It's the exam season and amid the intoxicating aroma of sweat, teenage hormones and Just Me by Paris Hilton familiar to invigilators everywhere, comes the faint whiff of middle-class hypocrisy as parents, politicians and pedagogues unite to condemn the aspirations of the nation's youth.

Last week David Eaglesham, the general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, was bemoaning the effect of the celebrity culture on Scottish children. Our “over-zealous approach to fame” was threatening real achievement, he claimed. In these pages last week, Maureen Watt, the Scottish minister for schools and skills, complained about the fixation that pre-teenage children have with fame and celebrity at the expense of exams and “real goals”.

I'm not convinced about the wisdom of this wholesale condemnation of celebrity culture. What teenagers covet about Kate Moss is not her drug habit, her single motherhood or her spells in rehab but her earning potential. They don't envy Joey Barton or Britney Spears their chaotic lifestyles but they do admire their wealth and success.

There is a certain perversity in parents and teachers urging children to knuckle under and study hard so that they can get a good job and a stable future while criticising them for aspiring to the only role models who appear to be comfortable about making money. All around them children hear politicians boasting about lifting families out of poverty while heaping scorn on young actors, footballers and musicians who have shaken off working class roots to make their fortunes.

At the same time the material pressures on children have never been greater. Advertisers are using ever more sophisticated techniques to reach children, by-passing parents altogether. Children have become conduits from the marketplace to the household, the link between advertisers and the family purse. We want children to be technologically literate but we condemn them when they clamour for the latest technological innovations.

Nobody wants to raise rampant little materialists but the signals we are sending children would flummox an Enigma machine. At the heart of the paradox is our ambivalence about wealth and wealth creation. We want our children to be fulfilled and happy in their careers while doing a job which is worthwhile and contributes to the betterment of society, but we also want them to make money. Nobody aspires for their child to live in poverty.

Money represents freedom, choice and independence - three things most teenagers lack. It's hardly surprising that they look up to the people who've got it, especially people who have made it young. It seems bizarre to berate teenagers for wanting to emulate wealth and success. The problem, of course, is that while Scotland could do with the odd Ronaldo, it doesn't particularly need a phalanx of Amy Winehouses. We need cutting edge scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers.

The irony is that engineers and scientists can command huge salaries in Scotland these days. Scotland's chief scientist, Anne Glover, owns a yacht and drives a sports car. Glover's work has opened up a new field of science - microbial signalling - in which genetically modified bacteria are used to identify polluted sites by extinguishing their glow in the presence of toxins. Her eureka moment did not come hunched over test tubes in the laboratory, however, but during a midnight swim with colleagues in the Mediterranean Sea, at one of the many conferences she attends in glamorous locations. She noticed that a research student's swimming costume sparkled with bioluminescence, which set her wondering about exploiting the effect in other cells.

Scotland's living scientists include Professor Stephen Salter, the inventor of wave power; Professor David Milne, the inventor of the iPod audio chip; Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri, the pioneer of keyhole surgery; Professor Sir Philip Cohen, who discovered how insulin works; Professor Sir Kenneth Murray, the creator of the hepatitis B vaccine; Professor Sir James Black, the inventor of beta-blockers; Professor Ian Frazer, who discovered the cervical cancer vaccine; Professor Peter Higgs, who gave his name to the so-called “god particle”, the Higgs boson; Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars; Professor Wilson Sibbett, a world authority on ultrafast lasers; Professor Sir David Jack, the discoverer of the anti-ulcer drug Zantac; Professor Peter Denyer, inventor of the CMOS imager chip used in digital cameras; Professor Walter Spear, whose work in amorphous silicon paved the way for the flat-screen television and Dr Ian Underwood, the inventor of the smallest television screen in the world at 5mm wide.

They may not all be multi-millionaires but a good number of them are. Yet no Scottish school child is familiar with this list. Why has Careers Scotland not made a film promoting, not just their scientific achievements, but their lifestyles? Engineering graduates are being offered salaries in excess of £30,000 straight from university. Such is the competition that there is open warfare in Scotland with engineering firms poaching each other's employees. By the time they are in their late 20s they can afford to drive a Ferrari. Yet most school pupils have no idea there is money to be made in engineering.

Even careers which have traditionally been seen as low paid can be extremely lucrative. Our top policemen are paid in excess of £100,000 and can retire with a fantastic pension at 55 or younger. These days good nurses can rise swiftly through the ranks and progress to well-paid management positions in their 30s.

Instead of the endless sex education videos our schoolchildren are subjected too, why aren't we promoting these careers in a way to which children can relate? There is no point waiting until they are 16 before giving them careers advice. If you are going to have a career in science or engineering, you have to take make the right subject choices at 13.

I can understand why professional people are unforthcoming about advertising what they earn. It doesn't pay to be flash in Scotland and there is still a great deal of envy and spite about people who make money. But if high flyers in science, engineering and industry are not prepared to be up front about the perks of the job, they cannot complain when teenagers look to those who are less reticent.