School Awards: Motivating or Demoralising

If your child is at school at the moment, then you might have noticed that there is a lot of talk about how children should be encouraged to achieve their goals. Many teachers have been forced to stop putting crosses in exercise books, and are instead being told to just put a red dot when something is not quite right. In addition to this, sports days are no longer allowed to declare winners, because this means that there will also be losers. However, is this taking things too far? Were children in the past damaged by the fact that they didn’t always win? I don’t think so.

When I was at school, we had sports day every year one day in the summer. There were always winners and losers of the sports, and I was never the winner because sport was just never something that I was good at. However, I never let this put me off, and there was no way that I wasn’t going to enjoy it just because I finished first. Of course there are always the children who like to be the best at everything; but even if they weren’t the best at sports, they would want to have the best clothes or the best games. Even though I didn’t win as an individual, we were in teams as well, and my team won a couple of times. This was great, and it made me realise that just because you don’t always win on your own, you can still contribute to a team effort, and that is something that is definitely worth knowing.

Another thing that has been stopped in schools is giving out awards at the end of each week. It would always be the same children who got them, because obviously those who did not behave well would not be able to get anything. Teachers said that it was unfair to deny those other children the chance to have awards, however I am of the opinion that if they wanted them, they should have behaved well. You would never stop giving out prizes in the Olympics because some people we’re good enough for them, so I don’t see why it should be any different just because the child it at school. 

Life is full of winners and losers, and it is important that children learn that they’re not going to be good at everything right from the beginning. If they do this, then this means that they can be encouraged to work on the things that they are good at, and this means that they won’t mind quite so much about the things that they’re not quite so good at. This is good, and is character building, so I am not entirely sure why schools feel as though they should be taking it away from the children who deserve the recognition.