513

A GENEALOGY OF GRIT: EDUCATION IN THE NEW GILDED AGE

Ariana Gonzalez Stokas

Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

Guttman Community College, City University of New York

Abstract. Recently, due in part to the research of Angela Duckworth, the cultivation of dispositions in
education, grit in particular, has gained the attention of educational policymakers and the educational
research community. While much of the research has focused on how to detect grit, there has been
little discussion regarding how grit came to be valued as a noncognitive disposition and what its recent
prominence might tell us about current social conditions. In this essay, Ariana Gonzalez Stokas attempts
to illuminate grit as a concept that has undergone a number of conceptual transformations in American
culture. She seeks to show how grit developed as a way to justify social and economic inequality and
how this history is bound up in its conceptual structure. Through conducting a genealogical excavation,
Stokas reveals the relationship of grit to a cluster of cultural events that occurred at the turn of the
twentieth century in the confluence of boxing, cowboys, and Theodore Roosevelt, and aims to illuminate
how grit has served as a tool for convincing society that achievement occurs through heroic individual
effort despite inadequate social supports. This historical understanding of grit, Stokas concludes, may
help us to recognize that the energy and resources currently spent on cultivating grit in children would
be better spent on ameliorating the problems of social and economic inequality.

Framework
Grit has recently entered American culture as a valued disposition in earnest.
It has emerged in countless areas of popular culture, from business blogs to fashion
articles to professional sports. The work of Angela Duckworth has most notably
given shape to the investigation of grit in the field of American education. Accord-
ing to Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, grit “entails working
strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite
failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”1 It is primarily a disposition that
correlates with a high degree of individual achievement and the ability to have
significant tolerance for the unpleasant sides of a practice, whether learning the
piano, math, science, or painting. Duckworth has shown that high-achieving indi-
viduals are not necessarily the most talented but rather are able to push through
setbacks and sustain their interest despite discomfort or unpleasant moments in
order to attain goals. Most recently Duckworth has connected grit to self-control or
the ability to delay self-gratification. While grit has been identified as a disposition
held by highly successful individuals,2 how it might be cultivated among individ-
uals more broadly is less clear, and addressing this question has become the aim

1. Angela Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly, “Grit: Perse-
verance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007):
1087–1101.
2. Although a lengthy examination of the term “success” is an important endeavor, this inquiry will not
directly seek to unpack this complicated term. In the literature on grit addressed in this essay, success is
most often associated with achievement in the areas of salary attainment, grades, as well as high school
and college graduation rates. Duckworth in particular is also interested in success as the achievement of

EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

© 2015 Board of Trustees University of Illinois
514 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

of the current discourse on grit and its related noncognitive dispositions such as
perseverance and tenacity. In this article, I understand a noncognitive disposition
to mean the capacity of an individual to act, feel, and think in ways associated with
a set of culturally recognizable qualities. Dispositions such as grit, I will argue, act
within culture often without question as to how they came to be and whether or
not they ought to be accepted as positive or desirable. They are often introduced
into the discourse as similar to inherited personality traits or even genetic traits
like eye color; they appear without inquiry into their origins and morphologies.
Grit has become of such interest to the educational community that the U.S.
Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology recently published
Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the
Twenty-First Century, a major policy report that articulates the importance of
these noncognitive abilities for achievement in education and calls for an inves-
tigation into ways to promote their development, particularly through the use of
technology. It states,
The purpose of this brief is to distill the critical themes, questions, conclusions, and recom-
mendations around theory, measurement, and the design of learning environments, with an
eye toward identifying potential new roles for technology. It explores the possibility that grit,
tenacity, and perseverance can be malleable and teachable, and discusses the potential of these
factors to significantly increase success for all students.3

Because grit has been identified as a quality of high-achieving individuals,

it seems to make sense that this particular disposition would be compelling
to an educational community concerned with elevating achievement levels and
supporting children to push through setbacks and challenges. Duckworth and a
team of researchers have partnered with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP)
charter schools to develop a character report card and road map for assessing
and developing a number of characteristics such as grit. This growing interest in
how grit might be cultivated through education, particularly in schools serving
low-income communities, has served as the catalyst for this inquiry.
The current flurry around grit is a revival of a long-standing conversation
about character education in schools. This inquiry does not intend to be a critique
of the idea that character can be cultivated nor of the KIPP approach or the
appropriateness of character cultivation in education. Rather, it seeks to show how
our current imagining of grit is bound up in a particular American cultural history,

goals, such as studying and completing a spelling bee competition, and the theme of completion is often
associated with success.
3. Nicole Shechtman et al., Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success
in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational
Technology, 2013), vi; http://pgbovine.net/OET-Draft-Grit-Report-2-17-13.pdf.

