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I wonder how much of this 'debate' is actually just people talking about different age groups? A participation ribbon might well have motivated me at age 6, an
by Bartweiss 9y ago
I wonder how much of this 'debate' is actually just people talking about different age groups?
A participation ribbon might well have motivated me at age 6, and frankly I doubt both the morality and common sense of anyone saying a six year old is too happy at a swim class. Keeping kids involved at that age seems like the biggest goal.
On the other hand, I have annoyed memories of getting participation ribbons at 15 for doing terribly in races. They felt downright insulting, because I knew exactly how I'd done and I was basically getting a ribbon for taking a bus to the meet.
A shocking number of educational issues seem to boil down to "6 year olds are not 15 year olds". That, and "offering things is better than enforcing them" - participation ribbons are way better than banning score-keeping, which I also got to see.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoOh this is a BRILLIANT point! We almost never breakdown our perspectives based on age, much less take a moment to reflect on which of our ages is being represented by a thought. I think the natural bias to put discrete values on things existing on a spectrum is where is all stems from. "We want to keep things simple, so here's this recipe for self-esteem" as opposed to "here's an age-based breakdown of ways to build self-esteem". Even then, the "enlightened" example is missing loads of other conditions, like if the person suffered emotional abuse or has automatic negative thoughts. Also, banning score-keeping is the naive approach. I think an interesting one would be to add a game score & encourage both teams to collaborate to increase it. I don't know how it'd effect things, but it'd be fun to find out!