RULE 9

Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t.

In some schools, failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to real life, which still rewards excellence and delivers a sharp poke in the eye to failure.

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Despite the wishful thinking of the therapists, counselors, and moon-rock peddlers, life does involves competition, with winners and losers. Some people get hired. Some don’t. Some get promoted. Some don’t. Some pass the bar exam. Some don’t. Some get admitted to the college of their first choice. Some don’t.

There’s an Alice in Wonderland quality to much of public education these days: “Everyone wins, and all must have prizes!” Or at least trophies of participation. In the movie Meet the Fockers, the “Wall of Gaylord” celebrates one character’s lifetime achievements in mediocrity, prompting the character played by Robert De Niro to muse, “I didn’t know they made ninth-place ribbons.”

Of course they do. America’s closets are stuffed with meaningless trophies, ribbons, and plaques signifying the earnest desire that everyone win and all have prizes. Everyone trying out for the team makes it; every student is gifted and talented.

There is, however, a catch: If everyone is gifted and talented, that’s another way of saying that no one is gifted or talented. In practice, this means that if everyone can’t be on the honor roll, the honor roll is dropped; class rankings are scrapped because no one wants to feel bad; grades are inflated so that everyone can be a straight-A student. “Everyone is special, Dash,” says the mom in the movie The Incredibles. “Which is another way of saying no one is,” Dash mutters.

Indeed, Charles Willie, a professor of education at Harvard, declares that the goal of education should not be “excellence,” because that is a matter of personal choice and requires sacrifice. Instead, schools should be concerned with “adequacy,”54

This aversion to competition is hammered into the mushy skulls of trainee teachers from the moment they enter the swamps of despond and mediocrity that are ed school. A survey by Public Agenda found a dramatic disconnect between the public’s expectations of what schools should teach and the beliefs of professors of education—the teachers of teachers. Nearly two-thirds of the ed professors said they thought schools should avoid competition for rewards such as honor rolls, and nearly half supported giving students in team projects a group grade rather than an individual grade.55 (This is called “collaborative learning,” and is otherwise known as “letting the smart kid do all the work.”)

Sometimes critics dress up the green toad of jealousy as high principle, and resentment as a passion for “fairness.” One educational critic of honor rolls, Mark Mlawer, complained, “Both the educational practice of maintaining an honor roll and the parental practice of public proclamations of this status create and reinforce a certain species of unfairness, one which necessarily causes resentment.” Thus, the bumper stickers: MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT.56

But in the great prestige hierarchy of youth, the honor roll is a relatively minor counterbalance to the genuine honors handed out by nature and by peers—a good jump shot, a body like Lindsay Lohan’s, getting elected prom queen, or the ability to beat all the levels of Halo2 in a weekend.

Try as they might, the legions of therapists, social workers, and educationists can’t take these advantages away, so they focus instead on the easiest of all: the handful of students who have the ability and have worked hard enough to excel in their schoolwork. When the honor rolls are dropped, those victories disappear. The burly guys will still get the girls and the fast cars.

Even if the honor student is popular among his peers, the academic honor is still distinctive precisely because it is an adult honor that provides the first tangible reward for the values and qualities students will need as grown-ups. Honor rolls say that success in learning math or history, or in developing a new killer-app, is worthy of admiration—a message that students are less likely to receive if left to their peers alone.

But the genuine stupidity in all of this is that at some point you will have to learn how to lose. Because if you don’t learn how to fail, life is going to be a very big, very nasty surprise.

Vince Lombardi once said, “The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.” The edu-nannies believe that it’s more important that you fall on something soft and squishy and feel OK about it.

Adults have an advantage here over children because most of them have had the experience of losing and know it is not the end of the world. They know that few defeats are permanent. That’s why major-league baseball players handle losses so well, at least in the regular season. There is always tomorrow. Children, whose present seems to fill the entire sky, often don’t see that.

On a recent Reality TV show, a young boy whose invention was not accepted by the panel of judges wailed into the camera, “They took away my dream.” One of the judges patiently explained to the boy that he was going to be a success, but that he needed to realize that there would be setbacks, that they were part of the process of growing up.

But abolishing the distinction between winning and losing not only takes the sting out of defeat, it also eliminates the incentives for and the joy of winning.

Defeat doesn’t necessarily crush the spirit: sometimes it inspires. Abraham Lincoln was a notorious loser until he was elected president; the magnitude of the World Series win by the Red Sox is understandable only in the context of their years of futility—a fact that Chicago Cubs fans might keep in mind.

In the 1993 movie Rudy, the lead character is Daniel E. “Rudy” Ruettiger, an undersized young man of middling ability, but incredible drive, who sets his sights on making the Notre Dame college football team. Unfortunately for Rudy, his grades aren’t good enough to even get him into the university. He enrolls in a community college, where he works to get his grades up, only to meet one setback and frustration after another. But he never gives up. Eventually he is allowed to suit up—and in the movie’s climactic scene he is put into the game.

If Notre Dame had had a no-cut policy, if everybody, no matter how untalented, unmotivated, or indifferent, made the squad, Rudy’s perseverance and ultimate triumph would have been meaningless.

Some people get this. The Boston Globe reports that the practice of giving prizes to everyone has gotten to be so widespread that some schools and sports leagues have actually begun to cut back on the number of trophies. Eventually, someone figured out that if everybody was a winner, nobody really was. “The trophies,” explained psychology professor Roy Baumeister, “should go to the winners. Self-esteem does not lead to success in life. Self-discipline and self-control do.… [Emphasis added]”57