Let's turn them all into milk and water misses and milksops...

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
-- Truman Capote
"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."
-- George Eliot
"Success is somebody else's failure."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin

I guess turning our kids into weenies is a gift that we have given to the global community. *SIGH* I expect better than this from England...

The article I linked to is worth the read just for the aerobic exercise your heart will feel from your blood pumping with outrage :) It seems that a bunch of idiot savant teachers from the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) in England have come up with the BRILLIANT (definitely not in the Guinness sense) idea of banning the word "fail" from use in classrooms and, get this, replacing it with the phrase "deferred success". According to the brainiac think tank, this will help avoid demoralizing pupils. Did you know telling a student they failed could put them off learning for life? Egads! It sounds like they have some deferred brain cells! ... deferred ... so, their success is going to be deferred until when? Who knows, since the poor sap doesn't even know that he screwed up.

What happened to the salad days of pushing our kids to earn gold stars and candybars? Growing up, we all had the reward system. You excel, you get stuff. You feel good. Everyone wanted to do well and be as smart as they could be. They wanted to be successful. Now in schools, the smart kids get screwed because classrooms need to stay in check with the slower/less bright kids.

Pray that your bright kid has a fabulous teacher, like the Flame of Cheshire, who covertly encourages and nurtures her kids to excel. Otherwise, they are going to be bored and will be running in neutral for a long while.

Dumbing down America is turning in to dumbing down the World.

Stay cool and safe and read a damn book with your kid while you are at it. Somebody has to pump up their brains!