I agree that life is unfair, but nobody is going to get themselves out of their position in life by being lazy. You work hard, and at least you've got a chance. It may not be much of a chance, but at least you have one. Saying that hard work is worthless is essentially just giving up, saying that you accept what life has given you. Screw that. Success isn't about how much money you make, what kind of job you have, or what kind of car you drive. Success is being able to reflect on your life and say that you did your best...that you gave your all. You are never going to do your best without hard work.
I never said hard work is worthless, I said it's a less important factor in accomplishing one's goals than you make it out to be. External factors
and the way you set your goals are much more important. Your goals largely have to be tailored to those external factors. You call that "accepting what life has given you" and look down upon it as a negative thing, I call it being realistic.
The problem with the idea of teaching kids that "hard work is the most important factor in success" is that they're kids. The moment this proves, in their eyes, to be false, how are you going to motivate them. I hope you have some idea of how difficult it can be to motivate kids. The younger they are, the more they lack the ability to plan long-term, the more simplistic their views on morality are(this is a real ****, kids 12-15 have a really strong belief in absolute morality...all good is rewarded, all evil is punished), and the harder it is for them to understand broad concepts like that.
The idea in the original article linked is absolutely ridiculous, on several levels. First of all, no one is motivated by freaking pizza. It's hardly a reward that'd be the stuff of any kid's dreams. I'm sure empirical research here would find no correlation between pizza offered and learning objectives achieved. The school in question is a middle school. I'm going to assume that's the same thing as a Junior High School in Canada, meaning kids ages 12-15. If I'm wrong, most of my arguments might be moot, so forgive me for that and ignore the rest.
Kids that age have already been in a structured learning environment for at least 6-7 years. Those who haven't(I've taught kids whose childhood reality was refugee camps in Sudan, but those are outliers) are generally more messed up than this situation warrants getting into. From my experience, success and failure at school at that age can largely be predicted based on patterns. Or rather, the outcomes tend to match patterns. Kids who are not doing well in school at that age are not doing well for one of a handful of reasons.
The curriculum as it stands may be too difficult for them. There may be cognitive disabilities at work, there may be simpler learning disabilities. These can, of course, be mitigated, but most certainly not by pizza. There are kids who have no help at home, either directly or through lack of a good example. If a kid is 12 and has been taught repeatedly that school and education are not important, pizza won't fix it. Then there are kids who are actually lazy, which again is going to be a problem that's been dragging itself behind them for 6-7 years. Pizza doesn't change that, especially since as I've mentioned above, they're not really good at planning ahead. Most lazy kids are lazy partly because education isn't built around instant reward, which is what they seek.
Success can be broken down like this, too, but there's no need to go through it point-by-point. The reality is that for both the kids getting the party and the kids not getting the party, there will be no tangible benefits. Kids who are successful are already successful, either through hard work, sheer luck(DNA), parental support, or some combination thereof. The kids who aren't successful aren't successful for the exact same reasons. All the pizza party does is draw an even stronger line between them. Funnily enough, it reinforces exactly what you're accusing me of doing -- that those who are successful will continue to get everything, and those who aren't will continue to get nothing. It does
nothing to fix the underlying problems. It just masks them and presents them in such a way as to confuse young, impressionable kids.
