The self-esteem madness continues

The same movement that in the past made headlines for replacing red pens with "friendlier" purple ones in correcting–oops, I mean "participating in a conversation on"–elementary students' homework assignments is now aiming to do away with another malicious destroyer of student self worth that dares to suggest that not everyone is equally accomplished by simple virtue of showing up: high school class rankings.

According to an article in today's New York Times, nearly 40 percent of the nation's high schools have either stopped calculating class rankings based on grades or have stopped reporting their rankings to colleges, on the grounds that they could "harm the chances of their very good, but not best, students" of getting accepted.

From the sound of it, basically, this is an issue of great concern to tiny, wealthy private schools where the entire senior class is oh so much more advanced than anyone in a lowly public school, it would be unjust to judge them on the same ranking scale when it comes to admissions.

But of course, it can't just be about numerical fairness and catering to wealthy, connected elites who can probably get in to any school they would like regardless of rank–it's also got to be about the all important self-esteem:

"The day that we handed out numerical rank was one of the worst days in my professional life," said Margaret Loonam, a co-principal and director of guidance at Ridgewood High School, a public school in northern New Jersey that stopped telling students and colleges about class rank a decade ago. "They were sobbing. Only one person is happy when you hand out rank: the person who is No. 1."

And how dare that person be happy–it's not like he or she might deserve to be at the top.

If I may descend into existential snobbery for a moment, our good friend Nietzsche had a bit to say on this that is rather fitting here:

Basically, most people (in his example, Christians specifically) are mediocre or worse, so they get together and tout a doctrine of egalitarianism in order to rationalize their "plebian weakness" and their resentment of those who work hard, develop their talents or exercise their gifts and thereby rise above the common lot. They make such people feel guilty for their accomplishments and attempt to keep them suppressed to safeguard their own fantasy world of equal merit for merely existing.

Thereby, egalitarianism, be it a belief in equal love in the eyes of God or safeguarding self-esteem by doing away with class grades, actually destroys justice–if you hold that justice rightly conceived is "equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal."

But I suppose, that's easy for me to say–I was No. 1.