— The ideal is the “Straight A” student - and these are the ones that many employers seek to recruit. What “Straight A” means is that the student has learned to do a number of things at a marketable level of performance, regardless of whether the student has any interest in or innate talent for the activity, and regardless of whether it brings pain, joy or boredom. The reward is in the grade, not the activity. And in collusion with the school, parents will bestow love and recognition for A’s, while discouraging the student from working in areas of interest and talent, so that energies can be devoted to studies in which the student is “deficient”. In adult life/career planning workshops, the author has found that of the things participants actually enjoy doing, less than 5% are things they learned in school as part of formal classroom work. —
