As opposed to the way intelligent kids are treated in school: ongoing, relentless humiliation by your peers? Without accolades, they’d be in terrible emotional shape. Nobody would publicly approve of them for anything.
No, I don’t think Mr. Fulton’s system would truly work. Even though he was trying to teach a sophomore-second-time-through that was taking a freshman-mandatory class, I don’t think his comments actually motivated Fred to do jack shit. Today when I think of those remarks I wonder more about what the janitor thought about being held up as an example of a stupid kid who never studied.
However, I just don’t think school is a place where we should wrap kids in cotton and foam and bubblepop and shipping peanuts and make it impossible for them to feel the consequences of their failures and successes. It’s cutting off the nose to spite the face: removing accolades to remove shame. Complete waste of effort.
I remember our 6h grade teacher once called us to the window to observe some guys sitting out on their porch. She told us they were there every day, were probably jobless and on welfare, and if we didn’t work in school we’d end up joining them. Judgmental bitch.
One minor quibble: I don’t think showering kids with praise over nmothing and insulating them from failure will lead to them thinking they are really great and perfect.
I think it will lead to them fearing and suspecting that they are failures, but not being able to tell the difference. They might put up a feirce bravado of success, but they will always be a little bit terrified that they really aren’t sure whether they are any good or not. And it will make them angry, because they’ll know they’re being screwed but they can’t quite figure out why, except they believe (but cannot quite prove) that everyone’s lieing to them and maybe even mocking them.
You must have had terribly delicate intelligent kids in your class. You’re telling me they received no support from their peers what so ever? No support from parents or other adults? They were solitary geniuses battered about a cold unfeeling world? Islands in the dark? Spare me. At what point do smart kids care what the goth slacker thinks of them?
I’m not arguing for removing the honour roll, or for that matter, student athlete of the year. As just about everyone has said, public recognition of measurable achievement is healthy to competition and person’s sense of worth.
However, I object to the idea you put forward of systematically degrading a person for shits and giggles. How this could ever provide an environment where the student would even consider trying to do better escapes me. You could argue that the fuckers deserve it for treating other like shit, but that’s hardly “smart”.
I don’t find anything surprising about this. PS is all about smoothing out the bumps and depressions in the population, and factory schooling doesn’t work very well when there are huge differences in knowledge and achievement. It’s not about self-esteem it’s about efficiency and keeping most of the students at about the same level of mediocre performance. Why on Earth would such a system want reward students who far outpace their peers?
I don’t remember my high school having an honor roll per se(class of '73) but our class rankings were told to us. And at graduation, if you were in the top 20% of the class, you had a set of silken cords, in the school colors, that were draped over your shoulders. So I can always remember exactly how many students were in my class, as I was 72 out of 472, and got to wear the cords. But class ranking didn’t ensure future prominence. We recently had a 30 year reunion, and nobody knows where the #1 student is. The #2 guy is a well-known local doctor though, but the salutorian, who we thought would be going into show business, became a missionary priest. That’s more meaningful than being well known I would think.
Sure, you get support from your parents and other adults, but if you’re like me, you don’t believe them. Of course your parents think you’re wonderful; they’re your parents, and that means they’re more than a bit biased. My mother used to tell me I had the world on a string, but she also used to tell me how pretty I was. I had a mirror and could see for myself that she was taking that “eye of the beholder” thing a bit too far, so why would I believe the rest of her assessments of me?
Support from my peers? You have GOT to be joking. I had a few friends, but for every 1 classmate who said, “Good job”, there were fifteen who were utterly indifferent, and another ten who never lost a chance to tell me what a loser I was. I wasn’t pretty, I wasn’t athletic, I wasn’t perky and vivacious, I wasn’t fashionable, and I wasn’t rich. My shortcomings in those areas were pointed out loudly, frequently, and often pretty cruelly (like the guys who used to bark at me in middle school–'coz I was such a dog, huh huh huh.) I went through so much harassment that my seventh grade science teacher stopped class one day and gave me open permission to slap the shit out the boy behind me any time I wanted.
I really think this sort of thing is why very bright children tend to turn into insufferable little snotballs, at least for a bit. The way they see it, they’ve got exactly one thing going for them, and in an effort to make themselves feel better they convince themselves that that one thing is the most important thing in the world.
I remember HS as you describe above. I graduated in 1977. I"m in total agreement with the OP. In fact, I was thinking of starting a pit thread on this subject too. But the article in the OP was much better at illustrating the underlying stupidity here than the one I saw.
I was watching the news the other day, and IIRC this was in Dallas schools (I just moved to a small community near Dallas from Anchorage AK about a month ago), at any rate, apparantly the elementary schools have decided that the kids will no longer be allowed to choose to whom they will give their valentines on Valentine’s Day. Instead, the kids will put all of the valentines they’ve brought on their desk, without putting any names on them, and the other kids will walk by and pick the one they want.
This is supposed to prevent any of the kids from feeling left out, or like someone else is a favorite. I think the quote the school official gave was “This will make the event an inclusive rather than and exlusive one”.
This PCness, or whatever it is, has gotten SOOOOOOOOOO ridiculously out of hand. Are we going to start making sure that all the little boys bounce their soccer balls at the same exact time, and all the little girls’ skipping ropes hit the ground at the exact same moment too?
Trying to take all possibility of the child being disappointed, or hurt, or exluded from something, ANYTHING, is to take away valid and valuable reasons that kids in times past STROVE to be better at something.
