A student flunking out of nursing school opened fire in a class at the University of Arizona, killing 4 people. Read the story on Yahoo news.
Has this freakish behavior become part of the required curriculum for failing students? What ever happened to the good old days when losers like this went off to the woods alone and did themselves in without involving innocents in their melodrama?
Why is this happening more and more frequently? One oft-ignored reason is that nobody teaches kids how to fail with dignity anymore. Starting in grade school, students are passed along to the next grade, regardless of achievement. Competition has been de-emphasized and every child is reassured they are doing fine.
This is done by soft-hearted to protect the children’s self-esteem. There are two problems with this strategy. First, the kids who are not performing at an adequate level know it and quite naturally rebel against the hypocrisy. Second, these children end up with an over-inflated sense of “I” that inevitably is burst like a fragile bubble the first time they encounter real adversity.
The simple fact of the matter is that everyone is going to fail at some point in their lives, no matter how brainy and/or slick one might be. Just ask the whiz kids at Enron about this principle. Failure and disappointment are a part of life and people need to learn how to deal with it and move on in a constructive manner.