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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Honor rolls hurt
feelings of us dummiesTennessee is taking President Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act" a tad literally. Educational leaders of that state -- whose official motto, and I'm not kidding here, is the rousing and inspirational "Agriculture and Commerce" -- are instituting a "No Children Who Feel They're Being Left Behind Act."
It started in Nashville where schools can no longer post "honor rolls" because it is embarrassing to underachievers. Parents of children who did not make the honor roll complained that their kids would be ridiculed for not appearing on the list. Now the entire state might ban honor rolls.
As someone who never made an honor roll, I'm all for this humanitarian development. I suggest that our own governor, Linda Lingle, who is revamping the Department of Education in Hawaii, consider banning honor rolls. And a few other things.
As a future newspaper columnist Hall of Famer, I guess the thing that hurt me most in high school was the ridicule I felt by not being allowed to write for the school newspaper.
Every high school has a newspaper, but only a few of the "cool" kids get to be reporters. Kids like me suffered blows to our esteem, or would have if we had any esteem, by not being on the paper's staff.
So, clearly, if schools did not publish newspapers, more students wouldn't feel embarrassed and cast down.
I PLAYED TENNIS in high school, even though I wasn't very good at it. I wanted to be on the football team, but I was skinny and bruised easily. If you played tennis and not football in high school, the chicks all thought you were a wuss. That hurt. A lot. Gov. Lingle should ban football teams in state schools so the slight of frame won't feel so emasculated and un-date-able.
While we're at it, we'd better get rid of track, basketball, baseball and golf because the average sports underachiever couldn't make those teams, either. And the chess club has GOT to go. Who do those brainiacs think they are, making the rest of us feel stupid?
With the honor roll, chess and major sports competition gone, underachievers will feel much better about themselves. But what will really improve their lives is to get rid of grades altogether. After all, without grades, no one would know if anyone is smarter than anyone else.
That would mean we also need to get rid of tests, since all tests do is make smart kids look smart at the expense of the dummies, I mean, the underachievers.
And let's get rid of the term "underachievers." It implies that it's good to achieve stuff. As long as you've got a small group of eggheads and athletes trying to achieve things, everyone else will be humiliated and ridiculed.
We need a school system in which achievement is not only discouraged, but punished. Those overachievers should have their names published on some kind of list, or roll, so they can be properly reviled.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com