A friend's kids went to an elementary school where "Honor Student" awards were handed out alphabetically so that (as one of his daughter's teachers explained) "everybody gets the award, and there are no favorites: it's alphabetical!" When my friend pointed out that his daughter's last name meant she'd go last -- "and that's hardly fair," he said with his most worried/frustrated/grim face -- the teacher grew nervous, and stuttered through an alternative: "Maybe we could go boy-girl-boy-girl?"
The school stuck with the alphabet. The ceremony gave new meaning to the term "A student."
America's "everyone gets a trophy" syndrome has become a national joke. "A" grades, which once conveyed excellence, are now given to 43 percent of all college students, according to a study by grade-inflation gurus Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy. This is an increase of a staggering 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The study also reveals how easy it is to buy college credentials: a scandalous 86 percent of private school students, it turns out, get nothing lower than a "B."
In other words, the nation has become a self-parodic reflection of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon: thanks to collusion between parents and educators, the vast majority of all private school children are virtually guaranteed to be above average.
While their older siblings score good grades whether they deserve them or not, thousands of five-year-olds across Manhattan are busily "prepping" for tests they'll have to ace to qualify for a small number of what the New York Times calls, "gifted and talented kindergarten seats." (The city's Anderson School requires children to score in the 99th percentile on the tests, the Times reports; otherwise their parents aren't invited to the school's open houses.)
Some public schools refuse to allow anyone to get a grade below "C," so no student will ever fail! Explaining why two Kansas school districts favor this policy, a spokesman says it's just like the Army, where no one can "be left behind on the battlefield." Yes, yes: the playground is a battlefield.
Grade inflation promotes ego inflation, the opposite of healthy self-confidence. "We want to encourage effort, especially among young kids," says Jean M. Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. "But the 'everybody gets a trophy' mentality basically says that you're going to get rewarded just for showing up. That won't build true self-esteem; instead, it builds this empty sense of 'I'm just fantastic, not because I did anything but just because I'm here.'"
Adults can be as seduced by the narcissistic con as their kids. For years, the fashion industry has engaged in a bizarre but calculated form of "downsizing," steadily lowering the bar on what used to be standard sizes for women's clothing. The Economist reports that in Britain, the average size-14 pair of women's pants is more than four inches wider at the waist than it was during the '70s; now it fits just like a former size 18. In the U.S., a size 10 is equivalent to a British 12 or 14. As consumers' waistbands inflate, they begin to believe what they want to believe -- that they still fit into their old sizes. Bigger spending and an obesity epidemic form a fat-uous circle.
Financial inflation has given ordinary Americans a distorted idea of their wealth, with devastating consequences. Before the current economic crisis, many 99 percenters felt richer and richer year after year as they earned more dollars (though prices soared commensurately) and found they could live in a "better neighborhood" without moving as the "value" of their homes apparently skyrocketed.
Now, with many millions unemployed and 11 million homes underwater, that illusion has been shattered. Today's hyper-low inflation only makes things worse for most of us, as mega-banks borrow from the Fed at zero percent, while human beings' savings earn virtually no interest. At the same time, corporate bigwigs bask in a variation of the Lake Wobegon effect, as boards ratchet up compensation packages (and golden parachutes) for CEOs without regard to merit.
Phony advocates for "democracy" like to give the impression that nobody's better than anyone else -- not on some abstract notion that we'll be treated equally before the law, but that "fairness" means we're all the same. "Every man a king," Louisiana Gov. Huey Long liked to say -- before he was dispatched to that very undemocratic utopia in the sky.
Follow Michael Sigman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/majorsongs
If Millenials are walking around feeling self-entitled and unable to take criticism, it's not because their fifth grade teachers gave every student some kind of year-end award, or because they all got little trophies on the last day of T-ball season. It's more likely that they were never encouraged to take risks where success or failure were very real options.
I also think kids learn pretty quickly that NOT everyone gets a trophy in every pursuit. Only five players can start on a basketball team. Only two kids get the leads in the spring musical. In a debate tournament, there are winners and losers. The cool guy gets the pretty girl, etc.
And I can't speak to schools that refuse to give out F's as a policy, but I do know some schools allow students to make up work, re-take tests and so on. But not to preserve self-esteem. It's about making sure the students learn the material. I once heard a national teacher-of-the-year winner speak and he was criticized for letting his students re-take tests (not the same test, but one on the same material) until they got decent grades. His point was that he's not there to hand out letter grades, but to ensure that kids learn something. Makes sense to me.
No fail etc.? A lot of the kids simply don't care enough. Some non-teachers probably imagine this poor child, struggling over an algebra book late into the night, desperately trying to pass. Sure that happens but IME far more often, not. We have a re-take policy and it shows me how deeply many (don't) care.
It's a good solution, really, C.Y.A. If you fail a kid and that's that, no recourse, then maybe you're called on the carpet, or courting a lawsuit, or facing an unpleasant school board meeting. But if remediation is OFFERED, the ones who genuinely care can take advantage of it. Where I teach, we don't get nearly the number of students seeking help as one might imagine. That's where the parents are supposed to lay down the law and...well that's not exactly working either, it seems.
The kids who have been told how great they are for all their lives are now finding out they are not special, they dont get a job paying 80k the day after they get out of college.
They are finding out their bosses will tell them to do things, they will be told when they screw up, and they cant handle it.
The real shame is all these young folks have been told "go to college" but many are steered into or allowed to major in areas of study that have no real employemnt opportunities. They end up with a boat load of debt and no real skills in the work place.
As long as we define success as getting a job that requires a university degree then we will never succeed. The vast majority of kids will never get an university education. Does that make them a failure?
Growing up our teachers identified each students strengths as well as our weaknesses. Yearly we would have a class vs class showdown to see just how much we learned in a "Family Feud" style trivia game. They kept score and there were clear winners and losers. It wasn't done in a mean way or in a way that left any of us emotionally harmed for a lifetime of feeling as though we were just not good enough. Instead it gave many of us more incentive to do better next year.
We are teaching our children that they don't have to work hard to get an "A". That "A" now means average instead of above average. That trophy is just a "thank you for participating" piece of plastic instead of "congratulations on beating the competition". What are kids to do when they become adults and go out into the world to get a job? What happens when they realize that competition is a real thing and not everyone gets the job? We are going to have a generation of kids who are not going to know how to handle rejection and who are going to feel entitled to everything. Scary prospect.
We're not "going to have" such a generation, we pretty much already have it.
One need look no farther than the Occupy folks to see how demanding and entitled today's youth are. We have people out there demanding that their college loans be forgiven, that their mortgages be written down, that the consequences of their choices to placed on others rather than themselves.
Scary indeed.
The fact of the matter is that life is often full of competition, and if you don't know your own strengths and weaknesses you cannot compete!