Sixteen-year-old Kaytie Christopherson, a high school student from Casper, Wyoming, received a $28,000 Chevy Colorado from her school district. According to a newspaper article in the Tyler Morning Telegraph five other public school districts throughout the country awarded vehicles to students for exceptional behavior. This practice would be generous and benevolent if the recipients were awarded for outstanding achievement in scholastic activities or even athletic prowess but this is not the case. These students received vehicles just for class attendance. Last I heard, attendance in high school is a requirement and is not optional. This kind of bribery is not only unsettling, but undermines foundational aspects of our education system.
All formal education is a means to an end. Even those who study for pleasure have a goal of personal edification. That is the nature of education. Utility is the foundation of its purpose. I know of no prestigious career or menial job that awards mere presence. No CEO receives benefits or pay raises for perfect attendance at his or her office. It is therefore ludicrous to instill this kind of message in our high school students’ minds. Kaytie Cristopherson is in for a rude awakening when she finds out that the rest of the world never got the memo.
This kind of excessive reinforcement for average behavior also lowers standards for students. Teachers and school administrators now put so much emphasis on what used to be commonplace that a quality education is easily lost in the fog of mediocrity. Students may come to assume that mere presence at the workplace is what is important and that quality of product is only a worry of overachievers. That is dangerous thinking and is insulting to those who strive to be above average and succeed. In the end is it is these who suffer the most.
This kind of thinking shows a plummeting of our education system’s confidence in its own product. This is blatantly obvious in the way many teachers spend much of their class time teaching students how to take standardized tests and not on the actual knowledge those tests are supposedly designed to measure. A high school diploma is now as attainable as a school admissions form for fear of offending someone who couldn’t achieve one otherwise. So schools choose to award worthless feats of scholastic ability such as class attendance because that is apparently attainable by geniuses and sluggards alike.
Awarding vehicles for adherence to the standard is counterproductive. It plays to the tune of those who are too lazy to strive for something better than average. These are the masses who wish to become drunk in the well of placation. This system is futile and should be changed if those in authority ever wish to produce quality students who know the value of hard work and self efficacy.
