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.
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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.
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RUSH: Paul in Hickory, North Carolina, great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks. I appreciate it. I heard your story about the school district or a school that was canceling the honors night for their best students, and that got me thinking to where my daughter, who’s a senior in high school up there — I know you hated high school, Rush, I know you hated it, but when you graduated, I know you had the valedictorian, salutatorian being able to speak to the whole school. They’re still gonna do that at my daughter’s school. However what they’ve said now because that’s not fair to everybody else, any senior is gonna be able to speak as well as they receive their diplomas once they walk across the stage because it’s not fair that they can’t speak because they’re not the valedictorian or the salutatorian.
RUSH: So the valedictorian and the salutatorian are going to speak.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And then an average, run-of-the-mill C student is gonna speak.
CALLER: If they want to, they have the choice. They can speak if they want to or they don’t have to. So what I’m thinking is it will be a 15 hour graduation ceremony if they all decide to talk.
RUSH: Well, it’s the outgrowth of fairness and trying to make sure that nobody is offended. Now, the real question is where were there ever honors for anything anyway? To listen to this principal in Massachusetts at the Ipswich Middle School or to listen to the people that had the no homework assignment, Half-Baked Moon Bay, they would tell you that they were never justified. It was always unfair and immoral and unjust to have honors set aside for high achievers.
Don’t forget, the way the left runs things, back during outcome based education, outcome based education, by the way, is exactly what the name implies: outcome based. Your education is what you think is right on any given day. For example — and this is not, contrary to what critics would say, this is not an exaggeration or an extreme example. It actually happened. If you thought as a second or third grader that two plus two was five, it was, until you learned it was four. You were not going to be told you were wrong.
Another characteristic of outcome based education was to try to deny that there were A students and then C and D students. One characteristic of the left, be it economics or grades or any other kind of performance, the left never, ever seeks to elevate those at the bottom and raise them up. The left looks at what they see as class distinctions or economic distinctions, and they penalize the people at the top and lower than. So in the example of education, high-performing students, when I went to school, there were three classifications. I forget what they were called. But students were grouped based upon their learning abilities and so forth so that everybody was learning at the same pace.
That was deemed to be unfair because it had a special classification for the high speed, high learning students, and it was not fair they should be in an advanced education circumstance with other students in the same school. It didn’t happen when I was a kid; this happened much, much later. And again it’s another example of the left taking high-performing students, students who were excelling, and they put those students in classes with much less qualified and far more underperforming students. And they slowed down the learning progress of the gifted. They slowed it down, on purpose, because it wasn’t fair that certain students were smarter than others or had the ability to learn faster, or even had the ability to take tests better, you know, whatever they determined the reason for these kids getting higher grades anybody else was. They just lowered ’em.
And it begets the question, why were there ever honors for anything anyway? Why is there a Congressional Medal of Honor, for example? Why are there honors for various kinds of valor? One of the reasons why there have been honors is to inspire people to strive to do better. It’s always been a common factor. It’s always been something that exists in American culture, striving to do better. That’s one thing America was about. You could be as good as you wanted to apply yourself to be. And for people who really worked hard, studied hard, achieved great things, we honored them, as a way of, A, honoring them, just within that context, and secondly, inspiring others to the same performance, to the same behavior.
That is vanishing. That’s deemed to be unfair. That’s deemed to be discriminatory. That’s deemed to be humiliating to the kids that don’t get the honor. And so here you have it, this Massachusetts principal is canceling honors night because it could be devastating to the students who theoretically also worked hard but just fell short of getting the grades to qualify. So you penalize people of high achievement, and you lower them, rather than try to elevate those at the bottom and find ways to improve them, or to help themselves to improve or to get better.
The real truth here is the left does not want people to strive to do better. The left wants people to accept their lot in life, whatever it is, and whatever it is that’s missing in their life, the left will provide via the state. The state will take care of equalizing everything, including outcomes. The state will make sure that you don’t get short-changed. So rather than promote you, inspire you, ask yourself, when was the last politician, elected official anywhere, that you remember speaking within the context of inspiration and uplifting motivation? It just doesn’t happen. Now we’ve got a bunch of hand wringers who lament the way things are. They talk about glory days in the past, how unfair they were. And you do have some who might reference a better day in the future where things improve, but you don’t have anybody consistently known for trying to inspire people to be better than they are or better than they can be. In fact, within the universe of leftists it’s just the exact opposite.
They’re doing everything they can to tamp down people striving to do better. Don’t worry about it, state will make up the difference, state will take care of you, state will make sure you’ve got health care, state will make sure that you’ve got a park to go lollygag around in after you have used your state food stamps to eat dinner. The state will take care of it all, because the left doesn’t think you have what it takes to get there anyway. They don’t think you have the ability to succeed at much anyway. Only a special rare few have the ability to really triumph. And it’s just too humiliating for those who can’t and who don’t. Now, the left has no problem giving themselves honors. Nobel prizes, Pulitzers, Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, you name it. They give themselves awards 15 times a week. But not you.
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RUSH: Let me codify this, or boil this all down to its essence. The reason why we’re not doing honor students anymore. Well, not everywhere, but it’s a trend. It’s been going on for a long time. And I’m gonna tell you why. The left wants to end the idea that we judge people on the basis of their accomplishments. The left wants to get rid of the idea that we judge people on the basis of their achievements.
Instead, we’re gonna judge them on surface things, their gender, their sexual orientation, their skin color. It is on that basis the left wants people judged and looked at. That’s how they do it. They want to eliminate this idea that we acknowledge people by virtue of their achievement, because what is that? That’s the essence of inequality, because nobody, no two people achieve the same things. And we have to have sameness. Sameness equals equality. We cannot have people good and great when others aren’t. So we’re gonna just get rid of it, end the distinction. That’s what’s going on.
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RUSH: Ron in Houston, welcome to the program. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. It’s a pleasure to talk with you. You commented earlier about the liberal agenda wanting sameness and equal outcomes, and I was curious as to why that didn’t apply to Hollywood with all their egos. Equal outcomes is far from the norm out there.
RUSH: Well, you know what, I’m glad you called about this, because, while it might appear to you that they give themselves Oscars and stuff, listen to them. You know, they expanded the number of movies to ten that qualify for best movie, to include more, so that fewer people’s feelings are hurt, nomination’s are a big deal, but listen to all these people when they win. They all praise the other nominees. They all express regret for winning, embarrassment for winning, or what have you. Hollywood is filled with people who outwardly and publicly criticize the competition involved in the Oscars, best actor, how dare we. They’re happy to accept it when they win it, though, and they parade around and they hold those Oscars and they go to the after parties and they’re proud as they can be waving them around, but they try to make people think they’re embarrassed by the competition.
So it’s a good point that you raise. They’re hypocrites. They paid money. They have advertising campaigns that try to win. They try to stack the vote to try to win the thing, all the while making people think they really don’t like this competition, it’s so unseemly. Excellent point.
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