Students musn't feel pride in their accomplishments

I well remember seeing the bumperstickers: "My kid can beat your honor student's ass." 

This is very sad. I'm sure this same school has a night to honor any football, baseball or any other athlete who does well... of course anyone can do well in athletics if they spend all their time on it to the detriment of their studies.

But folks who spend all their time on academics and don't do sports?  Well, gee, they must be made to feel proud for being willing to exercise their brains!

And of course kids who worked hard but didn't quite make it will now have no need to work hard any more, because there will be no reward - no recognition - for doing so.

RUSH: Now, in years past, when the left has done things like eliminate keeping score during high school sporting events because it was not fair. We don't want to humiliate young kids who are, after all, they're trying. Why should there be any humiliation for losing? So we started making jokes about where this would lead. And now the things that we joked about back in the nineties are actually happening. Try this.

"A Massachusetts principal has been criticized for canceling his school's Honors Night, saying it could be 'devastating' to the students who worked hard, but fell short of the grades." So there won't be any honors night. They might still have the honor students, but they're not going to recognize them publicly. There will be no notice of their achievement. There will be no bells rung, no trumpets, no ceremony whatsoever. Because this guy says we just can't allow these students to be disappointed. We just can't allow it.

The principal is David Fabrizio, Ipswich Middle School, "notified parents last week of his plan to eliminate the event. 'The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients' families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade-point average,' Fabrizio penned in his first letter to parents, the station reported. Fabrizio also said he decided to make the change because academic success can be influenced by the amount of support a student receives at home and not all students receive the same level of emotional and academic support at home."

So it's not fair. Do you remember -- you'll all remember this when I tell you -- Half-Baked Moon Bay in California back in the nineties banned homework, because it wasn't fair to some students who went home to decrepit homes or broken homes, violent homes, nonexistent homes, homes that were shopping carts, it wasn't fair to make them do homework because their circumstances were such that they couldn't. So homework was banned in Half Moon Bay, California. Okay, that happens, it's an isolated incident, we started making jokes about what the future will hold. And, lo and behold, it's all happening.

We have a touchy-feely principal who really thinks we can't have honors night because it's unfair to the kids who didn't make it. Now, this guy, in his life, he had to be educated this way. He had to be taught this. Somebody had to influence him. He thinks he's doing the Lord's work. He thinks he's the epitome of fairness. This guy thinks he's got compassion, and he's got a lock on it. This guy thinks he's the walking embodiment of fairness and niceness. I can't tell you the number of times in high school I was allowed to be disappointed for not making the grade. It was part of it, because it's part of life.

So the young students who are being taught by radical leftists in this country are gonna end up growing up in a world for which they are totally unprepared and unequipped. At least for a while until the rest of the world becomes like this, although the rest of the world never will. You're never gonna have this kind of treatment in the real world, where things count.


RUSH: I should point out that in Half-Baked Moon Bay, California, the students were opposed to the idea of no homework. Back then, when was it, 1994. No, no, I'll never forget this, 'cause we're laughing at it, we're making fun of it, and the students were concerned. They wanted, back then, to learn, and it wasn't so much the parents, although some of them spoke up, too. It was students who thought it was a dumb idea. Now, I couldn't understand that. I hated homework. I never wanted to do homework, so if I ever had somebody officially tell me I didn't have to do it, I would have said, "Fine," and I wouldn'ta done it.

I didn't do it anyway, primarily because I believed all my friends who told me they never did homework, except they were lying to me. They did. They told me they were out partying all night, they never did homework, never studied. They were getting A's and B's. I believed 'em. Anyway, students back in 1994 wanted to do the homework, but the administration at the school said, "No, no, it's not fair because some students don't have a proper home." And we started telling jokes about where this was gonna lead. Now the jokes we were telling back in the mid-nineties about where this gonna lead are reality today. It's not good, folks. It's entirely destructive.