ARIANA GONZALEZ STOKAS is Assistant Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies,

Guttman Community College, City University of New York, 50 W. 40th Street, New York, NY
10018; e-mail <ariana.gonzalez-stokas@ncc.cuny.edu>. Her primary areas of scholarship are decolonial
aesthetics, Caribbean philosophies of education, and ethics.
Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 515

one that depicts gritty individualism as the means to achievement. American grit
has, I will show, worked through archetypes such as the cowboy and the boxer to
create a kind of cultural propaganda that convinces the individual that success is
the result of hard, relentless work regardless of systemic privilege. These cultural
imaginings have reinforced the belief that social hardships, such as poverty and
inequality, are overcome through heroic individual effort rather than through
an ecosystem of supportive environments and policies. Grit, it turns out upon
close examination of its genealogical morphology, is a disposition that stands in
stark contrast to notions of collective effort. The Department of Education report,
attentive to this “dark side” of grit, states that
As grit becomes a more popular notion in education, there is a risk that poorly informed educa-
tors or parents could misuse the idea and introduce what psychologists call the “fundamental
attribution error” — the tendency to overvalue personality-based explanations for observed
behaviors and undervalue situational explanations. In other words, there is a risk that individu-
als could overattribute students’ poor performance to a lack of “grittiness” without considering
that critical supports are lacking in the environment.4

The “fundamental attribution error,” I maintain, is bound up in how we under-

stand grit. In other words, grit (or lack thereof) is, in our collective imagination,
attributed to the individual even if social conditions point to a lack of critical
supports; in its genealogy, we find that the need for grit often arises because sup-
ports are lacking. However, it is not my intention to suggest that grit has no
value. Rather, degrees of “grittiness” are often helpful and necessary to perse-
vering through major and minor life experiences. We might say that without the
endurance of gritty individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Fidel Castro, social
change may not have occurred. My aim is to frame the social and historical com-
plexities that comprise the dispositions we come to value and to show that the
renewed emphasis on grit is connected to increased social and economic inequal-
ity in the United States. I posit that without understanding that grit has been used
as a cultural trope to legitimate individual success while ignoring the systemic
reasons for its need, we risk continuing to entrench the systemic inequality that
educational researchers, such as Diane Ravitch, have indentified as at the root of
underachievement in schools. Because of how grit has evolved through our cultural
imagination, it is, I contend, difficult to avoid attributing failure to an individual
lack of grit rather than unjust and unequal social environments. So, while there
is undoubtedly value in developing grit or having a gritty disposition, its dark side
in such unequal times must be weighted heavily when decisions are being made
to elevate its social value. My contention with grit is more a matter of its eleva-
tion as a solution to inequality rather than a wholesale dismissal of its existence
or necessity.
In the face of underresourced schools, impoverished communities, and increas-
ing levels of economic inequality, the ethics of perpetuating the belief that indi-
vidual effort will necessarily equal success should be examined. It is increasingly

4. Ibid., 29.
516 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

known, though unmitigated in policymaking, that the single most significant

factor in the lives of struggling students is poverty. Recent research reveals that
the achievement gap between rich and poor students has grown despite continual
rhetoric about finding ways to eliminate it. The persistent widening achievement
gap directly correlates with rates of rising inequality in the United States.5 Very
simply, low-income children need access to greater resources and opportunities,
not just more effort. To tell the impoverished child in particular that he or she
needs more grit in order to succeed seems at best misguided and at worst classism
and a return to a culture of poverty ideology that equates pauperism was an unfa-
vorable human trait that could be bred out of society. Grit, as this genealogy will
reveal, has long been a way for the privileged to attribute inequality to differences
in individual talent and effort while ignoring other key factors such as disparities
in access to resources and opportunities.
Through the examination of two archetypes of grit, the cowboy and the boxer,
this inquiry aims to reveal grit as a disposition whose “dark side” is unavoidable
because it is embedded in our collective cultural notions of why some people
achieve and others do not. It explores grit as a disposition that contributes to the
mythology that achievement is predominantly the result of individual hard work
and questions if this is a disposition we ought to value in public education today.
I seek to illuminate that dispositions can be used as modes of cultural propaganda
through examining how President Theodore Roosevelt transformed grit into a
glamorized trope to legitimate vast suffering. My argument will not attempt
to question whether or not creating resilient children who can push through
setbacks is a laudable goal; rather, it will ask how ethical it is to tell children,
who face a society of entrenched economic inequality, that achievement is the
result of individual effort and is disconnected from systemic privilege. We need to
think through the potential pitfalls of an approach to cultivating resiliency that
privileges a disposition such as grit and to consider why the interest in it has once
again arisen in our culture.
Understanding dispositions as concepts “fabricated in a piecemeal fashion
from alien forms”6 enables an excavation of the morphology of grit to reveal that
it developed, through cultural images such as cowboys and boxers, to instill the
belief that achievement is the result of individual effort. Becoming a “self-made”
millionaire, for instance, is understood to be the result of the individual heroically
remaking the self, independent of any social factors that may have helped to
facilitate such a steep climb up the socioeconomic ladder. This excavation aims
to show that the disposition of the gritty student (with which researchers and

5. See Sean F. Reardon, “The Widening Socioeconomic Status Achievement Gap Between the Rich
and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations,” in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality,
Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, ed. Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2011), 100. The authors contributing to this collection provide ample evidence for the
link between increasing economic inequality and achievement rates.

6. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: Penguin, 1984), 80–97.
Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 517

educators are currently fascinated) is irrevocably tied to its history as a disposition

that arose because of unjust and unequal social conditions. Therefore, as a way to
show the alien forms that have fabricated grit and its connection to a disregard for
the social conditions that precisely engender its need, I examine the constitution
of grit during a specific period in American cultural history. Namely, I will seek
to answer these questions by giving a genealogy of grit, one that begins with the
story of cowboys and boxers.
Conceptual Transformations
True Grit: Disposition of a Cowboy

“Courage is being scared to death — and saddling up anyway.”

—John Wayne

American culture readily connects the cowboy to grit. Most recently, the 2010
remake of the film True Grit by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen reinvigorated the
cowboy and its place as a cultural archetype of grit.7 Understanding the meaning
of grit in the context of its representation in film as well as in the lives of historical
cowboys may enable us to trace the development of grit as a desirable way of being
and why it is presently so valued in education.8 At the beginning of the film, the
protagonist, Mattie Ross, identifies Rooster Cogburn as being a man of “true grit,”
one capable of relentless follow-through. He was known for stopping at nothing to
achieve whatever goal he was paid to accomplish, no matter how moral or immoral.
John Wayne, the original Rooster Cogburn, embodied the true grit of the cowboy
mythology, with his characters becoming interchangeable with his off-screen
identity in the American consciousness.9 During the ceremony at which John
Wayne was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, President Jimmy Carter said,
For nearly half a century, the Duke has symbolized the American ideals of integrity, courage,
patriotism, and strength and has represented to the world many of the deepest values that this
Nation respects. His conduct off the screen has been as exemplary as that of the characters
he has portrayed. He has served, and will continue to serve, as a model for America’s young
people.10

Through the life and roles of John Wayne, one of the wealthiest actors of his
generation, the cowboy became an archetype of grit, one that persists today. But

7. True Grit, directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen (Paramount Pictures, 2010).

8. The cowboy has a long history in the United States, one that began with vaqueros and the Mexican
west. The picture of the cowboy made iconic by John Wayne, the one that has persisted since the early
nineteenth century, presents the cowboy as a white man and gives little attention to the black, Indian,
and Spanish roots of the practice. The cowboy archetype that we have come to associate with grit has
been, arguably, a work of cultural appropriation by whites.

9. Deborah Thomas, “John Wayne’s Body,” in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian Alexander Cameron and
Douglas Pye (New York: Continuum, 1996), 75–87. For Wayne’s performance, see True Grit, directed by
Henry Hathaway (Paramount Pictures, 1969).

10. Jimmy Carter, “Gold Medal for John Wayne Statement on Signing S. 631 into Law,” (May 26,
1979), available at The American Presidency Project (website), Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=32404.
518 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

beyond the cardboard grit of the John Wayne cowboy, an examination of the work
of actual cowboys may yield a deeper understanding of the conceptual substratum
of grit.
The imagery of the cowboy, both on screen and off, is of a man driving cattle
thousands of miles and relentlessly persevering through drought, tornados, dust
storms, stampedes, and assaults by outlaws in order to accomplish his goal.11
Although the folklore has overshadowed any first-person narratives of cowboy life
and experience, primary source documentation does exist and provides insight into
the nature of the work and the people that developed the archetype of the cowboy
most familiar today. The development of the gritty, courageous cowboy image
came from a brief thirty years of cattle driving that spanned from the mid to late
1800s. This work required the cowboy to function in extreme physical discomfort
and to persevere to drive cattle north, often under life-threatening conditions.
Through examining the experience of the cowboy in the context of the work that
required grit, we can begin to understand the social conditions that have shaped
grit into the disposition we understand it to be today.
In The Cowboy: His Characteristics, His Equipment and His Part in the
Development of the West, Philip Rollins describes cowboy work in the following
manner:
The cowboy by the nature of his work was required, from time to time, to endure the pitiless
northern blizzard, to traverse the equally pitiless southern desert, to fight the bandit or the
Indian, to go on a horse upon the mountain cliffs or amid the river’s whirlpools, to ride madly
over ground pitted by the gopher and the badger, to face death often, and much of the time
when alone.12

Much of this description is reminiscent of the cowboy folklore that Hollywood

often depicts: the solitary white man on a horse, racing across a dusty landscape.
Although the image of the cowboy as alone is not historically accurate, as it is
well documented that driving thousands of cattle required a team of cowboys, it is
the most enduring image and the one frequently perpetuated by popular culture.
Images and songs about the lonesome cowboy have reached as far as Belgium where
the Lucky Luke comic originated; at the end of every story, the title character is
shown riding off alone into the sunset. The work of an actual cowboy was far from
solitary. The success of a cattle drive depended upon a group working together,
not on the heroic effort of the single individual. So it is curious how grit morphed
into a quality attributed to individual achievement. In order to understand this
transformation, we must unpack the qualities essential to a cowboy, ones that are,
I argue, bundled within our current understanding of what it means when we call
an individual “gritty.” Rollins, based on his research into the actual experience
of cowboys, has identified these essential cowboy qualities as courage, endurance

11. Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate, The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (New
York: Harcourt, 1955), 38.

