Proud Parent of an Accelerated Reader

That's what I saw on a bumper sticker on the back of a car today. “Proud Parent of an Accelerated Reader.” I actually had to think about that for a second, because at first those words didn't seem to have any meaning. Obviously in this context, “accelerated” means at a level above some sort of national average, but then that's not the word that confused me. It was the word “proud.” I just don't see how that would be a matter of pride.

Now, I'm all for reading, I think reading is kick ass. You're reading right now, and for that, I love you. Seriously, reading is totally great, and being good at reading is important. But is it really something to be proud of? It seems to me that as a kid I was only peripherally aware of so-called reading levels. I guess people made kind of a big deal out of it, but I just really didn't care. I never knew what level I read at, because I was more concerned with what I was reading.

After all, who cares how well a child can read if he goes on to read is fucking terrible? What if that little fucker goes on to read Twilight? Or anything by Dan Brown? Are you still going to be proud of that little dipshit? Your skill at reading is completely meaningless unless you can read something fucking decent.

It's all part of a very disturbing and disgusting trend developing in places of learning. Primary education has always been and will always be an utter waste of time, but this goes to something deeper. It seems the further we go, the more our schools want to do their best to protect children from accidentally learning something. The objective becomes not to actually learn, but to be able to pretend well enough to fake it. Lessons are not an experience, but an outline for what will be on the test. SAT training consists mostly of pattern recognition, even going so far as to identify what is statistically the most likely response should the student be completely stumped and need to outright guess. All of this to then find out that all these skills you've developed for beating the system you will never get a chance to use again. It's a bit like training to play basketball by memorizing the specifications of the court.

Not to mention how these supposed halls of knowledge consistently reward ignorance. You have grades where you either get a check, a check plus, or a check minus, and they're all pretty much the same thing. You put in some amount of effort, and no matter how small, it will be acknowledged. You have participation trophies, where everyone involved is a winner. You have student of the month awards that everybody has to win at least once. I remember they had this policy when I was in fifth grade, and because I was so rebellious against their bullshit, they almost didn't even give me one. Almost. The bastards didn't even have the balls to withhold their own meaningless award from me. And believe me, I made life hell for the administrators of that school, though that is a story for a different time.

And then we come to tonight, when I almost stormed out of my research methods class at ITT. The teacher was yelling at us because we hadn't managed to correctly interpret the cryptic syntax of his crazy description on the syllabus. We had each done the assignment to the best of the ability using common sense, but because it was missing one insignificant formatting element, he had a fucking conniption. So I started yelling back, that he didn't have a right to talk to us, a room full of adults who were in his class of our own agency, like we were naughty children. I would have walked out too, except that then he kind of relented, and tried to defuse the situation with a joke, and though it didn't really satisfy my complaint it made it kind of awkward for me to leave.

Then while driving home and still kind of seething about it, I saw that stupid fucking bumper sticker, and it seemed to sort of encapsulate everything. Because even though I hate that class and everything it stands for, I am still acing it effortlessly. I suppose when you set the bar so low that a one-legged dog could roll right over it, you feel justified in treating your students like children. I come from the first generation to witness the society-destroying horror of the participation trophy, but at least back then it was confined to the education system. Now it's starting to seep through into the real world, and that's scary. Are we setting ourselves up for a world where it doesn't matter whether or not you try, as long as you put in the time? I suppose you can argue that for most corporate workers, we're already there.

Damn it, trying matters! Don't you see that without doing our best, we're just going to have to settle for mediocre in every aspect of our lives? We're training an entire generation to just give up on what they believe in!

Oh, whatever. I don't care anymore.