Pajama Momma noticed that her children’s school is Celebrating Mediocrity by including the C students in an award ceremony.
Sadly our school system has decided doing ok is fine. Why try harder if you’re going to get rewarded for mediocrity? I understand teachers have their work cut out for them. They don’t have an easy job. They have to deal with rotten parents who let their kids get away with murder, but that still doesn’t explain the shift in what society expects from this generation.
Parents don’t discipline their kids anymore. They’re afraid to or their lazy or they feel guilty. They require little of their children in terms of chores, personal responsibility and acceptable behaviors. My favorite line is, it’s not little Johnny’s fault he behaves this way, he’s tired. I guarantee you little Johnny’s boss won’t give a rat’s ass if your precious is tired or not. Johnny’s boss is not going to be happy with mediocrity. Johnny will not get far in life, but hey, he did get that ribbon in school, right?
The trend in education in the last few decades is that failure must be prevented and excused at all costs. This is accomplished by lowering standards. It’s a pity because failure is an outstanding tool. The desire to avoid it spurs people on to work harder (especially when there are consequences), and it provides a metric to see what’s been accomplished. Failure also provides an opportunity to review what happened and see how things could have gone differently, so future attempts will be successful.
We set kids up for failure due to lack of effort by telling them repeatedly how smart they are, and taking the emphasis off of hard work. Studies have shown that telling kids they are smart harms them.
Consequently in our house we’ve gone the opposite route. The motto in our family is “try hard things” because when you set goals a little out of your reach and fight to achieve them, even if you fail you get more done than if you set a lower goal and actually achieve it. If you decide you want to be an A student and work hard to accomplish that, even if you make Bs you’ve done better than the student who was content to simply earn a passing grade. The emphasis is on the work and progress that was achieved. And when you try hard things and do achieve them, unlike the false pride of hurdling a low bar, it’s a sweet victory indeed.