12. Philip Ashton Rollins, The Cowboy: His Characteristics, His Equipment, and His Part in the
Development of the West (New York: Skyhorse, 2007), 24.
Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 519

of physical pain, and an uncomplaining personality. Let us briefly examine one of

the few existing firsthand accounts of someone living in the defining era of the
American cowboy, A Texas Cowboy’s Journal Up the Trail to Kansas in 1868
by Jack Bailey, in order to better understand the experiential qualities that have
developed cultural conceptions of grit.13
Courage
Courage was considered a requirement for becoming a cowboy.14 As men-
tioned, courage was associated with the archetype of the gritty cowboy as depicted
in the films of John Wayne. But it is important to this inquiry to work through what
sort of courage was important to the work of the cowboy and therefore what sort of
courage is related to how we understand grit in an educational context. I posit that
physical courage, in the real experience of the cowboy, was necessary in the face
of uncertain weather, illness, and large, volatile animals. Although the cowboy is
often depicted as having moral courage — that is, the courage to disagree in the
face of injustice or to fight against corruption — moral courage had little place on
the real cattle trail. The cowboy needed physical courage to survive the harshness
and danger of the cattle drive. Jack Bailey writes on August 12, 1868,
We had the hardest time last night imaginable. I got up at 10 o’clock. Never got off my horse
no more until day light. As I predicted we had 2 of the worse kinds of stampedes. The 1st
time they made a break about 9 o’clock. Run about 1∕2 hour. Got them to running around in a
circle. It was raining, came a loud keen clap of thunder. They turned all loose. It was so dark
we couldent see them. Sometimes we were right in the middle of herd. You bet they made
the ground roar. We couldent circle them. Finally got them cut into or divided. Such hollering
and running around you never head. Some of the boys couldent find their horses … some of
the boys holering at the cattle when the cattle were not near them but they swore they wer
coming right towards them. Dud Rogers, the spunkiest man in the crowd when there is no
danger started to climb a tree and leave the women to fight it out as best they could.15

A stampede was the cowboy’s worst fear, as it was common for cowboys to
die in stampedes. But the cowboys persevere despite the threat to their physical
safety because a significant financial investment is at stake. To lose cattle was to
lose income. So the physical courage they display, their grit, arises because the
conditions necessitate it; there is little choice. Therefore, we can understand that
physical courage arises for the cowboy precisely because the environment does not
provide essential supports for their safety; they develop physical courage because
they endure the physical suffering entailed by a dangerous, life-threatening job.
Enduring Physical Suffering
Follow through, whether in studying for a test or wrangling cattle, requires
an ability to endure degrees of physical discomfort. The cowboy most likely
developed physical courage through continual and relentless exposure to suffering;

13. Jack Bailey, A Texas Cowboy’s Journal: Up the Trail to Kansas in 1868, ed. David Dary (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).

14. Rollins, The Cowboy, 28

15. Bailey, A Texas Cowboy’s Journal, 40.

520 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

he became gritty because he learned to endure years of physical suffering. Writing

about a study done on spelling bee winners, Duckworth observes that “it was
the hardest, least pleasurable practice that really paid off — and the grittiest kids
who were able to do more of it.”16 The cowboys who were able to endure the
most physical suffering were habituated by years of enduring highly unpleasant
conditions. Clearly, the suffering endured by a cowboy and the suffering endured
through participating in a spelling bee are vastly different in degree, yet the ethos
pushing both the cowboy and the spelling bee participant is the same: that suffering
is valorized in relation to success. This is not to claim that there is no place for
struggling or suffering in education. Indeed, as Avi Mintz argues in his analysis of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, suffering can be part of learning how to be happy.17
The intention of my argument, particularly in highlighting the relationship of grit
to physical suffering, is not to dismiss the role of suffering or struggle in education,
but rather to draw attention to its historical connection to systemic inequality.
Grit has origins in an ability to push through physical displeasure, as cowboys
needed a significant amount of this ability in order to do their job. Bailey writes on
Wednesday, September 23, 1868,
I am sick today. You bet I would like to be at home. My side and shoulder kept me awake all
night. I took some pills last night which operated finely. Hope I will be better when they work
off. I am so lonesome. My pills make me so sick. I am out of sorts and mad because I was such
a fool to come on this trip and contrary to the wishes of my wife and advice of good friends but
I thought I could stand it. I don’t know whether I will get well or not, but I bet I will. I have
strong symptoms of pneumonia. One consolation is I’m not afraid to die.18

