We, as a generation, expect too much out of the world. We have grown up with the ideology that we will always end up succeeding and that we have the right to take the world. It appears to me, though, we have forgotten one very important thing: if the world is truly ours to take, we must still put out the effort to take it, rather than feeling as if it will hand itself over to us freely. This generation needs to come to terms with working hard to accomplishes goals.
Not everything in life is simple.
Take the infamous field day. Everybody gets a ribbon — whether or not they did well or even really tried, everyone receives, at the very least, a participation ribbon. Rewards of any sort, should exist to recognize an accomplishment. They provide a person with bragging rights and give them tangible evidence of a job well done. So giving out participation ribbons feels, to me, like defeating the purpose. It allows for a person to feel they have done well when they haven’t even done anything noteworthy at all. These ribbons have no real meaning. They don’t read ‘most school spirit’ or ‘best sportsmanship.’ If they did, I would support them. After all, obvious validity resides in the importance of children learning that the journey, whether to a win or a loss, has good in it as well. However, they don’t have those phrases inscribed on them. Instead they read ‘participant,’ and give children no real source of accomplishment, only a sense of it and a growing feeling of entitlement.
In addition, an abundance of safeguards exist to help students in high schools today. MISD regulations allow students to turn in work late and make up for assignments they failed. I’m not calling these regulations inherently bad. With the busy schedules of students these days, we can expect at some point something will slip through the cracks. However, they have become overused to the point that students put off doing work because they know they can turn it in late or avoid studying because they know they can make up a test. Some students even ask teachers whether they can correct a test or quiz before they take it. This happens so regularly that some teachers will announce to their classes on the first day of school that they will not answer the question. Students cheating the system when they should instead be grateful that it even exists is just one more example of the entitlement this generation appears to feel oh so often.
Now there’s nothing wrong with congratulating children for participation; it boosts morale and makes them feel accomplished. But there comes a point when it needs to stop. Tough love gives children motivation to work harder and become the best they can be, whereas congratulating them for simply showing up will give them a false sense of the world. Not to say that no one in this generation works hard; many students work hard and study every night to earn their grades. Some have already entered the workforce and put their all into even the most trivial aspects of their work. But others don’t have this drive in their life — they’re the people who received participation trophies every year and never worked harder to earn an actual ranking in their respective activity, the students who forget to turn in all their work and then expect teachers to give them good grades anyway and the people who show up late to work and don’t understand why they get written up. These are the people who need to realize that the world is not really theirs.
My future boss will not thank me for showing up to work. College professors will not hold my hand and walk me through material. I will not receive a ribbon for everything good thing I do in the real world. We need to realize that we are acting like the world owes us. We need to take action to remedy the problem. Rather than expecting the world to hand us what we want, we, as a generation, need to learn to work hard to get what we want out of our lives.
