barriers will do far more to generate the type of results Brooks seeks--and would do so with more respect for basic conservative values of family privacy and autonomy--than would legislating another indifferently implemented and controversial "values" program at the state or federal level.
*Sorry for Times Select link. Normally I try not to highlight anything many people can't access.
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