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by somenameforme 299 days ago
I find this point of view somewhat difficult to support. It was the whole motivation behind the cultural shift towards 'everybody's a winner' - participation trophies, expanding honor roll with 'merit roll', character awards, personal achievement awards, and so on. But far from driving excellence across the rather vast number of fields where it was trialed, it only seems to correlate with the period of overall decline in educational performance.

And from a practical point of view, let's consider this. The mindset one is indulging with this is that it's okay to quit if something is hard. But how does indulging that mindset, change it? What happens when the easy successes end and things not only get hard, but very hard? Are you not simply creating false expectations?

1 comments

People do quit when it's hard so instead of overriding the very human nature why not work with it?

We all saw the "draw the owl" picture. Step 1 is easy step 2 is easy but then the rest appears impossible. Why not make a series of small, doable steps that lead to the result? The "hardness" of many things is not exponential, it's linear or even less dramatic.