Teaching Ambition: or not

Time has an article "How to help them succeed" and it seems to miss the mark. When I read something like:

parents can play a critical role in conveying this message to their children by praising their effort, strategy and progress rather than emphasizing their 'smartness' or praising high performance alone.

it drives me nuts! We're not raising lab rats or Pavlov's dogs. We don't want our children to try to please us or other artificial authorities. Being under God's authority is only one they need to be under. Otherwise, they need to learn to seek success on their own terms. They need to follow the individual vision that [Judeo-Christian] God gives them in spite of cheering or jeering from the sidelines. In fact some opposition is needed to overcome the status quo. The sense of "I'll prove them wrong" is necessary for new inventions and even revolutions.

I don't know how it can be nurtured since today's school system emphasize getting correct answers: learning how the tests are written and how to meet those expectations. Like lab rats, one learns how to navigate mazes (taking tests) to get the cheese (pass the tests and get the praises). It maybe what the govmnt and companies look for in their employees but that's not what will create new products and services. See the most helpful reviews on "Who moved the cheese" on what I'm getting at (I wrote most of this entry before I saw the reviews because I recalled that it was being studied at one company I interviewed before: good thing I didn't get a job there!)

For my sons, I want them to become the un-lab rats: if they change the maze or move the cheese, rather than looking for different openings, I want them to climb over the walls or chew through the walls or punch through a crack or two in the seams AND GET OUT OF THE MAZE (or the rat race, if you will). Better, instead of cheese, get some steak or even better raise cattle and then sell steak.