Angela Duckworth has argued that American schools need to instruct “grit” to best prepare the next generation to succeed.

In her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she points to gritty athletes, business leaders, and NFL coaches who persevered through their struggles to achieve success. “…To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times and rise eight.” Grit seems to play on the strings of many core American values in promoting hard work, passion, and stamina to achieve long-term goals.

In line with Duckworth’s research, some schools in California have begun to tailor their Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculums to make their students grittier. Evie Blad, a staff writer at Education Week, writes that California school districts, called CORE Districts, are using modified versions of Duckworth’s Grit survey to measure the effectiveness of their programs. In 2015, the Walton foundation pledged over $6.5 million towards promoting and measuring character education, social-emotional learning and grit. Clearly, grit has become more and more popular in recent conversation.

But while there is a time and place for grit, however, school curricula should not be dominated by this dangerous culture.

Not surprisingly, the grit narrative is highly susceptible to political hijacking. In a Washington Post article, Valerie Strauss discusses how school reformers in Los Angeles have been touting grit scales to justify performance pay policies for teachers. The use of grit scales as an accountability measure for teachers is particularly disastrous because of the bias tied to this practice. People are not poor because of a lack of social competency or grit. Rather, poverty itself contributes to the lack of these qualities. To universally assess instructors based on grittiness is inherently biased against those teachers whose students are impoverished.

Grit further presents risk of monotonous learning in the classroom setting. Specifically, teaching grit could mean teaching compliance with authority, rather than perseverance and goal setting. In his article, “Teaching ‘grit’ is bad for children, and bad for democracy,” Nicholas Tampio contends that the grit model of education crushes thought-provoking character, in the name of following directions. He argues that U.S. democracy is predicated on those citizens who think critically, ask the “why and how questions,” and challenge decision-making on an authoritative level. The grit narrative challenges this paradigm and instead, makes it so that people are compliant to those in power.

America needs a grittier and more motivated generation, but not one that will succumb to the ideas of others without question. So are there occasions where people should exhibit grit? Absolutely. But, it would be foolish not to consider the consequences of inculcating this virtue into our education system.