Everyone Gets A Trophy
May 20, 2014 Commentary
The concept that everyone gets a trophy is designed to keep people (particularly children) from having low self esteem. It would be just too unfair for the last place team to have to watch the first place team get a well deserved and earned honor so everyone gets one.
This kind of thinking is what causes children to grow into adults who think they deserve things without having to actually work to achieve them. This kind of thinking is what gives us people like Obama and his progressive, redistributionist ideas. You see, everyone deserves to have the same amount of stuff even if they did not work hard (or at all) to get it.
When we give everyone a trophy we teach them that all they have to do is show up. They become adults and think that their first job should pay them six figures and they should have the corner office. Once they find out the real world is not about everyone getting trophies they are deflated and can’t understand why they did not get what they deserve.
You deserve what you work for. If you work hard you deserve to buy whatever phone you want. When you get a trophy for showing up you expect others to give you a phone (or health care, or food stamps, etc).
Now this is playing out at a school where Honors Night was cancelled because it is too exclusive. Archie R. Cole Middle School thinks that being the best and then honoring those who are best is exclusive.
Well, it is. Not everyone gets the highest grade point average, is the best singer or musician and not everyone is a valedictorian. These people are exclusive because they took the time to excel at something. An honor by its very nature is exclusive.
[note]Imagine if every football team got a Superbowl trophy and every player on those teams got a Superbowl ring. Imagine if all teams in baseball got a World Series trophy and all the players got rings. We wouldn’t want the ones who did not win to feel bad or anything. Then again, there would be no desire to get better and soon those entities would die off.[/note]
The school will combine the honors event with a team based ceremony:
By having the recognition ceremonies during team-based ceremonies, it will “afford us the opportunity to celebrate the individual and collective success of all students and their effort, progress and excellence.”
What this school is actually saying is that they will dilute the honors with another event so that everyone feels special. They are giving everyone a trophy.
Instead of downplaying the honors achievements the school should praise these students as models for the others to emulate. If those who did not receive honors see the praise as a goal and see that it can be done they might actually aspire to achieve.
Competition is part of human nature and it is what drives us to do better. When everyone gets a trophy the life is sucked out of people and they lose the desire to compete to get better and to be better. They go along to get along.
Giving a trophy to everyone gives us a society full of Occupy Wall Street morons who think they deserve everything for doing nothing.
It also gave us a president who feels entitled and a society more than willing to emulate that sense of entitlement.
Source:
Weasel Zippers
UPDATE: School has reinstated the honors event. Probably did not like being ridiculed by the nation…
Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Tags: entitlement, exclusive, honors, trophies