The many problems with 'grade inflation'
It was the late Martin Luther King Jr. who said that, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Which brings us, of course, to the widespread practice in education, from junior kindergarten through university, of giving students passing grades whether they earned them or not for fear that "failure" will tarnish them forever.

One of the things that seems to concern people most these days is the extraordinary sense of entitlement among the younger generation, a far cry from the days when most people understood that if you were only entitled to whatever it is you wanted if you worked hard for it and earned it.

A recent extreme example of this attitude is the Paris Hilton debacle where, without doubt, she seemed to be totally convinced that being sent back to jail to serve her sentence was, as she put it, "not right."

For a person who has spent her entire life getting whatever she wanted without any questions being asked, it's no wonder she felt put upon by the system when she actually had to face up to the consequences of her actions.

Most of us, of course, have no experience with life at the financial level enjoyed by Hilton and her peers, but even in the real world where the vast majority of us live, the principles of earning your privileges shouldn't be that difficult to grasp.

A major reason that so many young people have problems with this simple concept, however, comes from the misguided "experts" who have long dictated that children should never be allowed to "fail" because it is too hard on them.

What that means is that even if little Johnny or little Mary can't spell or add or subtract at the level their peers can, it's somehow better to move then along, apparently to save them from embarrassment.

And while it has been common knowledge that the elementary schools have followed this absurd practice for some time - it says here it leads to more frustration and higher drop-out rates from those kids who were artificially promoted - we now learn that even our universities and colleges are doing the same thing.

They even have a fancy name for it, i.e., "grade inflation."

University of Western Ontario Sociology professor James Cote told the Toronto Star in a story on the subject that, "we're (universities) becoming more like high schools and that's not a good thing." Co-author of the new book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, Cote added that "It's become a mass education system and whenever you do that, standards have got to drop to keep everybody in."

Our whole system it seems is based on how many kids we can push through colleges and universities - and government funding to these schools is based on the numbers - rather than on how much the students actually learn.

Because the schools lose money if kids drop out or fail, they are now going to extreme lengths to upgrade their marks in order to keep their bums in the seats.

As for the over-coddled generations of students who saw themselves breeze through elementary and high schools - whether they should have been passing or not - their expectations are so high that they're actually shopping around for universities which will offer them the higher grades they want.

A 2000 study by two University of Windsor economic professors, who looked at grade patterns over 20 years at seven Ontario universities - Brock, Guelph, McMaster, Ottawa, Trent, Wilfrid Laurier and Windsor - concluded that grade point averages rose during that period in 11 of 12 arts and sciences courses.

Is this because kids are smarter now than they ever were?

No. It's because of the pressures on the professors - just as it is on elementary and highschool teachers - to puff up the marks.

Is it any wonder then, that kids who have spent their academic lives believing in their own entitlement - and having that belief approved by their teachers - enter the work force believing that all they've got to do is show up and the big bucks and big jobs will be there?

Rather than teaching kids to deal with failure when they are young - and adjusting to it, and making up for it is not as complicated - all we've done in many cases is delay the inevitable crash until young adulthood when the consequences are far more serious than they would have been when they were young kids.

Or, as Forrest Gump would have summed it up, "stupid is as stupid does."