Anyone who doubts that children are born with a healthy amount of ambition need spend only a few minutes with a baby eagerly learning to walk or a headp toddler starting to talk. No matter how many times the little ones stumble in their initial efforts, most keep on trying, determined to master their amazing new skill. It is only several years later, around the start of middle or junior high school, many psychologists and teachers agree, that a good number of kids seem to lose their natural drive to succeed and end up joining the ranks of underachievers.
It’s not quite that simple. “Kids can be given the opportunities to become passionate about a subject or activity, but they can’t be forced, ” says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25-year study examining what motivated first grade students in three school districts. Even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don’t seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve.
Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn’t suffer from an emotional or learning disability, or isn’t involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically some how isn’t cool. “Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term,” says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. “You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth and that their intelligence is malleable. ”
Howard (a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, an organization that works with teachers and parents to help improve children’s academic performance) and other educators say it’s important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. “The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions, ” says Michael Nakkual, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before you can run.
What is the message that peer pressure conveys to children（）
A. A sudden lack of motivation is attributed to the student’s failure
B. Book knowledgeis not as important as practical experience
C. Looking smart is more important for young people at school
D. To achieve academic excellence should not be treated as the top priority
