Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | August 03, 2025
meme

Does it get any more stupid than this?

Education is, theoretically, intended to help people reach their potential. The goal is to help people lead happy, healthy, and prosperous lives, in which they thrive and can contribute to society. 

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Unfortunately, this requires people to strive, and when people strive, some will do worse than others in achieving their goals. This, we are told, violates the principle of "equity."

The left's solution? Nobody should be encouraged to succeed. 

I should first admit that I did horrendously on the Presidential Fitness Tests. I think I did 4 pullups, while a classmate of mine did 29 and could have gone on seemingly forever. The P.E. coach just said, "That's enough" to him. 

So I get why some people have bad memories about the fitness test. 

But really? Is the point to give people a warm fuzzy feeling for being out of shape, or encourage them to get in shape? For the liberals, it is the former, apparently. 

Ivory Burnett, 41, does not have fond memories of taking the Presidential Fitness Test.

It felt like a military recruitment exercise, she said, with all of her classmates watching as she struggled to run a mile and complete a sit-and-reach, a pull-up and other exercises.

“Doing that pull-up in front of everybody — that was the worst,” said Ms. Burnett, a freelance writer who described herself as taller and “a little chubbier” than her classmates at Carter and MacRae Elementary School in Lancaster, Pa.

“I never did a pull-up,” she said. “My jam was just to hang there and cut jokes.”

President Trump’s announcement on Thursday that he was reviving the fitness test, which President Barack Obama did away with in 2012, has stirred up strong feelings and powerful memories for generations of Americans who were forced to complete the annual measure of their physical abilities.

While some still proudly remember passing the test with flying colors and receiving a presidential certificate, many others recoil at the mere mention of the test. For them, it was an early introduction to public humiliation.

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I hate to say it, given that I am, shall we say, pudgy, but people should not feel good about being out of shape, because being out of shape is bad for your health. 

Obviously, teachers shouldn't let thinner and stronger students bully the fat kid, but the fat kid needs to know that he will die earlier and live less healthily because he is fat. Making him feel better about it is not helping him. Encouraging him to be fitter does. 

“It was survive or fail,” she said. “It was Darwinist.”

Some gym teachers said they never liked giving the test, knowing the effect it had on children who did not excel at sports.

“To tell you the truth, I dreaded it because I knew for some kids, it was one of the units they hated,” said Anita Chavez, who retired last year after 33 years as an elementary school physical education teacher in Minnesota.

This is the same logic that leads school districts to drop Gifted and Talented Education--I admit that I excelled there--because it made people who don't get in feel bad. 

Call it the Harrison Bergeron society, after Kurt Vonnegut's short story about a dystopian society that enforces equality for everybody by hobbling the physically gifted and disrupting the attention of the intellectually gifted. It is a world without beauty or achievement, but total equality. Everybody is reduced to the lowest common denominator. 

Now it is true that you can create a dystopian society by denigrating those whose skills are lower than others', and this, too, is destructive. We see this happen all the time, ironically, also on the left--just directed at a different demographic. When it comes to infants, eugenics is all the rage on the left. 

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Are you unhappy with your child's place in the genetic lottery? Abort it! This is how Iceland has almost eradicated the birth of Down Syndrome: by killing the children before they are born. 

With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased, but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.

Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women -- close to 100 percent -- who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.

The left is trying to eradicate Alzheimer's and other age-related diseases the same way, through the euphemistically-named MAID. 

But again, this is all to protect the feelings and enhance the convenience of the people who matter. The aged and the disabled are inconvenient, and the goal the left seeks is for everybody to feel good as much as possible. No stress, no strife, nobody better off than you. Everybody gets a participation award. 

It's a twisted view of the world. But one that suits their own view of utopia. 

It's for these same reasons that liberals find ways to hold back Jews and Asians in intellectual competitions in life. That's why colleges and universities set quotas--explicit or implicit--to reduce the number of high-achieving groups to create a false reality that is more comforting to them. 

We all know why Jews and Asians excel in certain fields: their cultures emphasize values that lead to intellectual excellence. I don't know if there is any genetic component at all--I actually doubt it, but what do I know?--but we all know that the average Asian and Jewish parents hound their kids to buckle down and work hard to enter certain fields. It is an impulse deeply embedded in the cultural values that animate these groups. 

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It is insane to undermine these impulses because they are societally beneficial, at least for the most part. You can overdo the pressure to excel, of course, as you can overdo anything. But encouraging kids to be slackers is far worse. 

If we can't all agree that encouraging kids to be physically fit--and to live with the consequences of not living in a "fair" world--then we are on the path to societal decline--as we are, at the moment. We need to reward people for doing good things, not ignore them because it might make somebody else feel bad. 

The point is not to make anybody feel bad--but to prod as many to step up and do better. Because it is good for them, and good for society as a whole. 

Isn't that obvious?























































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CRITICAL RACE THEORY EDUCATION GUN RIGHTS DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

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