Maybe I just got lucky, but I'm a millenial and I never experienced any of this stuff. I agree that more students are considered gifted than ought to be, but I

Maybe I just got lucky, but I'm a millenial and I never experienced any of this stuff. I agree that more students are considered gifted than ought to be, but I also think that the whole three-tier gifted/normal/special ed thing is broken. It's a spectrum, so treat it that way. That said, I've never gotten a gold star that I can remember, and I've definitely received my fair share of red X's. I did get stamps/stickers on papers which were A's or, in the lower grades, check-pluses or E's. But I don't think that these in any way gave me a false sense of accomplishment; they only gave them out for top marks. (For the uninitiated, sometimes for minor assignments we were graded on a scale that went v+, v, v-, X or Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, Poor.) Maybe this is a big issue in other places, or perhaps private schools (that seems likely to me, based on the accounts of some people I know who attended private school), but it's definitely not happening everywhere.