There are a number of examples in Bailey’s diary of fevers, soreness, and

near-death experiences. The preceding passage illustrates that grit developed in a
cowboy because he was continually exposed to conditions of physical suffering: the
more he endured physical hardship, the more he learned he could endure. Spelling
bee participants are the most innocuous example of the kind of suffering many
students showing up for school endure. Approximately 20 percent of children living
in the United States live in poverty and show up for school every day without
adequate nutrition. The relationship between enduring this kind of physical
suffering and the call to cultivate grit in schools is, to my knowledge, not fully
examined in the present discourse on the value of grit and suffering in learning. So
the way the student learns to have an increasingly gritty disposition is through
enduring suffering. When we recognize this process, the pedagogy of grit then
begins to reveal itself as a pedagogy in learning to endure suffering. In other words,
the cowboy or the student develops grit because he learns over time the limits of

16. Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri A. Kirby, Eli Tsukayama, Heather Berstein, and K. Anders Ericsson,
“Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,”
Social Psychological and Personality Science 2, no. 2 (2011): 174–181.

17. See Avi I. Mintz, “The Happy and Suffering Student? Rousseau’s Emile and the Path Not Taken in
Progressive Educational Thought,” Educational Theory 62, no. 3 (2012): 249–265.

18. Bailey, A Texas Cowboy’s Journal, 55.

Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 521

his suffering and thus builds up the courage to endure subsequent harsh conditions
without complaint. Yet learning to endure greater degrees of suffering is not what
will reduce the achievement gap. First and foremost, reformers’ energies should
be focused on addressing the social conditions that contribute to the achievement
gap. Children, particularly those enduring daily underresourcing, have a right to
understand that their success or failure is not only connected to their effort, but is
also connected to the ability of a social system to provide the resources necessary
to enable effort to flourish.

An Uncomplaining Personality
Throughout Bailey’s diary there is little evidence that he was a person who
today we might characterize as a complainer or quitter. There are very few
moments where he complains about the suffering endured because of the working
conditions. In fact, there are practically no passages where we hear him complain
about how bad the conditions are. One of the few moments where Bailey comes
close to making what we might consider a complaint is on his birthday when he
writes, “Got the cattle pened for the night. Gus received his fine saddle today. This
is my birth day, wish I had a cake.”19 While he is unhappy at not having a cake
or receiving presents, the entry ends with this statement and he doesn’t revisit
these regrets the next day or at all. Just as in the passage where he writes about
having pneumonia, we hear from a man who complains briefly and minimally
in the face of working conditions that many of us would not be able to endure
for even a few days. This uncomplaining personality completes the profile of the
gritty cowboy found in historical accounts. A cowboy who complained about the
conditions, who fought with the rancher for more food, better gear, or higher pay,
would have been described as a whiner or as unable to “cowboy up”, which means
to shift one’s attitude in the face of a hard chore from a “can’t to a positive can-do
with confidence and a non-complaining spirit.”20 To “cowboy up” literally means
to take on the disposition of a cowboy: one who does not complain, has physical
courage, and endures hardship to reach a goal.
Clearly students are not cowboys. The grit that researchers such as Duckworth
and the Department of Education are seeking to understand is related to how to
develop in young people a disposition that will help them persevere toward goals
despite the suffering they may encounter or the lack of pleasure in tasks associated
with learning. What becomes troublesome about the desire to cultivate gritty
students in schools today is that, as I have attempted to show through excavating
grit in the case of the cowboy, grit develops because the individual learns that the
environment or the task is hostile in some way and requires that one suffer to
achieve goals. In other words, it runs the risk of the student believing that a lack of
achievement is the result of not being able to “cowboy up” sufficiently. It tells the
student that achievement must and should occur despite an environment that may

19. Ibid., 67.

20. Rollins, The Cowboy, 90.

522 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

not provide the most basic resources essential to success. While most adults who
have undergone secondary education might agree that not all aspects of education
are or ought to be pleasurable, what is deeply problematic about the increased
emphasis on grit is that it renews focus on a disposition that is fundamentally
attributable to the individual at a time when poverty, a social condition often
key to academic achievement or failure, has reached historic levels in the United
States and continues to rise. Another troubling aspect of the rhetoric of grit is
that it distracts us from focusing on how we might make the public school a
collective good, a place that is a refuge from environments that already require
a great deal of grit just to survive on a daily basis. It would seem that in an era
when social inequality has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age, school
environments should aim to support children who endure poverty and who, more
than likely, already understand viscerally the necessity of denying pleasure and
enduring physical suffering without complaint.
The need for grit, as this genealogy attempts to show, arises when environ-
ments lack critical supports for success. It often arises as a way for the individual to
cope with suffering and for society to justify social failure through instructing the
individual that their condition — poverty, for instance — is related to an intrinsic
deficit. It has the potential to indoctrinate the student, through individual metrics
such as standardized tests, with the belief that failure is due to an intrinsic lack
rather than to systemic inequality. Diane Ravitch writes,
It is all the rage among the pseudo-reformers to dismiss the importance of poverty. Although
most of the pseudo-reformers grew up in affluence, attended elite private school, and send
their own children to equally splendid private schools, they feel certain in their hearts that
poverty is a state of mind that can be easily overcome. All it takes is one great teacher. Or
three effective teachers in a row. Or lots of grit.21

