How Social Promotion Ultimately Kills Self-Esteem

There's a phenomena in education called "social promotion", in which students who fail to achieve levels of aptitude around academics are still promoted to the next grade as a means of not stunting their self-esteem and allowing them to "catch up" academically through socializing them with people of their own age group. This is a pretty hot topic close to home, with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to put a stop to social promotion in New York City schools, despite critics who claim that forcing kids to be held back or attend summer school is essentially an academic death sentence for students with so little support in the first place.

Even in the Jersey suburbs I see elements of social promotion, and I think it stinks. My son is taking taekwondo, and the standards of promotion are laughably bad. Like educational social promotion, students are given offers to get "promoted through testing" not because their instructions see them as awesome or worthy of the next level, it's because they've attended an ample number of lessons as marked through a little timesheet that they "check in" before each lesson. This is known as promotion by "seat time" in educational circles (in other words, you're rewarded for sitting in a seat, not because you've actually learned a thing or two).

It's clear that their promotion isn't based on any significant progression in either taekwondo technique, Korean language or moral training. The kids who are blue belts perform their combinations with no greater crispness than the yellow belts, and for a master who supposedly stresses discipline and good behavior, there's no discernible difference between the conduct of the black belts and orange belts. It's not as if the black belts never fail to say "Yes, sir!" or bow on cue. Nor do the black belts stand at attention awaiting their drills. They may have memorized a longer combination, but watching these supposed black belts make me pine for Johnny Lawrence and the Cobra Kai. Those guys may have been jackasses, but at least they showed discipline (in class) and they could effectively beat the crap out of scrawny kids from New Jersey.

But here's where it really becomes a problem. I saw kids who flubbed their promotion exams terribly - both in the technique and interview portions - and they were still given their belts. Not only does it send the "socially promoted" kid a bad message of "there are no consequences of lack of preparation or not performing well", it also completely undercuts the kids that actually do practice and prepare. So it's setting up a scenario where Daniel may look up and say to his mother and me, "Why did you make me work so hard to memorize my Korean phrases?" because it apparently doesn't matter. I find it odd that at a Korean-run taekwondo school that they'd somehow lose the core value that it's a fundamentally good thing to teach that hard work makes a difference.

But maybe that's a larger societal problem. Maybe parents have become so obsessed with self-esteem that we've turned achievement into a entitlement as opposed to reward that has to be earned. Maybe it's possible that Master Yoo feels the pressure of parents who imply that they'd yank their kids out of this extracurricular if the kids weren't blissfully happy, though it'd be unfortunate if he's putting tuition income over principle, turning his Dojang into a promotion-factory cash-cow. Of course, the last laugh will be on the students, when their self-esteem will be exposed as counterfeit "feel-good" nonsense, as opposed to a self-esteem based upon real accomplishment.

This societal problem is one that I wrote about in an earlier post about the spirit of entitlement which I think may very well push us even further down the ladder as our nation fights to be globally competitive. I worry about a generation of Americans who think highly of themselves and then get crushed when they compete against the best of the rest of the globe. Results matter in the real world, why are we shy about teaching that at a young age?

Bring back the Cobra Kai!