I almost choked on this morning’s oatmeal while reading this from the Pirate’s Blog:

In a spat of unbelievable obsession with ’self-esteem’ a youth baseball team was kicked out of its league for winning too much.  It apparently hurt the feelings of the other kids always losing and the coaches refused to play the team because they would lose. 

“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Michael Allston, 12, a catcher and pitcher for the Stars. “We always played our best, and we were just winning games.”

Teammate Matthew “Boomer” Hufferd, 12, who plays second base, said he thinks overprotective adults are to blame.

“If they learn at their age that they can forfeit on things they don’t want to do, it’s quitting,” Hufferd said.

Its amazing how smart some kids are, hard work and success shouldn’t be a bad thing and changing the rules to punish those who succeed is wrong.  It makes sense and its smart, too bad the adults were taught to be stupid. As we said in our earlier educational primer:

We solve the problem of kids failing tests by making the tests easier and not by teaching them more. We fight standardized tests on the grounds that they are biased against the kids (or schools) who don’t do so well. We stop scoring in games to protect those who don’t score as much. We give everyone trophies or no one trophies. By making sure that we have no losers, we also insure that we have no winners.

Well, if there is anything to be learned by this is that we don’t give kids enough credit for knowing what is going on around them. Judging by the quotes of the 12–year olds above, kids are more savvy than over-indulgent, over-protective parents think.

Let’s bring back“winners never quit, and quitters never win” and stop this nonsense.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 at 9:05 am by Insider and is filed under Politically Correct ... and stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.