Trophy for Every Kid
I have heard how all kids these days get awards at almost any event the school organizes. I disapprove. Strongly. Very strongly. How is it OK to tell every kid that they are just as good as everyone else? At anything they try? This seems to be a weird practice we have imported from the West of late (I don’t remember anyone awarding awards to everyone when I was a kid). And so I read with interest Molly Knefel’s article titled Trophy Season . She would explain the West’s justification for this practice. Or so I hoped. She has 2 reasons: 1) She says that branding a kid a “winner” or a “loser” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; and so we should avoid those terms by awarding everyone. But that makes no sense at all. A kid doesn’t do better because he is called a winner . Rather, he is called a winner because he did better than the rest . How insane does one have to be to not get that? 2) The other reason is only slightly...