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Rigorous

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Smooches, honey! Wow you got a "C"! I'm so proud you're average.

On one hand, it's a false choice between rigor and nurturance. Even plants need nurturance to grow. But rigorously healthy plants survive hostile environments. The world can be hostile at times, and nurturing at others. What children (and people in general) need is a blend of self-reliance, focus, determination, a healthy measure of defiance, compassion, cooperation, intellectual curiosity, curiosity satisfaction, delayed gratification, positive reinforcement, competition, encouragement to think independently, discipline, self-confidence and intestinal fortitude.

Yes, it's a tall order. But so is life. If people weren't up to it, we wouldn't be here.

This writer cast a vote for rigorous over nurturing, because too often nurturing has meant coddling and fawning. Tomorrow's leaders don't get fawned over today. People capable of picking themselves up by their bootstraps weren't coddled as children. Rigorous also doesn't mean brutal. Children subjected to unending brutality are likely to become sociopaths or capos or (God forbid) law enforcement.

Standards of excellence require rigor. A student must reach a point in his life at which he decides to govern himself according to a set of principled standards. What we are is God's gift to us. What we make of ourselves is our gift to God.

There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going...Beverly Sills

To paraphrase Napoleon Hill ("Think and Grow Rich"), one step upward can place you high enough above the crowd to enable you to see still greater opportunity. Also an upward placement can enable Opportunity to see you.

"...all of our thoughts of limitation are upheld only through absence of challenge. In order to discern Truth from limitation, we must challenge the agreements we believe in, to which we add power by mass thinking".....Alan Cohen, from "The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore".

Where should the rigor come from? It may or may not come from a public school. Since no matter where you go, there you are, it has to come from within. That's where the nurturing comes in. A seed of independent thought must be planted, watered, sunned, fertilized, or there is no harvest. A person's mind can and will think for itself if it's encouraged to do that. Increasingly, our nation's public schools are merely "teaching to the test". Translation: students are reading bureaucrat-sanctioned textbooks for the sake of memorization in order to pass a bureaucrat-created test. And everyone is getting left behind. Where is the learning? Remember Albert Einstein? "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education".

There is a body of historical study describing in stomach-knotting detail the intellectual disarming of our nation. Pages 274-287 alone of "Everything You Know is Wrong" are worth the purchase. "[A]t the project offices of an important employer of experts, the Rockefeller Foundation, friends were hearing from president Max Mason that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, 'the control of human behavior.' ... (Compulsory) schooling figured prominently in the design...[B]etween 1967 and 1974, teacher training in the US was covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations, select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all coordinated through the US Office of Education and through key state education departments...In all stages of the school experiment, testing was essential to localize the child's mental state on an official rating scale... Each classified individuals for the convenience of social managers and businesses, each offered data useful in controlling the minds and movements of the young, mapping the next adult generation."

Rigor, folks. Rigor. Less Wii/X-box/Playstation/TV, more reading. Less coddling, more consistency. Less junk food, more physical activity. Less government crutches, more self-determination. Less sound-bytes, more meaningful information.

Not sure where to start? It's OK. Consider Stephen Covey's ""The Leader in Me"":http://search.barnesandno ble.com/The-Leader-in-Me/Steph en-R-Covey/e/9781439103265/?it m=1

Not the right age group? "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", "The 8th Habit", and the online community are good places to start. Out of school already? "The Power is Within You." The power IS within you. It's in your kids too!

Marianne Williamson from her book "A Return to Love":

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Coddling thoughts will not coax greatness out of us. Consistent rigor and genuine nurturing always do. That greatness is there.

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