Teach Your Children Well

The story goes that Marissa Mayer, the newly minted CEO of Yahoo, and a former VP at Google, once declined an otherwise brilliant job applicant at Google because they had once gotten a C in a math class. Clearly in today's competitive world, academic success matters. The bar must be set high for academic success. But it must be set  just as high for creativity, innovation and collaboration. But what about the kids that are not cut out to be the renaissance children of the next generation? What about those kids, even those from privilege, whose interests lie elsewhere? Whose job is it to see to it that they too are educated well and steered toward important places in our society? Dr. Madeline Levine, a Bay Area clinician and the best selling author of The Price of Privilege, looks at these issues anew in her new work Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. My conversation with Madeline Levine: