This book isn’t about home education, nor is much of it applicable to home education, but I found it fascinating all the same.

The subtitle is ‘Grit, curiosity and the hidden power of character’ and I wanted to read it particularly to learn about the importance of ‘grit’. I feel like we’ve got curiosity and character pretty well covered with home ed, but friends have expressed concerns that home ed doesn’t teach children to do things they don’t want to do, which is pretty much the definition of grit. (I touched on it in this post.)

Tough’s book looks at how character is actually a better indicator of future success than academic achievement and looks at different definitions of character as determined by various educators and educational reformers. He obviously also looks at the careers and programs run by these people and I found it really interesting to examine differing points of view. (Although they all seemed to agree that traditional education is failing children.)

It gave me a lot of food for thought (and for future blog posts).

Thanks to Najma Finlay at Random House for sending it to me.