Posted on 07/07/2012 8:04:11 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
I just retired from public education. I worked near Houston, so things were pretty conservative, but the “swimming team” syndrome of universal trophies was alive and well. If a teacher didn’t give a kid an “A” on a report card, the parents would demand a meeting to complain. Most of the time, the kid’s grade was changed to “A”. I asked one parent why they didn’t just keep the little darling home and come by every six weeks to get an all “A” report card since the grades were meaningless. She was at the next school board meeting compalining that I was opposed to “parental involvement”.
The Dodo in Alice in Wonderland. Everyone has won, and all must have prizes!
The problem with this feminine notion, of course, is that if everybody gets a trophy, nobody gets a trophy.
Which makes it a perfect socialist goal: Everyone is equally a loser.
Everyone getting a trophy is not bad per se. It becomes a memento of participating on a team, no different than a team picture. What is bad is refusing to recognize the league champs with a trophy for winning, or to give out special trophies to the best, most valuable players. That demoralizes the best players and teaches that individual effort and excellence is not to be rewarded.
“Everyone gets a trophy” syndrome - where does this idea come from?
Big trophy’s lobbying group.
Whaaa, I didn’t get a trophy! Where’s mine?!?
“Everyone getting a trophy is not bad per se. It becomes a memento of participating on a team, no different than a team picture.”
Back around 1967 I went to my swim team awards dinner. They gave everyone a trophy which was an award, definitely not a team picture. I see a huge difference. It was absolutely worthless to me because I knew I didn’t deserve it or earn it. I was absolutely disgusted with the adults. I was 8 or 9 at the time.
It is hatred of the good for being good. They can’t make the looser perform better so they just make the winners achievement meaningless, except that they can’t really do that because everyone still knows who the best are. But they are counting on people being cowed into not stating it out loud in the name of fairness. It’s the same as the doctrine of unconditional love. If you are asked to love everyone then love becomes meaningless. That’s my opinion anyway.
The problem occurred when we gave more value to avoiding hurt feelings over the legitimate pride of accomplishment. The pain of 100 kids who did not win was deemed worse than the pride of the few kids who placed.
Unfortunately, this de-motivates the achievers while demoralizing all the kids who just get “participation” ribbons.
And it undermines the lessons kids need to learn for the real world. You can’t all get an academy award, and you must learn to deal with rejection - from jobs you don’t get to girls who don’t like you.
I guess it comes down to the purpose of the trophy. Is it to say you excelled at something, or is it to say merely that you were part of a team. If the latter, then a trophy is no different than a photo, a ribbon or a certificate of participation. It is a memento. If the trophy signifies that you did something excellent, though, and it is given to everyone, then it loses value. In any endeavor, we appreciate the things most that we had to work the hardest for. If I had to choose between my MVP trophies and my participation on a team trophies, then I guess I'd go with the MVP ones. But I like all of them. Your mileage may vary.
From cheap trophy manufacturers
Thanks for the ping. It is a very deeply rooted urge, and it affects any perception of competition. When Marx read Darwin’s work, he was profoundly affected by Darwin’s description of the fit surviving, and the less fit being culled. He even wrote Darwin, hoping Darwin would lend support to Marx’s work. Darwin stayed out of it.
Eventually, some saw Darwin’s work, and postulated that a free market economy, which rewarded the smart and industrious, would evolve mankind to be smart and industious. Lib’s flipped out, and labeled it Social Darwinism, as if attaching the word Darwin to it made it an epithet.
Eventually some scientists postulated that groups would compete, and those groups which were made of indivudals with the greatest degree of loyalty, honesty, bravery, selflessness, and other good traits would win, culling the less able groups, and producing these traits within our species. Libs in the sciences set about creating all sorts of models to disprove that, and killed any study of group selection for decades. In the Lib model, altruism, loyalty, and other good traits were evolved by individuals, as a way of exchanging value to better their indivdual chances, and outcompete the selfish takers, who competed, and destroyed themselves by trying to win. It’s laughable, but they will buy into it.
Here, this is the same urge which makes Libs cringe when they think of an economy which rewards the highly capable and industious more than the sloths. The funny thing is how r/K then links it to sex, single parenting, cowardice, and all the r traits.
Once you see it, you see it everywhere. And there is a lot of evidence that if the economy collapses, resources become scarce, and you need to compete to survive, there are large malleable segments of the population which will suddenly find their very natures change beneath them, without their conscious assessment of anything. They will just suddenly go K, and Conservatism will rise unbidden within them.
It’s why the coming collapse may be the best thing which could happen to our nation. People will become more decent, more polite, more loyal, more emotionally attached to each other, and more loving of our nation and it’s freedoms.
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