Anyone who doubts that children are born with a healthy amount of ambition need spend only a few minutes with a baby eagerly learning to walk or a headstrong toddler starting to walk. No matter how many times teh little one stumble in their initial efforts, most keep on trying, determined ot master their amazing new skill. it is only several years later, around the start of middle or junior high schook, many psychologists and teachers agree, that a good number of kids seem to lose their natural drive to succeed and end up joining the ranks of underachievesr. For the parents of such kids, whose own ambition si often inextricably tied ot their children's success,  it can be a bewildering, painful experience. So it's no wonder some parents find themselves hoping that, just maybe, ambition can be caught like any other subject at school.

   It's not quite that simple. 'Kids can be given the opportunities to bacome passionate about a subject or activity, but they can't be forced,' says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25 year study examining waht motivated first-and seventh-graders in three school districts. even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don't seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve.

   Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn't suffer form an emotional or learnig disability, or isn't involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically somehow isn't cool. 'Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term,' says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. 'You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth.' Over the past couple of years, Dweck has helped run an experimental workshop with New York City public school seventh-graders to do just that. Dubbed Brainoloy, the unorthodox approach uses basic neuroscience to teach kids how the brain works and how it can continue to develop throughout life. 'The message is that everything is within the kids'control, that their intelligence is malleable,' says Lisa Blackwell, a research scientist at Columbia University who has worked with Dweck to develop and run the program, which has helped increase the students' interest in school and turned around their declining math grades. More than any teacher or workshop, Blackwell says, 'Parents ca nplay a critical role in conveying this message to their children by praising their effort, strategy and progress rather than emphasizing their 'smartness' or praising high performance alone. Most of all, parents should let their kids know that mistakes are a part of learning.'

   Some experts say out education system, with its strong emphasis on testing and rigid separation of students into different levels of ability, also bears blame for the disappearance of drive in some kids. 'These programs shut down the motivation of all kids who aren't considered gifted and talented. They destroy their confidence,' says Jeff Howard, a social psychologist and president of teh Efficacy Institute. Howard and other educators say it's important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. 'The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions,' says Harvard education professor Michael Nakkula. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before ou can run.