成功关键 智商还是性格?

Mr. Heckman wanted to examine this idea more closely, so he analyzed a few large national databases of student performance. He found that in many important ways, the premise behind the GED was entirely valid. According to their scores on achievement tests, GED recipients were every bit as smart as high-school graduates. But when Mr. Heckman looked at their path through higher education, he found that GED recipients weren't anything like high-school graduates. At age 22, Mr. Heckman found, just 3% of GED recipients were either enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of postsecondary degree, compared with 46% of high-school graduates. In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes - annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs - GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts.
赫克曼希望更细致地研究这一观念，因此他对几个有关学生表现的国家级大型数据库进行了分析。他发现，GED背后的前提在许多重要方面都是有依据的。从成绩测验的得分来看，获GED证书的学生完全与高中毕业生一样聪明。然而，赫克曼在进一步研究他们的高等教育历程时发现，获GED证书的学生与高中毕业生的情况差异很大。他发现，在22岁时，获GED证书的学生只有3%的人被四年制大学录取或是修完了中学毕业后的某种学位，而高中毕业生的这一比例为46%。实际上，赫克曼还发现，在考虑到各种各样的重要的未来成就时，例如年收入、失业率、离婚率以及使用非法毒品等方面，获GED证书的学生的表现与高中退学学生是一致的，尽管他们额外获得了这个据信是比较宝贵的证书，而且他们的才智平均要比高中退学学生高出很多。

These results posed, for Mr. Heckman, a confounding intellectual puzzle. Like most economists, he had always believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person's life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group - GED holders - whose good test scores didn't seem to have any positive effect on their eventual outcomes. What was missing from the equation, Mr. Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits, or noncognitive skills, that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school.
这些研究结果向赫克曼提出了一个令人困惑的关于智力的问题。与大多数经济学家一样，过去他一直认为认知技能是个决定一个人未来生活状况的最可靠的因素。然而，现在他发现了这样一群人──GED文凭持有者，尽管他们的考试成绩不错，但这似乎对他们的最终成就没有起到任何积极作用。根据赫克曼的结论，这其中缺失的正是让高中毕业生完成学业的那种心理特质，或者说是非认知技能。

So what can parents do to help their children develop skills like motivation and perseverance? The reality is that when it comes to noncognitive skills, the traditional calculus of the cognitive hypothesis - start earlier and work harder - falls apart. Children can't get better at overcoming disappointment just by working at it for more hours. And they don't lag behind in curiosity simply because they didn't start doing curiosity work sheets at an early enough age.
那么，家长能够做些什么来帮助他们的孩子培养诸如积极性和毅力这样的技能呢？实际情况是，在事关非认知技能时，有关认知假设的传统做法──更早开始练习更多地练习──就行不通了。孩子们不会因为多花了一些时间就变得擅长于克服失望情绪，他们也不会因为没有在足够早的时候开始进行好奇心练习就会在这方面落后于其他孩子。

Instead, it seems, the most valuable thing that parents can do to help their children develop noncognitive skills - which is to say, to develop their character - may be to do nothing. To back off a bit. To let our children face some adversity on their own, to fall down and not be helped back up. When you talk today to teachers and administrators at high-achieving high schools, this is their greatest concern: that their students are so overly protected from adversity, in their homes and at school, that they never develop the crucial ability to overcome real setbacks and in the process to develop strength of character.
反之，若要帮助孩子培养非认知技能（也就是说塑造他们的性格），家长所能做的最有价值的事情或许就是什么都不做。家长要少干预一些，要让孩子们独自面对一些困境，任由他们摔倒、无人扶持。现如今，你要是和一些教学质量优异的高中的老师和行政管理人员谈话，就会发现这是他们最大的担忧：学生们在家中和学校受到过度保护，不会遭遇困境，因此他们从未培养出克服实际挫折的关键能力，相应地也没有在这个过程中形成坚毅的性格。

American children, especially those who grow up in relative comfort, are, more than ever, shielded from failure as they grow up. They certainly work hard; they often experience a great deal of pressure and stress; but in reality, their path through the education system is easier and smoother than it was for any previous generation. Many of them are able to graduate from college without facing any significant challenges. But if this new research is right, their schools, their families, and their culture may all be doing them a disservice by not giving them more opportunities to struggle. Overcoming adversity is what produces character. And character, even more than IQ, is what leads to real and lasting success.
美国的儿童，特别是那些在比较舒适的生活环境中长大的儿童，在成长的过程中更是比以往任何时候都不用面对失败。当然，他们同样也学习刻苦，常常也会承受很多压力。但是，实际上他们接受教育的过程比以往任何一代人都更容易更顺利，他们中的许多人都能够不用面临任何重大挑战就顺利从大学毕业。话说回来，如果赫克曼的这项新研究正确的话，那就意味着这些孩子的学校、他们的家庭以及他们所处的文化可能都会因为没有为他们提供更多奋斗的机会而给他们帮倒忙。克服困境是塑造性格之要素，而性格是比智商还重要的造就真正的和长远的成功的要素。