Recent research by Ravitch and others shows that poverty plays a far greater role
in achievement than individual effort. In other words, while a child may exhibit
tremendous grit in the face of poverty, he or she is statistically less likely to succeed
than an affluent student, not because of a lack of individual effort but rather due to
a set of social-systemic conditions that hinder equal opportunity. The bitter pill in
this current discourse is that the child ends up potentially believing that his or her
failure is due to an intrinsic lack of effort and that the wealthier student, the one
attending the elite private school down the street, has achieved success through
working harder. One need only look at the history of legacy college admissions to
find evidence that the “hard work will equal success” line is a myth. Legions of
privileged children have attended elite schools, powerful networks of opportunity,
not because they worked hard to get there but because their parents or grandparents
attended. This mythology of achievement as the result of individual effort evolved
from the grit shown by real cowboys into a cultural propaganda tool used to justify

21. Diane Ravitch, “Poverty Matters,” Diane Ravitch’s Blog, March 2, 2014, http://dianeravitch.net/
2014/03/02/poverty-matters/.
Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 523

social inequality through, I will argue, the advent of contemporary boxing and the
life of Teddy Roosevelt.

Disposition of a Boxer
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your
life as a champion.’”
—Muhammad Ali

Boxers, like cowboys, must learn to endure a certain degree of suffering in order
to achieve their goals. The boxer must condition his body through painful practice
in order to prepare to enter the ring. Despite often being depicted as wild and
ruthless, boxers must be physically disciplined in order to enter the ring and win
a bout. In recent years the films Cinderella Man and The Fighter have once again
celebrated the corporeal grittiness of boxers.22 Boxers were not always celebrated as
an archetype of grit in the United States, however, and the dispositions associated
with the sport were not always seen as desirable by the upper echelons of society. In
this section I will briefly show that examining the history of boxing can extend our
understanding of the composition of grit and how it arose as a valued disposition
during a time of extreme wealth inequality and heightened emphasis on intrinsic
definitions of achievement.
Boxing arrived in the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Along
with boxing came a particular vernacular or slang used to describe the sport
and its related activities. For example, the first recorded instance of the word
“pluck” is found in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785.
It is described as a “sense of courage, boldness, spirit and originally probably
boxing slang.”23 Roughly twenty years later, in 1808, “grit” was first recorded and
defined as “a figurative sense of firmness of character, stamina, spirit, pluck.”24
As discussed previously in relation to cowboys, courage is a well-documented
synonym for grit or, as Duckworth and several other researchers concerned with
noncognitive dispositions state, the ability to persevere despite hardship and
failure. The relationship of grit to pluck via the slang of boxing may seem, at first
glance, not much more than interesting etymology that holds little significance for
education. Yet, as I will attempt to show through excavating another substratum
of grit, the sport of boxing tells us a great deal about why grit has once again arisen
as a valued disposition.
Early boxers were indeed in need of a great deal of pluck in order to endure the
violence of bare-knuckle boxing that characterized the early version of the sport.
There is no doubt that it was a brutal physical endeavor. Bare-knuckle fighting, a

22. Cinderella Man, directed by Ron Howard (Universal Pictures, 2005); and The Fighter, directed by
David O. Russell (Paramount Pictures, 2010).

23. Robert K. Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz, eds., Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (New York: H. W.
Wilson, 1988), 70.

