Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Making of Mediocrity



How else are we going to manufacture a generation of mediocre citizens, lazy, ineffective thinkers, obedient worker bees, citizens who opt not to vote than by penalizing teachers who hand out zeroes to students who don't hand in assignments?

Why would we want to prepare our young people for the world?

We're in a perfect position to pull a world-class gotcha on our children: raise them to believe everything they do is exceptional, give trophies -- trophies! -- to everyone who participates in sporting events, and lull kids into a false sense of security that the world will accept assignments left unfinished, unattempted, not handed in.

Then, if these young people are lucky enough not to die before entering the workforce -- gotcha!  Everything we taught you was wrong!

Dear children, when your boss gives you an assignment, he expects it to be completed -- on time, on budget, to specification.  But what a great and hearty laugh will be had at your expense when you have no ability to produce such work because the period that should have been spent teaching you how was spent laying the foundation for this wonderful, elaborate joke!

It's like a generation of parents is hazing its children.  It's like a generation of parents sees its children as fraternity and sorority pledges who must be treated with outlandish exaggeration in order to initiate them.

This generation of "helicopter"-trophies-for-everyone parents is dead set to raise an entire population of basement dwellers; pale, pasty, video-game-suckling drones with the intellectual physiques of veal calves.

Yes, penalize teachers who hand out zeroes!  Zeroes hurt your child's self esteem.  Your child is only expressing himself when he doesn't do his homework or hand in assignments.  You don't want to thwart that kind of natural self-expression.

Hopefully these parents will take their warped sense of child-rearing to its logical extreme -- teaching their kids to drive on the wrong side of the road, to disobey traffic signals, cut lines, walk out of stores without paying for merchandise.  After all, rules are for idiots.

And everyone gets a trophy just for showing up!

How could this philosophy possibly go wrong?

2 comments:

ThisIsHorsheshit9 said...

I've yet to receive my participation ribbon! Failure is only something read about in books, luckily I was made to read any books while in school!

Can'tRead/Write9 said...

Wasn't made to read any books that should've stated.