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http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1061137286
David McCullough Jr gave a graduation address at Wellesley HS (just west of Boston) this weekend. He didn't sugar coat things and I'm sure that much of his point went right over the head of many of those in attendance- students, faculty and parents alike, but I think what he said is really on target and a valuable reality check:
David McCullough Jr gave a graduation address at Wellesley HS (just west of Boston) this weekend. He didn't sugar coat things and I'm sure that much of his point went right over the head of many of those in attendance- students, faculty and parents alike, but I think what he said is really on target and a valuable reality check:
...You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it... Now it’s “So what does this get me?” As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic ...