Finding Someone to Envy

As a first year painting teacher and MFA student, I find myself regularly evaluating how to best instruct someone in the methods of painting. I waver between step by step, technical tutelage and simply giving the students the supplies and a loose assignment and helping them struggle (currently I live in the later). But all this thinking has got me evaluating how we are taught, or guided, because really I think that is a better description of MFA instruction.
Critiques seem to focus on looking at someone's work, at times I feel, just long enough or deeply enough to make a connection to some other artist, and then directing the artistic-sheep toward a new potential shepherd. Sometimes I feel like this process does more to expand my mental card catalog of artists, rather than expand my abilities to paint, but there is some merit to this method.
Since everything has already been done, more or less, all the wheels have been invented, there is little sense in totally reinventing, when we can get right to "pimping our paintings," taking the valuable framework of another, established artist, combining it with some shiny, chrome-like techniques of a few others, welding it all together with some ideas, and calling the galleries. But seriously as Robert Henri taught "whatever an artist leaves is so much for others to use as stones to step on or stones to avoid." Indeed there is some truth in that quote, another great quote, which really speaks to the value of this teaching method, came from Billy Collins, a Poet Laureate, whom I met last week, and had the pleasure of listening to. Mr Collins was asked how he learned to write, and how he teaches/ can others be taught to write poems, and his response was to the effect that, "all artists need to find people who make them jealous; people who can do the things they wish they could do, then through aspiring to be like that individual, they may discover themselves." He in fact mentioned that he spent years "stealing" from other poets and he turned out alright.
Perhaps artistic individuality is not an inborn idea, but based more on the particular composition of our experiences, influences and all those artists to whom we are directed who fill us with envy.