I just finished reading two online articles about decisions that were made by educational administrators in regards to their school or school systems. I am not going into where they are because that is really irrelevant to my point. It just seems to me that our public educational system for primary and secondary education is moving in the wrong direction. It appears that they are moving toward the acceptance of mediocrity when it comes to educating our children. I addressed some of this in “A Nation in Crisis” a couple of weeks ago. What I saw in the articles I read today continues to demonstrate this same attitude by our educators. I believe that these decisions also serve to demotivate the student body as a whole.

The first article I read dealt with “Honors Night”, a time that those students that have applied themselves and exceeded in doing so are recognized for this achievement. The principal of the schools has decided not to have Honors Night anymore. The reason stated is that it “can be devastating to a child whom has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but whom, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade-point average”. This principal went on to say he made the change “because academic success can be influenced by the amount of support a student receives at home and not all students receive the same level of emotional and academic support”. Maybe these educators should understand that by recognizing these high achievers as they should that they will not only continue to motivate them, but will motivate others to follow in their steps. Maybe they should look at people like Doctor Ben Carson or Howard Schultz. They both started from humble beginnings yet they were able to ultimately reach their goals in life. They applied themselves to the task at hand. They used their talents, mental or physical, to the best of their ability. They were recognized for these things and became more motivated. They succeeded and others have too. There are a multitude of stories like theirs.

After some contemplation I came to the conclusion that what was being suggested was simply a way to marginalize success instead of maximizing it. Following this path fails to recognize students, some of which may not have had all that much “emotional and academic support”, for what they were able to accomplish. Let me try to draw a correlation using sports instead of academics. What would happen if the Olympics decided to not give out any medals? What if they simply told the athletes to come to the Olympics and do their best? What if when the event was over it was simply over? No one stood on a podium; no one got a medal. How many records do you think we would see? Another view might be that if you attend the Olympics you automatically get a gold medal, doesn’t matter if your performance is the best, mediocre or a complete failure. I know of some youth sporting events that are doing this today. Everybody wins. Where is the motivation in doing your best? What is the driving force that will make a person do their best?

As for the devastation I am going to tell on myself. When I was in high school I failed a class. It was not the fault of the school, the teacher or my parents, it was my fault. It was not my favorite subject so I simply did not apply myself. I figured that I would just try to scrape by and get a “D”. Well sometimes when you plan to just scrape by you are walking a tight rope. I discovered that when I got an “F” in the class. I missed my D by about .2 points, but I missed it. So I had to do two things, the first was to tell my parents, which was the biggest deal; needless to say they were not happy with my performance. The second was to take the class over in summer school. I made an “A” in summer school because I was more motivated. It was not devastating. Neither was seeing my classmates out playing and the like while I was leaving to go to summer school. Neither was the bit of ribbing that I took over it. Had I done my best and still failed it would have been the same thing. All of us were looking at the same bar; we all had an equal chance to reach it. I had no problem with those that did better than I did, those that were recognized for their scholastic achievements. After my failure I did well in all of my classes, getting consistently higher grades. My failure was a wake-up call. It was a positive motivator for me and continues to be one today.

The second article dealt with a school district banning students handing out party invitations. The rationale behind this educator’s decision is the “someone might get their feelings hurt”. Getting ones feelings hurt is just part of growing up. It happens and you learn from it. It happened to everyone that I knew growing up. Something happened or someone said something and someone got their feeling hurt and that was that. Maybe as a result of the action you decided that you didn’t like that person anymore or that you would not play with them anymore. Maybe you both decided to fight it out. In the end it was over, you were still friends or you were not. Either way we all just moved on. It appears that instead of teaching students reading, writing, math and science that our educational system is also trying to shelter them for the interpersonal skills and lessons to be learned as a child, lessons and skills that will help carry them through the real word as an adult.

In looking at this from another perspective an article appearing in the New York Times a few years ago stated that “the United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree.” In this article it was stated that part of this problem rest with the colleges, but much of it also rest with the secondary schools not preparing the students. I believe that schools not setting the bar high enough and not recognizing academic achievements are part of the problem. I also believe that the failure to allow students to have feelings, both good and bad exacerbates the issues. The educational process should allow a student to grow in all areas of their lives. These include mentally, spiritually, personally and physically. I also believe that no student is a failure who applies themselves and does their very best.

As much as this may come as a surprise to some people the real world does not shelter you from anything. Every day there are winners and losers. Everyone cannot play football or baseball. Everyone cannot play music or sing. Everyone cannot be the CEO of a company or run their own business. However, everyone can be successful, because success should be measured on a personal level against what you want to do. It does not matter if you are a ditch digger or a president. Set goals and apply yourself in reaching them. Be the best at what you do. Doing so will allow you to reach your goals and be successful at what you want to do.

Hope you have a SUPER Day!! Life is a journey, may God bless you each step of the way!!

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I was drinking my second cup of coffee this morning and reading some of my friends post on Facebook when I had an epiphany about why this country is in such disarray. I believe that we have several crisis in this country that if solved would fix all of the issues that we are seeing, from trust in our leaders to unemployment, welfare, deficit spending and tax revenue. First let me state that I do believe that we need a smaller government. I also believe that we cannot simply continue to “tax the rich” to solve our spending problem. Our politicians need to do their job and get control of these things, however these are not the true crisis that I believe this great nation is facing.

