I can't think of any subject that better defines the cultural gulf between my generation (pre-boomer) and later generations than the current controversy over valedictorians in high schools.
It goes like this: For generations, public high schools selected as their valedictorian the student with the highest academic ranking (best grades). Somewhere in the past two generations, an idea developed that academic rankings caused low self-esteem and under-achievement in children with lesser academic skills.
That idea first surfaced with the "track" system of the '60's, where a child would be placed in a "track" with his or her academic equals, so the gulf between high achievers and the dolts wouldn't be so apparent. So, high achievers competed against other high achievers for standing within the track, and low achievers competed against other dolts.
Soon enough, this system was considered too competitive, and competition between students for academic standing was considered a bad thing. Then we began to see pass-fail grading, then, in some cases, the elimination of grading all together.
For some reason, though, probably because it was too strong a tradition to break, the selection of a valedictorian was left alone.
It couldn't last though, and about the time the PTAs went away, to be replaced with "Educational Councils" where educrats tell the parents what's going to happen, but allow them little input, the system changed.
Now we have multiple valedictorians, and valedictorians "chosen" by educrats for the purpose of ego-boosting.
Here's how it works. On the West Coast, where there are more families of Asian extraction (kids of Asian extraction usually do better in school because their parents stay on their little butts and make them study), it was common to see, year after year, an Asian kid as valedictorian. The "other" kids of color didn't make the best grades, and were usually missing from the valedictorian ranks. This rankled the educrats, who feared that their careers might be in jeopardy if they didn't produce a kid who would give the valedictory speech in Ebonics. These educrats fussed and fumed because Asian and Caucasian kids always gave that speech.
They devised a solution, perfectly in keeping with their educational product: redefine valedictorian. So they did, and now we have, based on grade inflation (giving GPA bonuses out on a feel-good basis), valedictorians who were somewhere in the middle of their class academically.
We have also multiple valedictorians, a sort of "valedictory council" in some schools.
These schools thereby turn out a product that business and industry can't use: dumbed-down kids who expect their rewards to come without any achievement to justify them.
Racial quotas play a part in this, but the real villain is this belief within our educational establishment that kids must feel good about themselves ALL THE TIME. Actual experience tells us that the stress of competition is what forces us to achieve more and more, not the act of having everything handed to us on a silver platter.
When I was a kid myself, I saw what competition meant firsthand. I was going to a school in England and kids my age (11) were standing for their "elevenses", a nationwide test that determined, at the tender age of 11, whether they went to college or trade school (or the military). At the time (1954), there were the first whiffs of opposition to this long-standing examination, based on "stress isn't good for the children".
Well, the Brits did away with the exam, and modeled their education more or less on ours, and look at what they have in Great Britain today: a population that insists on having everything in life handed to them by their nanny government, so the nation is made up of people who live by and for the "freebie". These people are unwilling to earn anything, and so the once-great British Empire totters on the edge of becoming just another has-been second-world nation.
We're not that far behind the Brits.
