Intelligence and How To Get It: Why Schools and Culture Count

"This book is a bit like Paul Tough’s book in that it really highlights the malleability of child skills, and how broadening access to opportunity can transform where children wind up when they enter adulthood and start having to contribute and be independent. Nisbett’s book, unlike Tough’s book, focuses on traditional cognitive skills, things like IQ and academic achievement. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There is a long tradition in psychology arguing that it is very hard to change cognitive skills but it turns out that is a bad interpretation of the existing evidence. This book is making that case in detail. It’s definitely more scholarly than Tough’s book, but it’s a good read and the author conveys his passion between the lines. So, if you want to know if trying to make your kid smarter is a fool’s errand, you can read this book and conclude that no, it’s not a fool’s errand. It’s a worthwhile endeavour for many parents and for our society. We can endow whole generations of children with richer cognitive and non-cognitive skills through the right kinds of investments. A lot of the things we talked about will target cognitive skills, like tutoring and good early education, while also simultaneously targeting non-cognitive skills by helping kids form healthier identities. In the non-cognitive skill domain there are social and emotional skill programs that help you, say, work through conflict and give you new tools to tap into that more patient part of your brain, allowing you to empathize with people and realize that there could be interesting reasons for conflict that don’t require aggression, that can be resolved with more effective strategies. Crafting and scaling up these kinds of interventions is a big exciting area. So it’s a very overlapping set of tools that we’re talking about here."