WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION

Heard a radio discussion the other day about this: Schools in Nashville are now refusing to release their honor rolls or post any outstanding schoolwork:

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A-students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways — all at the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, Nashville school system lawyers warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

Obviously, anybody who makes the honor roll would be likely to give permission for their information to be released. So the gist of the complaint is the old “exception proves the rule” argument. Since the honor roll recognizes academic achievement, it’s reasonable to infer that anyone whose name is not on the honor roll didn’t achieve at a noteworthy level. And that’s an awful thing to have to face about yourself.

But I have intimate knowledge with this matter. As a bored, underchallenged high-school student, I routinely got grades a lot lower than I should have, because I couldn’t see the meaning or purpose behind the busywork I had to do. The fact that I only made the honor roll once in four years of high school didn’t bother me at all. I knew I was smart; I didn’t need a report card to remind me, and getting my name in the local newspaper meant exactly nothing.

Honor rolls are fine, no matter what thin-skinned parents who can’t abide the possibility of their children being average say. But there are better ways to motivate underachieving students. I’d suggest, oh, I don’t know, talking to them, trying to discern their areas of interest, finding ways to give them the challenges they need, maybe even (gasp) finding ways to recognize what they do well, even if it doesn’t fall into the sphere of traditional academics.

As you may have discerned, I didn’t get any of that. All I got was moral approbation and about a million “not working to potential” comments on my report cards. Not one teacher ever bothered to find out why I wasn’t working to potential; it was just too easy to slap the “underachiever” label on me and write me off.

I became a success in spite of myself. Mediocre grades didn’t stop me from doing well on standardized tests. And when I got to college, I quickly found that I excelled in courses where my grade was based on one or two papers or exams instead of an endless stream of “justify your existence” assignments. I wound up graduating magna cum laude and I got my first year of grad school totally paid for.

Sure, there’s some lightening up that needs to be done in this case of political correctness run amok. But it’s not what you think. The problem with honor rolls isn’t that some people get their names on them and some don’t. The problem is that the real world doesn’t have an honor roll, so it’s better to learn how to motivate yourself instead of counting on a “yay! hooray!” for every little achievement you make. Making the honor roll is certanly nothing to be ashamed of, but as a predictor of success later in life, it’s about on a par with your favorite pizza topping.

But I’d still say the Canadian bacon-and-pineapple folks are pretty smart.

(Submitted for today’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM.)