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[personal profile] amanda_lodden
There is a private school near me that has a changeable sign out front. Normally, it displays "Happy Birthday" and then a list of names-- presumably the students with birthdays during a certain time frame. Since it changes about once a month, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's students with birthdays in the current month. This week, however, it displays "Honor Roll" and a list of names. This leads me to believe that it's a list of students who made the honor roll at the school.

It's a preschool.

This bothers me to the very depths of my soul. Have we gotten to the point that we push our kids so hard to perform that 4-year-olds need an honor roll? Is it truly necessary to make children compete to see who can color inside the lines better than others? And how do they determine who makes the honor roll anyway? Please tell me that we're not giving grades to toddlers based on how well they nap. Is it cumulative, like a high school honor roll? Can a bad episode during potty training destroy their chances of making the honor roll two years later?

Maybe I'm missing some key factor in childhood development, but it seems to me that we push our kids too hard to outperform others. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for encouraging kids to do their best, but I'm also for teaching them that failure isn't the end of the world, and that's it's better to have given an honest effort and still be the worst among your peers than it is to coast through life, succeeding only because you didn't actually risk failing. Plus, pushing people (of ANY age) to constantly compete discourages them from working together. I'd rather see my employees work as a team, and I'd rather see other people's employees work as a team too, because nothing is more frustrating than calling up a company to report a problem and being passed from person to person to person and having to explain the problem to each and every one of them because none of them can actually bother to talk to each other to sort out the mix-up. Instead, they blame a different department and transfer me around endlessly, because of course it couldn't possibly be THEIR department's fault that I have a problem. That would be failure. I think the world would be a better place if more people were willing to try even at the risk of failure.

I blame baby books for this, by the way. I don't have kids of my own, but I've gotten to observe new parents for over a decade, and the phrase I cringe at most is "[s]he's talking/walking/picking her nose/whatever way ahead of schedule" (or its sibling, "way behind schedule, and I'm worried that [s]he's not developing properly"). It's not a hard-and-fast schedule, it's an AVERAGE age. That means that half of the children in the world will walk/talk/whatever before the date listed, and half will not. That's what average means*. But because the parents are socialized to compete, they flip out when their kid falls in the half that doesn't do that particular thing quite as fast. And because failure is a Big Deal but succeeding is just What's Expected, they don't see the part where their kid is slower at one thing because they're faster at another. The parents feel they've failed in raising their kid, and they push that sense of failure onto the kid. The kid starts out life being told that they've already failed, when they've barely gotten a chance to try.

* Which is different from what "mean" means. But that's a whole different rant.

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January 2015

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