I just listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast from last May: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-test-the-overlooked-factors-

I just listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast from last May: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-test-the-overlooked-factors-that-determine-success https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-te... The subject being interviewed is a Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman. The starting point was noting that people who get a GED (on average) score just as well on IQ tests as those getting an ordinary HS diploma. However, their life outcomes tend to be much worse than those who got a HS diploma the ordinary way. Why? The economist said that 150 years ago schools taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but spent as much time on "character building" lessons: diligence, persistence, working well with others, etc, but that mostly was removed by the mid 20th century for a couple of reasons. One was that the character building exercises were cast in terms of Protestantism, and as the US became more diverse, there was a push against it. Second, psychology was in the thrall of things that could be machine scored like IQ tests and looked down on squishy character traits. Anyway, although the GED students did as well on IQ tests, they did substantially worse than normal HS graduates when scored on those other personality skills (not traits, the economist said, since those things can be taught to a large degree). In the mid 60s a controlled experiment was run where a preschool for impoverished kids were split into the treatment group and the control group. The treatment group's teachers did non-standard stuff, eg, simply exposing the kids to the larger world by taking them on field trips to parts of the city they would never otherwise experience. They were read stories with those character building traits about fairness, persistence, etc. The teachers built relationships with the parents and emphasized how important the parent-child relationship was and not to expect that learning is simply the teacher's job. They provided child care for single/working mothers. This intervention lasted two years of preschool, so basically ages 3-5. The kids were tested at age 10 and everyone was disappointed that there was no difference. But the economist (and others) revisited the test subjects decades later and found there was a profound difference in outcomes. The treatment group attained higher levels of education, had better incomes, better health, and lower crime involvement. The children of the treatment group were substantially better off in those regards than those of the control group.