Have you noticed how popular it is these days to not be successful? I don’t mean “not successful” to mean that people are praising homeless people for not being able to provide for themselves, but in general, people seem to be happier when they aren’t successful.Just think about it. For those of you who gamble, say you go to the craps table, and put down $100. After a little while, you may be up $50 or so, and you’re having a good time. You should be happy with your success and walk away, but you don’t. You keep playing until you start losing. Finally a little while later, you’re putting your last $10 chip on the table just to see the shooter crap out. You may walk away disappointed but you still feel like you had a good time. But think about it. Anytime you have the opportunity to walk away with more money than you came with, and wind up walking away with nothing, it is not a good time.
Maybe that doesn’t really prove my point that well. Instead, think about when you were in elementary school, and the consequences of not passing a grade. If you are an older American, if you didn’t pass a grade, you wound up taking that grade over the next year. That’s not true anymore. Granted, in some cases kids who learned absolutely nothing may still stay back, but for the most part kids who are on the borderline will usually get bumped up a grade. In reality, all this does to the kid, is tells them “hey, you may not have learned much, but that’s OK. We won’t make you feel bad about your failing grades by holding you back a year.” And what happens to the kids who excel? Well, if you praise their success, you may make the less intelligent kids feel bad about themselves.
Even the smart kids know less than kids their age about 100 years ago. In Joseph Farah’s book Taking America Back, he put an 1895 eighth-grade final exam from a school in Salina, Kansas. The point he was trying to make, by putting in the exam, was that not only couldn’t today’s eighth-graders pass that exam, most high school and college graduates couldn’t either. And he’s right. I’m a reasonably intelligent person, with a B.S. degree in Accounting, and I would probably have a difficult time passing the exam. Even the math section! Now that’s not to say that I’m a failure, or that I don’t try, but over the years, our schools have made the passing requirements a joke.
I think all of this leads people to feel dependent on others to do things for them, rather than feel a reliance on themselves to succeed. Like the kid who relies on his teachers to pass him or her into the next grade, rather than on his or her own skills, many people make excuses for themselves so that they can rely on others or the government to do things for them.
The problem is only going to get worse. People these days give up on themselves far too easily. Most times they aren’t willing to put in any extra effort (or any effort at all) to strive for success, because they know that they will be allowed to float by with minimal effort. They see people around them who are leeches to the state, and figure if they can do it, why can’t I?
Public schools are pumping out these drones by the millions, and it has to stop. According to Farah “the most important step we can take… [is to] take responsibility for educating your kids; don’t leave it to the state.”
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