Not News: Students Promoted Despite Stupidity
Another article explaining why the guy at McDonald's can't make change and why people think Paris Hilton is interesting -- schools continue to promote students who have the intellectual capacity of a somewhat addled turnip, but without the chance of being made into a possibly tasty soup. (Well, for some people, I hate turnips, but the point remains...)
If he had been held back and made to retake all his courses with lowerclassmen, he said, "I would have felt bad
Yes, and we can't hurt the feelings of our precious little snowflakes, even if they themselves acknowledge it would make them work harder.
Self esteem is consequence of success, not a cause of it, people!
This is not, contrary to the article, a difficult problem. The answer is dirt simple. Eliminate grades -- not in the sense of 'you got an A', but in the sense of 'you're a third grader'. Assign progressively harder work, from introductory facts to full mastery, as fast as the student can absorb and assimilate it. When the student has reached mastery in all subjects, he graduates. If this happens when he's ten, he has eight glorious years of goofing off before he has to earn a living -- though I suspect he'll do more in those eight years than most of us manage in a lifetime. If it doesn't happen by the time he's eighteen, well, I'm pretty sure there will be some meatgrinder of a war out there he can be a useful part of.
And for Ghu's sake, let's drop all this nonsense about feelings. Your boss isn't going to care if you feel sad when he tells you that you're an incompetent jackass, so let's not start kids off thinking that's how the world works. The later in life they learn that, no, they aren't precious snowflakes, the harder it is for them and the more likely they are to self-destruct in a spectacular fashion. You do not learn to swim by thinking about how scared you are of water; you learn to swim by getting kicked into the deep end and managing to not drown.
(And here's another example of what you get when 'social promotion' rules the day...)
