Chapter Summary Of How Children Succeed By George Orwell

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George Orwell says that he writes because he has a “Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” In the book, How Children Succeed, Tough tries to push society into realizing that they have an effect on a child’s future. Tough accomplishes this goal by using setting, and studies and statistics as rhetorical strategies to provide his argument that the environment surrounding a child and how they’re raised can affect how successful they will be in adulthood. Each chapter of the book is broken down into mini chapters to help the reader better understand how to succeed. Each mini chapter begins with a background of the setting. This helps support Tough’s argument of a person's childhood directly relates to a person's success. For example, “Nadine Burke Harris grew up surrounded by privilege in Palo Alto, California...had …show more content…

For example, a study from researcher Calvin Edlund shows that motivational rewards can backfire because it does not apply to real life situations. The study allowed a division between high intellect kids ‘A’ and ‘B’ and lower intellect kids ‘C’ and ‘D’ to answer certain questions. When getting the answer correct, groups ‘A’ and ‘C’ received M&M’s as a reward while groups ‘B’ and ‘D’ received nothing. Groups ‘A’ and ‘C’ showed an improvement in test scores after taking them again while the remaining groups did not improve. To receive proper results for this study, Edlund expanded his study to multiple middle and high schools. The study was concluded that “Motivation is quite complex, and rewards seem to backfire.” (page 66) because in reality rewards aren’t given out to people for doing good so it sets kids up to feel like they need a reward in order for them to think they are doing a good