I think this crisis is threefold. The first issue is faith. We have lost our direction when it comes to God. Our country was founded on faith and faith still shows itself at times. However, because of so many individuals always trying to be politically correct we have lost the foundation of our country. We see “In God we Trust” everyday, yet we don’t stand up for it. We let those that govern us do things that many of us don’t support, things that are against our values and beliefs. Yet we keep voting them back in office knowing full well that they will not change in their actions or attitudes. In addition we have churches and TV evangilist today that work harder at raising money than they do at raising the awareness of the Bible and God. They fail to teach us how faith is not only good for the individual but for our country. Our founding fathers seemed to understand this, but over time it seems we have moved away from it. Some of these “churches” have simply become money machines. They are in the business of making money, not of teaching faith. Over the years we have seen a few of them fail, which I feel was a warning to the others to get thier act together, but many have not. I don’t care about what religion you are, I am simply taking about a faith in God. I believe faith is simple and individual when it comes to God, not complex as some would have us believe. I also believe that it is important for this country. Our religious organizations need to get back to basics and teach about faith in God and what it can do for us and our country.

Secondly, I see issues with our educational system. We are failing our children in every area of education. In world rankings for reading we are 33rd, for math 27th and for science 22nd. This is shameful. Now, this is just me, but I sometimes feel that our emphasis when it comes to our children is somewhat misguided. It seems that in many cases there is more emphasis on sports than on education. In regards to this, I see parents racing to get from work to home so they can take their kids to little league, soccer, football or basketball practice. Don’t get me wrong, I see nothing wrong with kids participating in sports. However, I sometimes wonder if these parents would make the same effort to get them to an evening computer, math or science class or to the library? I really don’t believe that all of them would and I find that sad. Dispite my feelings about this, this is only a small part of what I see as the probelm.

I believe that our entire educational process is broken. We continue to dumb things down, we lower requirements for grades and advancement. We move students from grade to grade because we don’t want them to feel like failures. In doing this we make the student face a harder class without the proper preparation thus perpetuating a bad situation. We continue to do this until they graduate at which point they are ill prepared tp take their place in the world.

I believe that we, the parents and the family, hold a great deal of the responsibility for this issue. We fail in several different ways. Much of the time we fail to encourge and praise students success like we should. We fail to motivate students and motivation is an important part of the educational process. Look at some of the people that are now successful that started from humble beginnings. In most cases they were motivated by someone, many times it was a parent. In others it was a teacher, which brings me to what I believe today is a another shortcoming related to the educational process, that being the support of teachers and the school systems. I have friends that are teachers and from listening to them they feel that many times they do not have parental support. Parents with children in school need to become involved. They need to do th right things to support their student, the student body and the teachers. Help them all be successful. This needs to happen on the local level, the county or city that you live in. I know that whenever our family was asked to relocate that the school system was a very important part of where we chose to live. Education cannot be managed by the federal government. It cannot be improved by them. The only way it will improve is if parents and others interested in it get involved at the local level and “force” the issue. The US spends more money per student than any other country and yet we get poorer results. This needs to be changed and when it is the next issue that I see will loom even larger.

That issues is JOBS. As much as I dislike saying this, this is another area where the federal government cannot help. We do not need more government jobs, we need less and those that remain need to be done efficiently. What we do need from the government is less regulation. We also need more entrepreneurial spirit and people willing to support that spirit. People and businesses need to be able to create and add jobs without having to deal with books of rules and needless regulations. Just as an example in 1998 the Code of Federal Regulations contained 134,723 pages in 201 volumes (source usgovinfo.about.com). Think about what has been added in the 14 years since then. I have no doubt that we need some regulations, but not everything needs to be requlated, especially at the federal level.

We need to allow people to start new businesses or to grow thier current business. Big or small it does not matter. We need to work to bring manufacturing back to the US and the jobs that go along with it. Our major corporations need to bring the jobs back here, both the manufacturing and the support jobs. It is hard to count the number of US based companies that have moved their support organizations to other countries bacause of cheaper labor and less requlated environments. It is also hard to count the number of people that I have talked to that complain about the support service they get from these companies. The problem with this is they continue to support them with their dollars by buying their products. Most of you can name at least 3 or 4 that you know. This will only be fixed if we force the issue by looking for companies that support our values and are working to move things in the direction that we want them to move. Our money talks and if we let it we can make a change for the better in the jobs we have available.

As we fix the educational issue we have to fix the jobs issue. If we provide a quality education for all of our children then it is also our responsibility to make sure that they have a job when they get out of school. If we fail to do that then we have accomplished little. To quote Gene Kranz “Failure is not an option”. If we fail to fix these things we will simply continue down the path of a declining nation. A welfare state with no way out. Taxes will go up as will the deficit. We will be in a downward spiral to become a failed nation.

However, if all of us, everyone concerned about these things work to fix them we will regain our place in the world. Without doubt, we can and must fix them. We need to get back to being a faith based nation, “One Nation Under God”. Obviously, our success from an educational perspective would give as a better prepared and motivated workforce and upon fixing the jobs side more opportunities for those individuals. This in turn would reduce the need for welfare type programs and increase the tax base. This becomes a win for everyone. All that is left now if for each of us to get started on this. “We the prople” can prevail, we just have to have faith and work at it.

Hope you have a SUPER Day!! Life is a journey, may God bless you each step of the way!!

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