Posted by
The Barbershop on Monday, September 28, 2009 12:00:00 AM
“Leveling The Playing Field”
One phrase I think is overused, and has been for probably fifty years, is “leveling the playing field.” Thinkers, some of them even great thinkers, over the last several decades have attempted, perhaps with the best intentions, to put teeth to the phrase from the Declaration of Independence regarding all of us being ‘created equal.’ To them, created equal means something more than being gifted with ‘inalienable rights,’ something more than the “pursuit of happiness.” To them it means only “happiness.” That somehow we, being fortunate to have been born a citizen of the greatest country on the face of the earth, should be able to avail ourselves—each of ourselves—to anything we want, regardless of our inability to pay, lack of talent or skill, or our cavalier attitude towards effort and hard work.
To these thinkers, it was unthinkable that, in this great country, one child may be more gifted than another—say, faster at the hundred yard dash. There had to be a way, they felt, to ‘level the playing field.’ Again, to paraphrase our friend Drew Carey, it was almost a great idea.
What really happened is that somewhere during the 1950’s, child psychiatrists began to question thousands of years of successful child-rearing techniques, criticizing those techniques as ‘archaic’ and unprogressive. The world, they said, was changing rapidly, and children were becoming ‘more aware’ of themselves (due, in large part, to a growing cadre of ‘enlightened’ parents who believed that an ‘evolved’ society should banish the ‘barbaric’, albeit highly successful, practice of corporal punishment in favor of ‘reasoned’ discipline involving talking. Oh, and listening. And, you see where that’s gotten us). This heightened awareness in our children meant that they were somehow engaging in regular patterned behavior of self-examination, and were becoming confused, frustrated and downright depressed at what they were finding. The answer, according to those great child psychiatrists, was to provide an educational environment in which the focus was to be moved from one of “unhealthy competition” to one of raising levels of self-esteem. Competition in the classroom, they said, left some children out of the educational loop. Certain socio-economic factors in a rapidly changing world were placing undue stress upon certain children such that they were unable to concentrate in the classroom, and teachers and administrators, spurred on by a left-leaning political environment—a ‘we are the world’ created-equal-ness—had a choice to make. They decided to remove the “pressure” of competition in the classroom. Towards that effort, some schools did away with walls around the classroom, standard seating arrangements, and time-tested teaching methods. But, chairs placed willy-nilly in a “learning space”, “move at your own pace” lesson plans and pass or fail grading systems resulted in no structure. In the twenty-twenty hindsight of many, the decision was tragic.
The problem? Simple: Children are not as stupid as we think they are. Try and level the playing field on them, and they are acutely aware of what you’re trying to do. They know they are not equal. They know one is better than another. You can’t fool them into thinking they’re they same simply by providing the same reward for different results. The point of leveling the playing field was to encourage participation by those children who had grown to feel disenfranchised due to, the ‘experts’ said, competition. It could not simply be that some kids just don’t crave competition like others. It could not simply be that the subjects of said competition just happened to be of the type at which certain kids did not excel. A simpler “solution” could have been to just create different types of competition that reached out to more kids, engaged their minds, exploited their collective forte. See, the problem wasn’t competition; it was the limited focus of it.
Earlier I said that if we diminish the importance of winning, then more importance will be placed on how we play the game. And that’s true, but only to a point. We can’t entirely remove victory and her spoils from the equation, no more than we can entirely remove how we play the game. Minimizing the importance of victory at any given task is exactly what we’re talking about here. The winner of the Olympic gold medal in pole-vaulting has achieved an admirable goal; he has not achieved the only admirable goal, not by a long shot. Why in the world would we want to either take away his achievement or divvy it up between all the participants?
Have ten kids run the 100 yard dash. Afterward, give each of them the same “prize”. Do that enough and pretty soon, there’s no incentive for the fastest runner to try to win. Pretty soon, there’s no incentive for anybody to even run. It’s as simple as that.
And that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that children lost respect for themselves. If a person has no respect for himself, he certainly has no respect for anybody else, or anybody else’s property, and psychologists and the Law have a name for people like that: Sociopath.
The Law has, in many instances and in a variety of arenas, codified the notion of leveling the playing field. At first, the law and the cases arose from the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth amendment. That amendment conveys the protections of the U.S. Constitution to the States, and therefore prohibits discrimination by state government institutions. The clause grants all people “equal protection of the laws,” which means that the states must apply the law equally and cannot give preference to one person or class of persons over another. What that really means is that an existing law must be equally applied. What it never meant is that a new law must be written in order to cater to the certain whim of a certain protected class of people, or for its benefit.
But look what happened.
Although the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education effectively desegregated public schools, desegregation wasn’t happening fast enough to satisfy the liberal elitists who are smarter than us all, so they took cases to the courts all over the country which resulted in busing. Black students from perfectly acceptable neighborhoods, albeit perhaps not as financially secure as some white neighborhoods, were bused to attend schools in the more affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods. Conversely, white students were bused to predominantly black schools. Do I have to tell you how this situation worked out? I’ll always remember the uproar in Boston, because that’s where I lived. And I’ll always remember the snapshot on the cover of Life magazine of a “concerned” white father attempting to impale a black father with an American flag.
Well, it’s the seventies and you know what happened. White girls started to get abortions and black girls would never get abortions and the once white neighborhoods became a mix of black and white and then predominantly black and then the white people left the community, the so-called ‘white flight’. It is important to remember that the citizenry was never in favor of desegregation. The citizenry had enjoyed the life it had, with its neighborhood schools and neighborhood groceries and neighborhood churches. I’d never argue that there is no racism; only that forced integration fed the fire of racism, but I’m really digressing here. The point is, the Law has done very poorly at leveling the playing field.