Awarding Mediocrity

For the last few years, watching our community and our country award failure and mediocrity. We award millions and billions to banks and companies who have failed and their employees, with no consequences for failure.

We award children for most improved, best attendance, compliance with teachers and staff, and so on but not really awarding and recognizing real academic achievement. We reward children who are gifted in sports, or the arts, but what about the sciences? Science is our future, it is our way out of global warming, It is our way out of pandemics, energy shortages, real invention and innovation will all be science-based. Instead, we question science we question evolution, we refuse to teach our children real history and instead teach some watered down version of it. I see my son in high school doing projects and posters that are more at the elementary school level.

I see students who can't think their way out of a paper box disrupt classes and destroy the learning experience for those who want to learn, with no consequences.

I see students who truly achieve on standardized testing not get recognition or awards, even when it will make their school district look good, because, I am told, it might hurt the feelings of the other children. Well, maybe they will then have the incentive to work harder, to try more, to excel at something.

For eight years we had a president who was mediocre, who had no intellectual curiosity, who didn't want to learn about the Middle East and the countries we were invading. I always remember the phrase, Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Isn't that the truth. Anyone who knows the history of the Middle East would know we were doomed to failure, just like Vietnam. And again, we have learned nothing assured that again no one will accept responsibility for the disaster and enormous waste of human lives and money that should be used to build our own country, to pay for health care, to pay for bridges and roads, and green innovation, research that will drive us through the next century of innovation and change. And instead, we rewarded mediocrity, and did nothing, achieved nothing.

Kevin Phillips (a Republican economist) is entirely right when he discussed in his book American Theocracy the global decline of imperialist countries historically, including the Dutch, the Romans and the British and how the three signs of the declining societies, a change in the energy driving the society and a failure to adjust to that change (here oil), a rise in religion and religious implications in the political realm (see the religious right's control over the Republican party and how everyone panders), soaring debt and decline in manufacturing (thanks to free-market believers who have sold our manufacturer down the river and over the ocean) and we are on our way out as a world power.

Our educational system is failure. Our health care system is failing. We are in deep trouble with no one willing to take responsibility and fix the problems because it is too politically difficult and assumes we as a people are too stupid and shallow to get it. Maybe we are, because we have rewarded mediocrity and consumerism for too long.

Let's have national awards for genius, for achievement, and get on it now. Forget no child left behind, how about free college for those who achieve? Isn't that what other societies in Europe do who are beginning to outpace us? China is all about science and engineering and they will outstrip us within 50 years, It is inevitable. Forget Spanish, we all better be learning Mandarin and Cantonese.