The path to greatness is not followed by staying within the lines with your crayons, EVERY intellectual and EVERY scientist and EVERY artist we know by name or reputation got to their position of greatness by being a rebel, dissatisfied, frustrated, and belligerent. So if your child disagrees with their tutors, or you, or even their own previous position, then examine and embrace. Children have only the power you grant them, and being wrong is a harmless position for those without power. Do not attempt to punish difference of opinion as if it is bad behaviour because punishing the act of thinking and reacting differently is a suppression of something that may be greatness. Yes they could just as easily be wrong, but at the very least they are trying. You don’t know if you have a Tesla, an Einstein, a Feynman, or a Newton on your hands. Imagine what we’d all have lost if those guys creativity and rebelliousness had been naughty-stepped out of existence?
Positivity is not the attitude of the innovator, it is not a tool of greatness. Positively attituded people use their positive attitude as a compensation, to allow them to stand in shit and pretend they smell roses. Negativity is what we do in a decadent empire, it is the child of leisure time, not busyness, its nature is progressive and useful. Negativity is where we look at something and say we are not in fact satisfied, that it could be better, that it should be better. It is this, the negative, that drives all improvement, not happiness toward the process or the object or the endeavour. Positivity stifles, it inhibits progress, it maintains the status quo, it is a stoic discipline to be positive within potentially challenging circumstances, it has a usefulness to power but no usefulness to people or society..
Your little brat, monster, whatever you like to call him or her, is a being in the world that is without prejudice before you put it there, without shame until you instil it, without capriciousness and selfishness until you teach them those ways. He/she is a creative engine filled with imagination, possessing a mind that wishes to know the world, a curiosity that might take them anywhere. You might, with the best of intentions, tame all that for the sake of allowing some members of society to feel more comfortable around them and less challenged by them. It is that society of comfortable mistruths that they may challenge with their questioning “but why?”, it is that that you are protecting when you make them a better fit through discipline and coercion.
The most outstandingly rewarded, and listened to, persons are those that get through the education system by conforming at every level, unfortunately these will be the least creative and the most entrenched in the canons they have learned. If they make a dent at all it will be in the increments of improvement that happen organically. For me personally, and bear in mind that I am not currently an employer, but if I was, I would not be looking for the top graduate, I’d be looking for the most interesting outlier, an achiever despite their odds. It’s like being within any body of persons, the least interesting people are the sheeple, those that disagree with nothing. Followership is a better term for what we call leadership, it is a mistake to blanket label as successful the person who repeats the actions and mantras of their predecessor, repetition can yield further success yes, but not greater success.
We build a society just as we build a religion and a government, with the intention that it has a solidity that all can agree on, so then adhere peacefully to. But children are like Socrates, they don’t fear to erode away the bedrock that societal, cultural, and procedural dogma is built upon, they will drill into subjects so as to expose the lack of fundament they contain. For a philosophy student this is an incredible thing to witness because it’s what we all want to do. Yes they will annoy and make mistakes, but their mistakes will teach them as much as their successes. Their mistakes are just as important.
I had a stepson once, I thought of him as my boy, and I tried to get the conditioning of positivity out of him, that which had been implanted by being over coddled by family and narrowly socialised at a private educational enterprise, but it didn’t work as far as I could see at the time. He remained boring and sedate, a docile drone like human, perfect for blending into the world of worker bees. This was maybe my biggest disappointment, not sure…
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