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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

I have a 6 year old son, who recently finished a language class (Hindi) and a chess class. In both of these, he got a medal. Why? Because everyone got a medal.

So, in end, he is happy, with a sense of achievement, but what achievement I don't know.

I believe that failure in life is important, at least was for me, otherwise I would never have tried harder. But if people are given something for nothing, how do you define/measure success.

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A medal seems silly, but here in this part of the US it's common to see 5th grade and 8th grade graduation ceremonies, complete with parties, fancy dresses, and gifts, for the near 100% of kids who met the minimum requirements of the lower levels of their compulsory age-based schooling.

It seems like it's even more common among people who have the least to celebrate: middle-to-upper-middle-class suburban White parents, where your kids practically can't fail school even if they try.

Do any students fail public school grades anymore? Do students get 'held back'?

Back in the 70s, I knew students who were 'held back' - repeated 4th grade again, etc. I don't think I've heard of that since then. Obviously I'm no longer a 4th grader :) but among people I know with kids, the concept of "held back" never comes up.

No.

Even if you deserve to be 'held back', you get what's called a 'social promotion'.

In 8th grade, there was this big project we (each student) had to do in order to 'pass' 8th grade. The teachers all told us that if we didn't do it, we'd fail 8th grade, but still go on to high school as a 'social promotion'.

I actually had several friends who decided to not do that project, because nothing bad would happen to them if they didn't do it.

Those social promotions are clearly screwed up, especially as old as eighth grade. As a counterpoint anecdote, however, my mother is a kindergarten teacher who holds back (on average) two students a year for failure to understand the material or social immaturity that would prevent them from learning anything in first grade. And this is in a state (Indiana) in which kindergarten is voluntary.

Never heard of that but I don't doubt you.

In the (public) school my son goes to, people do get held back.

Yes.

Although it sometimes takes less clear-cut forms than "you fail this course, therefore we make you repeat the entire grade." my mother, for instance, taught at a school (this was ~2000-2006) that kept students perpetually in 8th grade. The school system identified students who were likely to drop out of high school based on grades and behavior and kept them from entering high school to prevent them from depressing high school dropout rates. They would remain in 8th grade until they turned 16 and dropped out.

I was in high school in the 90's, and my classmates frequently failed and had to repeat classes. This usually didn't result in having to repeat an entire grade though, since our schedules were very personalized and classes could be repeated the next year or semester without interfering with the rest of the schedule.

This was a conversation I was having the other with a close friend from France. I was talking about how kids in the US, especially in impoverished areas, get pushed through math classes with barely passing marks even if they learned nothing. I'm not sure how completely accurate this is, but he explained that he knew many people (probably 15-20) that had repeat entire grades multiple times because they failed math.

I know that a lot more has to happen in the US in regards to financial reform of public education for kids to be able to repeat grades so liberally, but I think it would do a lot of good.

As someone who went through school in the 1990s-2000s, I heard of kids either in my grade or my sister's grade (younger) that had to repeat a year. I'm not sure if that's changed since, or if it was location-specific.

I graduated in 2007. While it wasn't common, there were friends of mine held back in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th grade.

I have friends with kids who have been held back, but these are usually kids who have some form of diagnosable developmental delay, not just an average kid not doing well.

I remember kids being held back, mostly in the early k-1-2 years or 11-12th grade years. Not much in between. I was in school in the 90s and early 00s.

Don't think of graduation as an achievement. Instead, think of it as a coming-of-age celebration, like a mitzvah. From that perspective, it doesn't seem so bad.

You mean a Bar Mitzvah. A "mitzvah" is simply a commandment; the Bar Mitzvah is but one of these.

And from experience, a Bar/Bat Mitzvah is certainly an achievement, not merely a coming of age ceremony. It was certainly the hardest thing I'd done by that age (13), and involves leading a full service in hebrew and reading from the Torah, also in (very antiquated) hebrew.

Preparing for it involved tutoring for six months, in addition to biweekly hebrew and temple school classes for many years.

Thank you, that reminds me of another pet peeve of mine regarding the education system in US:

In India, where I'm originally from, even high-school was not given much importance, primary objective was getting into a good college. People dropped out for economic reasons and not other.

Here in the US by celebrating something as simple as "graduating" 5th-6th grade, we're telling these kids that they have achieved something, when they clearly have not, and then we mourn the fact that many kids dropout even before high-school.

