My recollection of school is that it was one big competition, all the time. We competed for grades, we competed for the best seats, we competed in the schoolyard, and we competed in gym class. We played hard, worked hard, and hovering right below the surface all the time was the fear of failure. In gym class, we’d play dodgeball, and the winners were allowed to leave early and the losers had to clean up and run an extra lap or two. Every spring report card was scary, because every kid knew that if you got below a certain mark, you would fail and have to repeat the grade. There was great shame in that, and it DID happen. Every year, a couple of kids would get held back.
My brother had a ‘marginal’ report card, and was forced to do homework all summer for his ‘conditional’ pass.
To my way of thinking, these kinds of things are very important for a kid’s emotional and intellectual development. Actions have consequencies. Try hard, and you get rewarded. Screw up, you get punished.
And if you were a little kid and no good at dodgeball, you had to learn to be creative. Try to get yourself on the team with the biggest kids. Learn how to duck. Learn how to not draw attention to yourself. Whatever.
Some of the smaller kids hated gym class, and hated dodgeball. But even in that there was a lesson - sometimes you have to do things you don’t like doing. You just have to find your courage, step up to the plate, and try your best. And sometimes those kids surprised themselves and turned out to be pretty good at it, or they learned that it really wasn’t all that bad, and life goes on.
Now kids are given no responsibility. We don’t trust them with freaking tic-tacs or nail clippers. We make them pee in bottles for the privilege of joining the chess club. We don’t let them be naturally competitive. We coddle them until they make a simple mistake, then ‘zero tolerance’ kicks in and we expel the poor kids.
We don’t allow them to fail grades, and then when they get to grade 12 and can’t read properly, we chuck them out of the school system totally unprepared for life, having been coddled and told they were doing fine in order to save their self-esteem. Then hard reality hits them.
We’re not doing kids any favors. The needs of the children have been replaced by fear of liability suits and parental wrath. Parents use the school system as a surrogate for their own lack of attention, then throw fits if the school tries to do the right thing. So schools have backed down.
My daughter starts public school in the fall. Recognizing what’s wrong with it, I’m going to be enrolling her in all kinds of extra-curricular activities where she can learn vital skills and challenge herself.
Most fun game in the world, my heart speeds up just thinking about it.