Generally, I agree with the OP. From my experience, some of the claims seem right on target. There are a lot of claims in the OP, and I can't agree with all o

Generally, I agree with the OP. From my experience, some of the claims seem right on target. There are a lot of claims in the OP, and I can't agree with all of them. I would add: In my experience, there is a small fraction of parents and teachers who really understand all that stuff, avoid the dangers, and do well as parents, teachers, whatever. Then there are the rest of the parents and teachers, and, yes, they can do a LOT of really serious damage -- I've seen too much of it close at hand. I'm an example of avoiding the dangers in the OP: My parents took the attitude that in nearly all things I should not be lectured to, disciplined, etc. and, instead, just left to my own devices. My collection of interests grew, and it's still huge. I pursued my real interests with a lot of effort with good results. In grades 1-8, the teachers talked to each other and agreed that I was a bad student. Yup, no doubt, a bad, poor, slow, not very smart student. Then there were some standardized tests, and, oops, no way saying I wasn't smart. But I was still a bad student. Then I discovered math and science, especially chemistry and physics. I was plenty interested, worked hard, and learned a lot. Some of the math teachers were torqued: I refused to show homework! That's because I found the assigned problems to be too easy and, instead, found the much more difficult supplementary problems in the back of the book and worked ALL of those, made sure I never missed one! But, there were standardized achievement tests, and again I did well and the teachers had just to swallow their belief that I was a bad student. It appears that the Principal of the school understood me and made sure I got some good opportunities -- I was sent to a math tournament and also a summer NSF funded math and physics program. When the SAT scores came back, the teacher who read them to me -- I'd had in the sixth grade, she was fully on board that I was a dumb student -- saw the Math SAT score and got confused, "There must be some mistake." I didn't miss 800 by much -- I'd love to know what the CEEB thought I'd missed. It was the city's premier college prep school and had a lot of traditional good students. So, of #1, #2, #3 on the Math SATs I came second. Poor teacher was confused! In my Ph.D. program, the department Chair was a high discipline, dot i's and cross t's, straight As type of guy. But his research didn't amount to anything. At one point I pursued my interests instead of a course beneath me, and he got really torqued! Ah, to heck with him! From an advanced course, I saw a problem in an old field and asked for a reading course to address it. I already had an idea for a solution -- "Never give a sucker an even break.". Two weeks later I had a nice solution, ready to publish -- later did publish it in JOTA (Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications). Net, doing that research got all the faculty and all the high discipline guys totally OFF my case. The rest of the way through my Ph.D. I had some secret help at least from the Dean and maybe from the President -- the department Chair was soon fired. Net: In my experience, most of all students need to be INTERESTED and, then, given maybe a little very well considered advice but a LOT of freedom. THEN the student will likely work REALLY hard and maybe do some good things. If I have to hire some people, I may reject straight A, Valedictorian, PBK, Summa Cum Laude applicants as people who worked for grades but not really for interests or learning -- someone with strong interests will likely do a LOT better.