Lift Up Your Hearts!

Equality means everyone gets to run the race. It does not mean everyone comes in first.

John C. Wright and I may not agree on Prince Caspian, but we saw the same message in The Incredibles: the loss of excellence, enthusiasm, and initiative that results when we foolishly favor equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

The inspiration for Wright's post was a soccer trophy won by his five-year-old son.  Well, "won" is stretching quite a bit, and that's Wright's point.  Everyone on the team received the same trophy, just for showing up.  Or even not showing up; the coach also wanted to give a trophy to Wright's other son, who had quit the team mid-season!

One can argue that five-year-olds should not be competing for trophies.  One can even argue, à la Alfie Kohn, that getting trophies will actually decrease the children's enjoyment of the game.  But if you're going to have a competition, make it a contest, not a sham.  Don't give out hunks of plastic or cheap metal that waste resources, take up space, gather dust, and have no correlation whatsoever with accomplishment.  I like to think that the child who has done well does not need an award to tell him so, and the child who has done poorly will not be fooled by the award into thinking he has done well; unfortunately, my college professor friends won't let me keep that illusion, since they've had plenty of experience with students who have been given (not earned) A's all through high school and nearly break down when they discover they're not the academic whizzes they thought they were.  If their parents, teachers, and coaches had not, in effect, lied to them for years, they might have learned to buckle down and work and actually become highly capable students.

Wright found the problem on the soccer field; I've seen it time and time again in the educational system, from the principal who out-and-out told me that the purpose of kindergarten was to get everyone on the same level, to the elementary school "contests" that were rigged so that every student won at least once, to similarly-rigged "Teacher of the Year" awards, to the school board that took a monetary award away from the school that earned it and gave it to a poorly-achieving school.  No matter what a school district may say in principle, "making everyone great" means holding down those who are capable of exceling more often than it means raising those who are struggling.

None, least of all the winners, likes a situation in which the same few people win all the awards again and again.  Dash would soon lose interest in racing, and possibly in running itself, if he blew away the competition every single time.  But a coach or a teacher, for example, who wants to reward every student can, with a little creativity, devise competitions where the outcome is by no means certain, and yet in which the winner knows he has truly earned his victory.  (John Holt did this with some of his classes, but I've forgotten in which of his books he discusses it.)

Muscles, be they physical, mental, or spiritual, grow with use, and atrophy if left unchallenged.  Wright is right to be worried about his sons.  Fortunately, awareness of the problem is half the solution.

For two quite different yet effective views of the consequences of "anti-elitist" policies, see Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron and C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Proposes a Toast.