I recently read an article on the boblivingstonletters.com website which mentioned participation trophies. As I sat and thought about it I began to reflect how much society has changed from the time I was in school and until now. How often do we as parents and organizations insist that people feel good about what they do even when the product they produce or their performance is at best subpar. We have degenerated into a society where it is not important to achieve or win but into a society where we reward and coddle people for just participating.
I taught at a prestigious mining University in my field over 30 years ago and have continue to lecture, help with classes and give short courses during the ensuing years. What I have noticed is that within our advanced educational system is that we continue to promote to our students the myth told to us by our parents that they can do or become anything they want only adding that they just need to pay for the appropriate college education.
What we often forget is that people are created unique in both their cognitive and physical abilities. Eyesight, height, color perception, IQ, our capacity to reason, retain material and memorize, our capability to analyze situations and materials, our motor acuity, etc. are all different. Yet, increasingly there is pressure on our teachers and professors to ignore those differences and to create learning environments which hands out “participation trophies” (or University degrees) for just paying for and taking classes.
We forget that while some skills can many times be learned with enough work, there are people with have a natural ability or aptitude to master them without much work and there are those regardless of the amount of work will never learn them. In spite of how fast a person runs, how high they jump or how strong they are, a person that is 5’5″and 125 pound person will probably never play in the NBA or the NFL. Likewise, not everyone has the mental ability to become an engineer or medical doctor.
Yet increasingly we confuse the concept of “equality of opportunity” with “equality of outcome”. For example, at the University I am now required to accommodate those with “learning” or “testing” disabilities in the engineering classes that I teach. It is a requirement of Federal Law. Hence, for testing I must give extra time or consideration for someone registered with the campus testing center as having testing anxiety or other testing conditions. If they are “dyslexic” I cannot count an answer wrong because the numbers on there test are not correct and/or I must design different testing criteria to accommodate the dyslexic individual.
Give me a break! Do you really want a bridge or have a dam that was designed by an engineer like this? Do you really think it is appropriate for a brain surgen to be dyslexic? However, according to Federal Law we cannot flunk these people if they have disclosed their disability. We must accommodate them because its not really their fault but, the problem is really rooted in some social injustice, stigma or trauma growing up.
Because we continue to let our educational administrators (that are generally mathematically or scientifically challenged) espouse the pious concept that we are all “created equal” we let them tell us that we can not let a person’s physical or mental issues and abilities to thwart their dreams to become an engineer or doctor. We as educators are then mandated to find a way to pass them and to hand them a participation trophy (diploma) in exchange for all their tuition dollars.