24. Ibid., 72.

524 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

common spectacle in ancient Rome, was revived in England during the late 1600s
but was not popularized until the early 1700s when the English athlete James
Figg rose to prominence. Upon its arrival in America, bare-knuckle fighting was
not the revered sport that it grew into during the reign of fighters such as John
Sullivan, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. In fact, the sport was violently rejected
by the bourgeoisie, who saw it as a debasement of society. Fighters were not heroes
but rather working-class men who brutalized their bodies out of desperation for
money.25 However, like the cowboy, the boxer developed over time into a cultural
archetype that valorized individual toughness.
At the end of the nineteenth century, America had experienced civil war and
sought to build a united country. The war had offered even young men of privilege
an opportunity to test their physical endurance, their courage, and their grit on
the battlefield. At the same time, government support for settling the frontier had
ended; indeed, by 1890 the majority of the population in the western states and
territories lived in small cities. The American West of pioneers and real cowboys
had come to an end. During the Civil War, boxing had continued to be a deviant and
marginalized endeavor, with only a few fights gaining the attention of the bourgeois
class. With the end of the Civil War, the country entered a period of unprecedented
industrial growth and saw the rise of early corporations. This period, known as the
Gilded Age, was for most people a time of great inequality and dangerous working
conditions that demanded long hours for low pay, but for some it was a time of great
wealth. For the wealthy elite of the new United States, this was a golden era, but
the privilege of the era had an unexpected side effect. The great wealth generated
for the new captains of industry had begun to develop a generation of young men
and women who were overindulged, soft, weak, and unable to command a growing
and complex laboring class. Eliot Gorn writes,
Large numbers of men, especially members of the old Eastern elite, dwelled on their own
ineffectuality and “overcivilization” in the face of new captains of industrial wealth. Nervous
breakdowns occurred with alarming frequency and some doctors even argued that work-related
stress gave rise to a new disease, “neurasthenia,” the loss of vital “nerve force.” Sports,
however, offered a cure. The champion athlete had unusual reserves of magnetic energy, of will
power, which allowed him to dominate other men. Physical exercise, therefore, was medicine
for this new epidemic now spreading through the managerial and professional ranks.26

Something was needed to justify to the working masses that these young men,
these soft children of oligarchy, had the ability to lead the growth and development
of the new American empire. A cultural propaganda was needed in order to
convince the masses that these men had earned their success and leadership roles.
Through the advent of college athletics and Teddy Roosevelt’s call for a strenuous
life, boxing was transformed from a debased form of entertainment for the poor into
a method for young men of privilege to enact behaviors associated with grit. At this

25. Eliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1986), 24.

26. Ibid., 75.

Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 525

juncture, a cultural propaganda began to emerge, one that served to mythologize

success as the result of individual heroic effort rather than of inherited wealth and
social privilege. At the center of this mythologizing was Theodore Roosevelt.

A Strenuous Life
The life of President Theodore Roosevelt offers an excellent example of how a
child of privilege was able to convince the American masses that failure was due
to insufficient grit or a lack of individual strength. I argue here that Roosevelt’s
life served as a first instance in providing the public illusion that achievement
is the result of individual hard work rather than privilege. Roosevelt, because he
had briefly been a rancher in the American West and had trained as an amateur
boxer while studying at Harvard University, was uniquely able to tap into the two
archetypes of American grit that had captured the American imagination in order
to convince the public that gritty individualism was the road to success.
In 1899, just after Roosevelt led the Rough Riders in Cuba during the
Spanish-American War, he gave a speech at the Hamilton Club in Chicago to a
group of the wealthiest men in the United States. This speech, titled “A Strenu-
ous Life,” was to characterize his legacy and began, I posit, the morphology of grit
into a piece of cultural propaganda used to convince the masses that achievement
was related to individual toughness rather than a supportive social system. In the
speech Roosevelt asserted,
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the
life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes,
not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger,
from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.27

To an individual unaware of the environment of privilege Roosevelt had been born

into, his actions on the battlefields of Cuba and the philosophy he espoused in
this speech could easily create the perception that he was a gritty hero, one who
had achieved through enduring bitter toil and suffering. Importantly, however,
Roosevelt could choose a life of toil and strife; the conditions of his life did
not require him to endure suffering, unlike the experience of real boxers and
cowboys. He could opt into experiences that necessitated grit, just as he did in
pursuing boxing and ranching, or he could opt out of such endeavors. From the
moment he was born in a brownstone in New York City, Roosevelt had access
to some of the most elite networks of power in the United States. His father,
a highly successful businessman, helped to found the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and was a prominent cultural figure in New York City. After his father
died, Roosevelt benefited from admission to Harvard and the steady support of

27. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life” (speech delivered on April 10, 1899); the text is
available at Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/
roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/.
526 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

an extensive network of his father’s friends and business partners.28 This matters
to our discussion on cultivating grit in students because Roosevelt provides an
example of a person whose interest in grit arose not because the conditions of his
life necessitated it, but rather because he chose to valorize it. He believed that there
was valor in the suffering endured through the kind of grit cowboys and boxers
exemplified because he had never truly experienced a need for that kind of grit
himself. To him, it was a plaything, like ranching or amateur boxing. Roosevelt’s
grit — the romanticized version that persists in the cultural imagination today —
was a fantasy and a mechanism for justifying the social inequality of the time.
Roosevelt continued to valorize grit as key to individual achievement in
a speech he made before the Wisconsin legislature regarding the University of
Wisconsin’s athletic program:
We like to see the boy who has got a healthy vigor in him which means he has not only
developed his muscle, but has developed his pluck, his grit, his courage, his resolution. And to
you who have ever seen, much less taken part, in the work of a nine or an eight or an eleven,
you know besides physical prowess you have got to draw on a fund of resolution and pluck.29