IIRC, didn’t they lower the bar for the Honor rolls ANYWAY not too long ago? It seems to me that when I was in school, only straight A student’s made the honor roll.
When my daughter was in school it was A’s and B’s. I think that in my son’s school, it was a GPA, so that even if a kid might have gotten a bad grade in one class, his other grades would make up for it.
We’re constantly harping on kids to excel, and yet there’s no incentive for them. I hope the parents of that school district fight this idiocy tooth and nail.
Agggghhh.
I developed a theory, after I’d successfully survived the mandatory portion of my schooling, that the ability of a person to shrug off abuse is pretty much directly correlated to how much healthy human contact they’re getting compared to what they need. And even for people with a perfectly healthy home life, parents are almost certainly not enough to address social needs.
My experience in late elementary school up through junior high was one of having one friend, at most – the kid who was even lower on the social totem pole than I was. We didn’t actually have anything in common aside from a willingness to speak to each other. (I went to a high school with an application-only academic program, and managed to, after about a year, start assembling actual friendships based on common interests and affection. Got a lot saner then.)
Humans are social creatures. The experience I had as the outsider kid (being smart was only part of why I was in the outsider role) was that the only options I had for meeting my basic social needs involved listening to the people who abused me, because there weren’t people who were willing to be friendly. The choices I had were to go nuts from social isolation, or get damaged by the social interactions I could get.
Amazing…I actually agree with DtC…and yes, I was one of the ostracized nerds on the campus…(but I graduated salutatorian, so they can just eat my shorts)…
On a related subject, this is also why I have a problem with quotas on standards tests. I mean, if your school is expected to have x% of students achieve a y grade, what are you going to do if your school’s percentage of stupid, lazy, ignorant (pick your term) students is greater than x??
I mean, not EVERYONE can pass the freakin’ test! Genetically, there’s a probability that there ARE some intelligence-challenged folks out there!
“What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence-moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the priciples of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence amoung your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all cipher, all nobodies. All equals. But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in the desire to Be Like Stalks.”
-Screwtape
Screwtape Proposes a Toast
C.S. Lewis
Preach it, Brother Cynic! I fought that battle for twenty years in Nashville Public Schools. I finally went stark raving mad fighting the system, trying to get that point across. Fortunately, there is a disability pension for madness.
I once had a 9th grade student who could not write his name or address by the end of summer school. The principal would not allow me to give him a failing grade. “He’s been through 9th grade twice. Let’s see how he does in 10th grade.” Arrrrrrgh!
The Tennessee privacy law has been used to thwart Nashville teachers in other ways. Teachers are allowed to see the records of only those students for which they are responsible. In my school, that did not include the students in our classes! We were “responsible” only for our homeroom students. The guidance counselor then illegally changed grades that we gave our students. (I found this out from an assistant principal.)
Allowing them to fail and giving them honest feedback is one thing, but humiliation is not a good teacher. Don’t shame them in public. That’s not the way.
Uh…The honor roll is/was/will be published for self-esteem enhancement. Let’s not throw it all away.
On the other other hand, I don’t think national high school sports competitions serve much purpose. Granted, keeping fit is important, and some running around might not be bad, but I really don’t think national High School sports competitions serve any useful purpose. So the kids can hit a ball or run a touchdown. From what I understand VERY few people who excel in high school sports will actually play on a professional team. Plus it’s a very intense, emotionally painful competition and I wouldn’t be bothered at all if it ended today.
That was partially hyperbole, though I do think there is WAY too much emphasis on sports in alot of high schools, especially in light of the apparent lack of emphasis on…oh, I don’t know…EDUCATION in our education system. (I notice alot of this down here in the South (at least it seems to me from my observations…Texans seem VERY serious about their high school sports related activities. Chicago native, moved to just outside Dallas two years ago…welcome CanvasShoes! )
Pfft…all you people naysaying this idea of doing away with academic awards (Noting a distinct lack of wanting to eliminate sports related achievement awards in the OP’s article)…next thing you’ll wanting kids to work hard to excel and think for themselves, and THEN where will we be?!?
Oh…
Amen, CrazyCatLady, Lilairen! It wasn’t till I got to college (all-women’s so the social pressures were way lower) that I began to develop any self-confidence, after the ego-crushing humiliation of public school.
One of the worst blows to my self-esteem came out of an award for excellence program in high school, oddly enough. There was an award (a dinky ugly pin) given to the top-ranking student each year, at an assembly where a number of awards were made. In my junior year, I knew I’d won it. Had to have, with straight A’s. So as the giving of the pin started with the usual speech, I sat there, basking in the tiny bit of happiness I’d dredged from yet another term of social ostracism. The principal reached the name… and it was someone else! I sat stunned as, all around me, kids turned to look, and smirk, and laugh, and jeer.
I still recall how awful I felt. Normally I was so shy and self-contemptuous that I took whatever crap was heaped upon me, but this time I was so enraged that I actually went to the administration afterwards to find out why??? Yes! I braved the terrors of the principal’s office!
And discovered that I’d missed it by one-tenth of a point. ONE-TENTH??? They couldn’t have called it a tie??? After some consultation, the powers-that-be grudgingly gave me my own pin (in the office, no public announcement) and I wore it defiantly for a week – my big act of rebellion in high school.
Hmmmmm… I suppose some could call that experience a reason NOT to have academic awards. Not me. I do think it calls for the application of some common sense. An honor roll rather than singling out just one achiever is a better idea. But for pity’s sake, give the smart kids – the ones who don’t (yet) have social skills, or looks or athletic ability, something positive.
