Repost: Everyone Wins? Just for showing up? Part 1 of 5

Today is my kids first day back to school. I start a new
quarter. My wife is finishing one of her quarters. Little man Celli is continuing
to prep to make his debut to this world. I need to ease my way back into this
blogging thing. I have a lot of things that I am excited to share with you over
this upcoming year. But for this week, I am going to do a repost of a series
that I did last year regarding what I think is a dangerous mentality of “everyone
wins.” This series is designed to create some conversation on what it means to
allow our children to lose and struggle and win. If you read it last year,
maybe you’ll want to skip it…and then again you might enjoy it again. If you’re
new to these parts maybe you’ll love it…or maybe you’ll hate it. We’ll see.
Either way. Here is part one of five.

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In graduate school I had to take extra classes because of the
institution that I attended. Many of these extra classes were put
together in a string. One of those strings was a connection of three
theology classes. Normally, these classes would be have been taught by
three different professors. Due to a confluence of events, I had the
same professor for all three.

Like all things, this had positives and negatives. One of the
consequences of this was the fact that as a student I tended to hear the
same rants again and again. Doing an unscientific evaluation of my
time, I am guessing that about three hours of my life was spent
listening to rants about “everyone winning.”

My professor’s basic complaint  was that everyone wins today and that
is having terrible effects on our children and society as a whole. He
was so passionate about it that often the conversations would spill over
into the hallway after class or during break.

This lead to some good questions.

1. What if he was wrong?
2. What if he was right?
3. What are the consequences of it?
4. What is the cause?
5. What can we do about it?
6. Should we do anything about it?

I think this is a worthy discussion for anyone to have, especially
anyone who works with kids or has children. There can be little doubt
that if he is right, there are consequences. It is reasonable to examine
those consequences and ponder their effect on our children.

My next post will deal with the question of what if he was wrong.