Forward-thinking principle David Fabrizio of Ipswich Middle School finds himself in hot water for taking the “progressive” ethos to its absurd extremes: he canceled Honors Night because it makes the kids who didn’t earn honors feel bad.

“The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average,” Fabrizio penned in his first letter to parents.

Fabrizio also said he decided to make the change because academic success can be influenced by the amount of support a student receives at home and not all students receive the same level of emotional and academic support at home.

Some have expressed surprise that he would come to this conclusion, because he comes from a coaching background and ostensibly “believes competitive environments are healthy and necessary.”  Those who find this difficult to reconcile with canceling Honors Night clearly haven’t checked out the everybody-gets-a-trophy-just-for-showing-up rules under which “competitive” school sports now operate.

So… if the level of support students receive at home is a crucial factor in their success, doesn’t canceling Honors Night remove a potent incentive to parents to provide that support?  Won’t all students be inspired to work harder by the possibility of winning recognition as an honors recipient?  Discard such icy logic, because we move now through the land of warm feelings and academic mediocrity, where the really important thing is to teach kids that nobody is responsible for their own success or failure.  Winners cheat.  Honors students get unfair amounts of support from their high-quality parents, so there’s no reason to celebrate any “achievement” on their part, especially if it makes less accomplished students feel bad.

Another recent horror story from the world of academia found teachers in Wisconsin suffering “racially charged” indoctrination into the evils of “white privilege.”  Bullet points dispensed by this program included:

In this country the institutional system supports the dominance of white people.

More frequently than not, white people take advantage of privileges generated by a racist society.

We are given a false sense of superiority, a belief that we should be in control and in authority, and that people of color should be maids, servants, and gardeners and do the less valued work of our society.

There appears to be a national trend that can be attributed [to] the conservative agenda that currently exist[s] with former closet racist[s] leaving the closet and entering the light to write policies that support covert and overt racism that impact[s] students of color.

Your tax dollars at work, parents of Wisconsin!  (And tax serfs across the fruited plane, since this program reportedly got federal money.)

Look past the racial grievance mongering, and efforts by useless educrats to siphon money away from real education into their bank accounts, and you’ve got another burst of essentially the same transmission that middle-school principal in Ipswitch is sending.  No one succeeds on their own, and no one is responsible for their own failures.  The game is hopelessly rigged against you, in countless ways.

It’s not a long journey from these premises to the conclusion that only benevolent government authority can bring any semblance of “fairness” into our wildebeest lives, shielding us from the predatory forces that stalk the shadows around daily life.  Virtue and equality must be imposed.  High achievers cheated somehow – they enjoyed the benefits of racist privilege, or they exploited the surplus value of labor to make demon profit, or they “stole” their riches from “the people” by taking disproportionate advantage of our lovely public infrastructure.

The trick is to sell lots of people on the essential belief that powerful forces they can never overcome on their own have placed them at a permanent disadvantage, from which only the Anointed Ones can rescue them.  That sale is easier to make if achievement is treated as fundamentally illegitimate, and you can’t do that while simultaneously celebrating achievement.