Through participating in college sports, boxing among them, the privileged young
man learned to exhibit grit. But again this kind of grit was built upon a glamor-
ization of suffering; it was disconnected from the real conditions that had first
necessitated grit. It is possible to draw parallels between Roosevelt’s language in
his 1899 and 1903 speeches and Duckworth’s definition of grit as “working strenu-
ously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure,
adversity, and plateaus in progress.”30 It is quite possible to envision Roosevelt
using these precise words to chastise the men of the American elite for having
become too soft from the ease of excess and civilization. Throughout his speech to
the Wisconsin legislature, for example, he urges his audience to recognize what a
strain such a pursuit will be, one that requires just the kind of endurance Duck-
worth describes.
This brings us to the ethical problems of Roosevelt’s call for a strenuous life
of grit and its connection to education today. Roosevelt’s speech did not celebrate
the perseverance of the working-class individual, but rather showed a profound
ignorance toward the conditions of the time for the average individual — the
average person was already gritty. The call for a more strenuous life served to reify
this condition rather than to acknowledge the need to alleviate it through greater
social equity. It began the narrative that persists today: that the strong achieve
and the weak fail, regardless of the social conditions that one is born into. It was

28. Edward P. Kohn, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Early Political Career: The Making of an Independent
Republican and Urban Progressive,” in A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Serge Ricard (New
York: John Wiley, 2011), 27–44.

29. Theodore Roosevelt, “Before the Wisconsin Legislature at Madison” (speech given in Madi-
son, Wisconsin, on April 3, 1903); the text is available at The Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt,
http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/394.txt.

30. Duckworth et al., “Grit.”

Stokas A Genealogy of Grit 527

the elite classes who needed to embrace the strenuous life, to enact it in order to
create the illusion that their achievement was the result of gritty individualism.
The wealthy elites needed to valorize grit in order to justify inequality and the
wealth that they had inherited. Grit became, at this point, a cultural trope enlisted
to make the working-class person believe that, despite social inequalities rooted in
racism, classism, and the absence of a living wage, everyone could succeed through
hard work. Individuals needed to believe that success would be achieved through
enduring the strenuous conditions of their work.
In education today there are uncomfortable parallels to Roosevelt’s call for a
strenuous life. The rhetoric that hard work in school will lead to achievement,
regardless of any social barriers that exist, is pervasive. However, there are ample
statistics demonstrating that hard work in school does not equal achievement.
Increasingly, success in school does not help to alleviate poverty, and many
individuals born in poverty will remain impoverished despite performing well in
school.31 As in the time of Roosevelt’s boxers and cowboys, the rhetoric of grit
serves as a justification for the failure to take political responsibility for addressing
social inequality. I contend that grit has significant potential as a dark mechanism
for finding a way to justify the achievements of privileged children and the failure
of impoverished ones. Emphasizing grit is a way to ignore the fact that significant
numbers of children lack the critical supports they need in their every day lives,
and this lack results in an ever-widening achievement gap.

Conclusion
As I have attempted to show, we cannot help but attribute failure to a lack
of grit on the part of the individual; this way of understanding grit is embedded
deep within the history of this concept. It is a disposition that cleaves, through
our cultural imagination, to deficit notions of the self rather than to notions of
systemic failure. Grit, as we have seen, has a history of emerging from conditions
where suffering must be justified because social supports are absent. Of course,
seeking to develop in children resilience and the ability to persevere through
intellectual and social challenges is an important project in education. Wanting
children to achieve their goals is essential. However, teaching them that their
goals can only be achieved through enduring ever-increasing levels of individual
suffering is something that educators must actively question. There are ways of
showing children how to persevere other than through inculcating the belief that
they must endure suffering in order to succeed.32 In addition, we do not, I believe,

31. For further discussion of these issues, see Duncan and Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? Rising
Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances.

32. See Carol Dweck’s research on the growth mindset; Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology
of Success (New York: Random House, 2006). Dweck’s research, conducted over the last thirty years,
shows that when children understand that achievement is related to growth, they can become better
at something. Specifically, they engage to a greater degree in learning as process — a process that may
sometimes be uncomfortable and that requires endurance, but one that ultimately is connected to a
larger ecosystem that helps or hinders their growth.
528 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 65 Number 5 2015

need to cultivate and reinforce in children the sense that achievement results from
individual effort despite unequal social conditions. We must aim to be honest about
the role that inherited wealth and privilege play in individual achievement and
work to create social policy that enables educational environments to truly level
the playing field. We should, I posit, work to cultivate dispositions grounded in
the understanding that the greatest successes, the greatest achievements, come
as a result of an ecosystem of opportunity. Our public education system and its
students do not need more grit; instead, we need to develop a sense of collective
responsibility for ensuring that children succeed due to supportive, nourishing
environments rather than in spite of their absence.