I doubt that those early grade parties have much impact any which way.

I think they are the sort of thing that makes a certain type of parent or teacher feel good, so they end up happening when those people decide to make them happen. The kids get some cake and forget about it a week later (or maybe 2 weeks into the stress of starting at a new school).

As far as I know, the message that graduating high school is important gets hammered on over and over (and then it isn't particularly important, a GED works about as well anywhere a diploma is supposed to matter).

A high school diploma in a developed country doesn't get you that far these days.

That is because graduating from 5th and 8th grade once was an achievement, and in the scheme of human history, is remarkable. What most 5th and 8th graders have learned by the time they "graduate" would have once been more education than kings and philosophers received over the courses of their lifetimes. To put things into perspective: your average 8th grader has received more education than Newton had when he began developing calculus (though obviously, the 8th grader's education is more spread out and generalized).

It was only in the last century (post WWI) that graduating from high school became commonplace. It was not until after the GI Bill (post-WWII) that attending college became common. It was not until after Vietnam that attending college became the new normal.

I don't even think it should be assumed that if no medal was given out then the child is a failure. I remember getting participation trophies as a young child (under 10) and at the time I was confused as to why I was getting it. Had they not given out the trophy I would have thought nothing of it. Just that the activity is over. No sense of failure (or success for that matter), just the general passage of time.

Failure has another great importance, it tells you what your good at and sets you up to try new things or ways. I love golf, but I know that no matter how much time I put into it, I won't be great. Its still a fun thing to do, but I know not to make a career of it.

I failed a lot at programming at the start, but I had enough real successes to keep going. You need the honest feedback to make real decisions. This "everyone gets a medal" culture doesn't give the right feedback so people grow up and have disappointing lives until the can change or die.

Failure also produces a lot of false negatives though, I've failed at a lot of things not because I was bad at them (though, lord knows I have enough failures because of that), but because of bad luck, or bad instruction, or what have you.

Most of the people I've seen who were shielded from failure don't make this distinction. They attribute it to bad luck and don't learn anything or assume they're innately terrible and never try again.

There's a fine line between teaching children to learn from failure and allowing failure to discourage them inappropriately. The solution is to walk it carefully, not stay so far away from it that people never learn to persevere.

Thanks for making this point, amongst many posts looking down upon so-called "self-esteem" culture.

I can't say if the methods being used today to give kids "self-esteem" are misguided and/or ineffective. But I can say that the entire point of true "self-esteem" is exactly so that failure is perceived as a learning experience and not a discouragement. Genuine self-esteem needs to be the backdrop, regardless of whether or not "medals and rewards for everyone" are entirely the wrong way to achieve that.

Edit: I think what I'm trying to say is that there's a difference between self-esteem and self-entitlement.

Funny, I was going to throw some concurring examples from sports your way. "Michael Jorden was cut from his high school basketball team." "Yogi Berra was repeatedly denied a spot on a major league team." But in looking for citations, I seem to have disproven myself. Turns out, Jorden was never cut, he just didn't make varsity as a sophomore, like almost all sophomores, at least partly because, at 15, he was still under 6 feet tall. [1]

As for Berra, the only reference I found was a claim on wikipedia that he was kept off the Cardinals by a team president who was moving to the Dodgers and was hoping to sign Berra there. [2]

These examples certainly don't mean that there are no false negatives when it comes to failure, but I think it's interesting that these two famous stories about great players overcoming early adversity are bunk. It is probably the case that most people start out not being so good at something, then gradually get better, with any early success compounding over time.

[1] http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/01/11/the-man-wh...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra

But, most people can feel that. I knew I was going to do fine at programming despite the shaky start. It felt good and I was doing little things right.

The problem is the distortion of your judgement from people who believe no one should fail (or excel really). It makes you not trust your own gut reaction.

Failure is a better signal than success though. You can also succeed through luck and other mostly irrelevant circumstances; but if you are trying to succeed, then you only fail despite your efforts.

Both cases still require examination of the situation to determine whether the success/failure is attributable to luck, skill, effort, etc.

In 3rd grade, my teacher would give us star stickers that reflected how well we did in the class with participation, attendance, behavior, etc. I have a picture of me at my desk with these stars and in the picture there is another student with their stars showing. I had about 5x the amount of stars.

The student behind me ended up earning a PhD in her education while I have a BS.

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