It seems harmless. A children’s athletic competition where everyone gets a blue ribbon or gold medal, regardless of outcome. The replacement of traditional letter-based grading with a pass-fail system, or grading on a curve. Flatten or eliminate the distance between the best and the worst, avoiding hurt feelings and damaged self-esteems.
Notice whose feelings are ignored. When rewards are equalized, there is no way to elevate the worst without devaluing the best. Bad as this is, it is merely the first step towards not equality of outcome, distasteful as that would be, but rather a world where the worst are rewarded and the best are punished, if they’re allowed to exist at all. A world characterized not by the moronic bromide: “Everybody wins!” but the barbaric slogan: “Losers Take All!”
Nothing about capitalism arouses more fear than its primacy of competitive prowess. To get anything out of a capitalistic economy, you have to put something in, to have a product or service somebody wants to buy. Innovative and productive ability are the coin of the realm. Much of the hostility towards capitalism comes from those quarters where that coin is conspicuously absent: the state, the academy, and the temple. As America moved, in the second half of the 19th century, to the closest to laissez-faire capitalism the world has ever seen, the potentates, professors, and priests got quite a comedown from the privileged positions they had historically enjoyed. Adding insult to injury: some of the entrepreneurs, inventors, and businesspeople who made it big in America started out as penniless immigrants—people of no account—Europe’s “wretched refuse.”
The counterattack was swift and vicious. The Trojan horse was humanitarianism. While capitalism admittedly reduced poverty and created a whole new class—the middle class—some were still poor. Capitalists were greedy, and the whole notion of profit was morally suspect in all major philosophical systems. Labor had been commoditized and separated from its own work product. Mass production and urbanization produced alienation and anomie. Suburban and middle class life produced bland conformity. And so on and on and on and on it has gone…as the professed humanitarians have poured from their Trojan horse. They would save the “wretched refuse” they neither associated with nor cared about, and if in the bargain they regained their old status, so be it; that status was their rightful due.
The resurgent classes weren’t bent on eliminating competition, only changing its terms to their benefit. If what you produce and exchange for doesn’t determine your reward, what does? Charity or theft are the only alternatives. What couldn’t be extracted from the winners through goodwill or guilt would be taken from them; it was the humanitarian thing to do. The priests peddled charity, the potentates theft, and the professors dreamed up muddy rationales for both. Producers have no right to what they produce. The potentates have first claim; all our best intellectuals say so, and whatever they don’t steal producers should give away; all our best moral philosophers say so. The proper order has been restored, and the potentates, professors, and priests are back on top.
We’re not yet to the point where last place gets the blue ribbon and the winner nothing, but we’re close. Barack Obama parlayed a thin resume, little private sector experience, a good speech, and something-for-nothing promises into two presidential election victories. His Nobel Peace Prize is emblematic of both his life and political philosophy: reward and recognition without accomplishment. Blue ribbons for everyone!
Obamacare has been a disaster and may not withstand its second Supreme Court challenge. Obama has managed to one-up George W. Bush, putting us on both sides of the Middle East’s interminable Sunni-Shiite conflict. He bears no responsibility for America’s biggest economic success during his tenure—the development of new sources and extraction technologies for domestic oil—but contributed an impediment with his refusal to make a decision on the Keystone pipeline. His failures and scandals have cost his party dearly, but his outsize self-regard, a result of the same reward and recognition without accomplishment that’s being foisted on our kids, allows no concession to electoral realities. He threatens to impose immigration reform and global warming legislation through executive orders and regulatory fiat. But for affirmative action, white guilt, and something-for-nothing politics, Barack Obama would be a Legal Aid lawyer somewhere, and probably not a very good one.
The arts offer a vision of things to come: avant-garde, after all, is French for “advance guard.” Robert Gober’s sculpture “Three Urinals,” which yes, is three urinals, just sold for $3.2 million. If that’s an indication, then we are headed down the toilet. Losers take all.
EVER WONDER WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY? AMERICA DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WAS THE CLOSEST WE GOT TO THE PINNACLE OF FREEDOM. READ ALL ABOUT IT IN ROBERT GORE’S EPIC NOVEL.
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Reblogged this on Starvin Larry.
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“The replacement of traditional letter-based grading with a pass-fail system, or grading on a curve. Flatten or eliminate the distance between the best and the worst, avoiding hurt feelings and damaged self-esteems.”
Actually both systems are suspect. Kids learn just fine without testing and grading at all. It’s called “unschooling”, a variety of homeschooling. See for example John Holt’s books, “How Children Fail” and “How Children Learn”.
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Gober merely puts an exclamation point on PT Barnum’s cynical rejoinder. Obamacare’s Gruber was partially right, but most people aren’t necessarily stupid. They have been taught by our .gov public school system to be ignorant and gullible, and seduced by television into foregoing the written word. Forget reason and logic. Feelings are more important than facts.
Many years ago, when I was a student, grades were a helpful motivator, although the thrill of learning was the spark that started the process. And there needs to be some mechanism whereby a student can tell how successful he was at learning any particular material – not memorizing, but understanding – and for a teacher/school to be able to determine how successful they were at actually educating the students. Grades served that function much better than gold stars, blue ribbons, or singing songs to The Won. Common Core is an obscenity.
I remember in pre-med taking a chemistry course where I simply did not grasp several of the concepts involved. The instructor was so bad that he used a heavy curve on the grades, such that I ended up with an “A” – simply because I understood the material better than most of the rest of the class. He confided he was worried that he might be let go by the university if he didn’t pass enough of the students in the class. And this wasn’t a junior college, it was the Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) which had its own medical school. It’s gone socialist, now, but back then (1974) it provided the best opportunity for getting into med school.
If The Won hadn’t been groomed and hand-carried into the White House, he _might_ have been bright enough to have been the next Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. He wouldn’t have lasted long even as a public defender in the ghetto.
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