DRILLED AND THEN DRILLED some MORE

Like drill sergeants in the army, disciplinarians in schools are simply far better at getting things dome, Prof Poplin argues. She quotes a fourthgrader, who has come to the same conclusions on her own. "When I was in first grade and second grade and third grade, when i cried my teachers coddled me," the student explained. "When I got to (teacher) Mrs T's room, she told me to suck it up and get to work. I think she's right I need to work harder."

Creativity is not a gift from God, it's a learned trait. Robert W Weinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, has studied a series of geniuses from Einstein to Picasso. His verdict: they were not born great, they made themselves greet through sheer tenacity and hard work. Or in simple layman terms: "practice makes perfect" - just as Lipman's music teacher insisted by expecting his students to work hard and then harder.

And tenacity, too, is a learned treat. Children can learn to be perseverant if they are expected to be so. Conversely, heaps of praise Lavished, unearned, on children can have a corrosive influence on their motivation.

Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has found that 10-year-olds who were praised for being "smart" lost confidence, being clearly aware that the praise may have been unjustified. Yet those children who were told that they were "hard workers" became more confident and did end up working harder to prove the validity of that assessment.

"There is something to be said about a teacher who is demanding and tough not because he thinks students will never learn but because he is so absolutely certain that they will," Lipman sums up.

She cites a former classmate of hers who went on to become a professional cellist. By expecting the best from his students, their irascible music teacher taught his charges about the redeeming virtues of resilience and hard work, the cellist opined: "He Taught us how to fail! and how to pick ourselves up again.".