Why Academic Rigor is Still Important

By Amy E. Barr, The Lukeion Project

I teach tough high school level classes for a living. Sometimes it can be a little hard to market “academic rigor.” Students compete, tooth-and-claw, for a high GPA and winning transcripts. To them, It may feel a tad perilous to sign up for a class that challenges them so much that they may occasionally fail (or at least not perform perfectly). Students who are most keen to get into top schools become challenge-shy as they protect their scores. This is to their detriment. Rigor mainly boils down to the idea that a successful student develops academic grit during his or her strong determination to earn a real education.

There can be no rigor without the peril of failure. Why not make it easy and turn our classes into laid-back transcript padding? After all, some say, these are online classes. People could simply cheat their way into a nice grade. Out of many, here are our top 3 reasons you (and/or your student) still needs academic rigor:

Failure is the most important part of a good education

As parents, we may unintentionally prevent our children from mastering healthy recovery from failure by never letting them fail. With the best intentions, we may nurture our children so carefully that they don’t suffer any real academic setback prior to college. Not only will this damage their self-esteem either by having an artificially inflated one or by convincing them that they actually “need” all those second chances and do-overs and are unworthy of all the hoopla. Here come college and the first low grade or poor paper may be crushing and costly.

Second chances, no firm deadlines, and daily-do-overs may seem like a great way to teach a subject well—but be careful. Persistently protecting a child from failure will do very real damage. Shielding kids from failure will not develop confidence, self-esteem, or resilience. On the contrary! Confidence, self-esteem, and resilience result from a healthy response to, and recovery from, daily adversity. Here are three ways to help:

1. If you are a home educator, check your teaching habits. Do you always let your child retake the quiz, re-do the assignment, or push back the deadline? Start to firm up expectations and stick to stated consequences. A lovely side-effect of all this, of course, is improved time-management skills. 
2. Raise the bar: increase challenges, set expectations high, and then model healthy recovery when inevitable failures arise. Playing a musical instrument or reading a foreign language such as Latin and Greek are terrific at providing challenges, failure recovery, and pride over hard-won success.
3. Praise your child for being determined instead of smart. Enthusiastically celebrate the (real) hard work involved in more difficult tasks. A determined person understands that everything will come with more practice and more hard work. Success in college and life is 85% determination and 15% smarts. The latter can be fully compensated for if one has enough determination.

Brains Function like a Muscle and Most of us are Flabby at First

The human brain can memorize vast storehouses of information accurately. Most of us will never put this to the test because all early attempts “feel” difficult. Anyone who has successfully tasked him or herself with mastering (memorizing) a large body of details will confirm that memorization is always slow at first. We build our brains over time and use. 10 flashcards seem like an endless stack, at first. 

My son took a course on anatomy and physiology his freshman year of college. The course is used as a metric to weed out the uncommitted early on. He earned a very low B as one of the best grades in a class. By the end, half the enrollment dropped the course. Everyone who quit was also abandoning their chosen course of study (medicine of one form or another) because the task of memorization felt too tough. My son plans to retake the class this summer before his senior year to score (in his words) “a super easy A.” His brain has become far more muscular over just a few years of training. What was originally a very tough memorization chore is a piece of cake. This leads me to my final point.

Lack of Rigor Places Lifelong Roadblocks

Any person, regardless of income, health, house size, stature, gender, or status, can learn how to memorize and do hard things through determination and grit. Armed with these few basic skills (summed up as rigor), the possibility for personal growth and success are multiplied exponentially. Determination and memorization are learned responses to adversity and challenges. When my kids were little, I used to read Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. As the participants in the story encounter challenges, the repeated words say, “We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh no! We've got to go through it!”

Every year thousands of “top of the class” students arrive at college with too little determination and flabby brains. Dreams and aspirations are quickly crushed by those first failures. Even average (and below average) students who have been sharpened by rigor during their high school years will navigate these turbid waters easily enough to persist, endure, outlast, and succeed. Indeed, a good life is all about persistence never about perfection.