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. For the parents of such kids, whose own ambition is often inseparately tied to their children’s success, it can be a bewildering, painful experience. So it is no wonder some parents find themselves hoping that ambition can be taught like any other subject at school.
It’s not quite that simple. "Kids can be given the opportunities, but they can’t be forced. " says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who led a study examining what motivated first-and seventh-graders 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.
Dubbed Brainology, the unorthodox approach uses basic neuroscience to teach kids how the brain works and how it can continue to develop throughout life. The message is that everything is within the kids’ control, that their intelligence is malleable.
Some experts say our education system, with its p emphasis on testing and rigid separation of students into different levels of ability, also bears blame for the disappearance of drive in some kids. Some 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 Nakkula, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program called Project IF (Inventing the Future), which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to tell them the notion that classwork is irrelevant is not true, 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 they have to learn to walk before they can run.
Some experts suggest that many kids lose ambition in school because they are ().
A. cut off from the outside world
B. exposed to school work only
C. kept away from class competition
D. labeled as inferior to others
