Teaching Children To Achieve Mediocrity

The most depraved type of human being is the man
without a purpose.

- Ayn Rand

I get up every morning and embrace hope. Honestly I do. I wake up, slowly I admit, but filled with the hope that this new day, I will not stumble over more stupidity beyond government stupidity to which I am pretty much resigned.

I woke up this morning with cautious optimism. I say cautious because I knew Occupy would be on the loose today and who knows what stupidity they’re capable of implementing.

My caution was well placed and my hope was dashed on the rocks of idiocy. No….it wasn’t Occupy, as hard as that is to believe. In fact, it wasn’t even government. It was amateur soccer.

The organizers of children’s soccer in my city are implementing a number of changes to the game in order to make it more ‘inclusive’ and less competitive.

Less competitive? Soccer is a game; it’s supposed to be competitive.

Here are the changes.

1. There will be no goal tenders in order to make it easier for the less skilled player to perhaps have an opportunity to score.

2. Games will be held but score will not be kept to prevent any sense of winning and losing which might hurt the feelings of those on the losing team.

3. The word tournaments will not be used. It will be replaced by the word festival which has a more celebratory, inclusive feel to it and which removes any sense of soccer being a competition of skills.

4. Teams with visible minority players will be expected to ensure that the percentage of goals scored will match the percentage of racial diversity on the team although if they are not tracking goals, I’m unsure how they expect to track this.

5. All teams will receive a trophy at each festival.

There are more changes but you get the picture. These changes come on the heels of their previous ruling that any team which won the game by more than five goals (while they were still keeping score) actually was declared to have lost the game by default. I can’t even begin to explain to you, let alone myself, how people think up stupidity like this.

It isn’t a few wingnuts behind this either. The Chair for Sport Research at Laurentian University is extolling this approach as a better way to teach children and even Sport Canada has come down in favour of making soccer less competitive for players under eight.

It's like deciding that children can be taught how to play chess but they will not be permitted to achieve checkmate. All games will be mandated to end in stalemate. Won't that make chess a much more satisfying game for everyone! I imagine that they will also mandate that both black and white pieces must be removed in equal numbers to maintain proper racial diversity on the board.

Life is nothing, if not competitive. All life competes. All species compete. Surely we have a duty and a responsibility to teach our children how to deal with competition?

Competition is one of the primary drivers that motivate us to strive to achieve. What’s the point in trying if you don’t have to worry about the end result? If everything is boiled down to the lowest common denominator then mediocrity becomes the new standard.

Think about it.

Instead of teaching children how to win gracefully and how to lose with dignity, instead of teaching children the value of working hard to develop skills that will reward them, we are lowering expectations. We are teaching our children that the best and brightest of us, the people who work hardest, strive for the stars don’t deserve any more than those who are average or can't be bothered trying.

It is very much behind the attitude so prevalent today where the successful are being attacked for being....well....successful.

We used to teach our children important things like manners, respect for others, integrity and the value of hard work. We used to teach them self-reliance and how to learn from defeat and to try again.

Now we are preparing our children to have the same entitlement attitude that has become the new normal for too many in our societies.

We are teaching our children that there is no value in hard work, no reward in learning and practicing to be better. We are teaching them to be like too many of us who look for ways to force the achievers to drop down to our level so that we don’t have to strive to reach up to theirs.

We are allowing the stupid thinking of the politically correct and the mediocre to rob our children of their full potential,  their desire and the opportunity to strive to be the very best that they can be.

I hate to admit it because I always found her a little too extreme for my taste but Ayn Rand was right. We are allowing mediocrity to take control and become the new standard by which we will live. I wonder how long it will be before the best of us, the most successful, the most talented and the most creative simply give us the finger and move somewhere else.

I also wonder how mediocrity will serve us then. Where is John Galt when you need him most?

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