Ego Based Society Sucks

When I was in High School, my friends and I were guided down a path of "achievement" mainly by praise and vague promises of future financial success. For example, I was a musician and eventually became the "first chair" player in the band in my section and participated in myriad band activities over the years. The real reason I did that was all my social connections were band people, but I never really liked playing and wasn't "into music" like a lot of people are. It never occurred to me to sit down and listen to jazz records for example. Then when I was in college, I had a music scholarship, so I was forced to keep playing. Once I was out of school I barely ever touched a musical instrument again. I have a twinge of nostalgia for it once in a while, but I know I won't practice and seek out opportunities to play, so I don't bother with it.

Lots of kids were in a similar situation in their particular niche--maybe it was sports; maybe it was some other performing art; maybe it was 4H or horse riding or something similar. The school scenario grooms people into a world where they can be the center of attention every once in a while and maybe win a ribbon or stand on a podium, or have an article about their performance in the school paper. Some kids might love the thing they're doing in faux competitions, others might be blase about it like I was with music.

One common factor to all those performance based ego-feeding sessions is the competition is really limited and is essentially a fraud. A good high school musician might never be a world class soloist that can play in an orchestra for example. A high school football player can be good within their entire conference but be miles away from a Division I college player.

Anyway, in short, life's problems really are nothing like the faux competitions kids are groomed to invest so much time and energy in. There's some valuable habits that can come from training to be a musician or athlete, but the overall structure of the programs is very misleading and damaging and artificially limits the horizons of kids.

The critique of "track based" education that sort of reformed schools in the US has some merit, but the system that's replaced it is obviously way worse. Schools replaced faux competition with praise of everybody and now the students are just entitled retards and brats based on the reports I've seen.

The Montessori school system seems better; they basically throw the kids into real life with training wheels, then the kids learn in the context of doing real things. Kids run businesses for example, or learn about biology in the context of a farm, and that kind of thing. I have no idea how that system works with respect to the ego based/faux competition scenarios I was constantly in, so I can't comment on it, but one of the major problems with the faux competition scenario is it trains the ego to stay in the world of lies instead of grooming students to deal with real reality.

For example, a business can fail no matter how hard a person works, how smart they are, etc... A person groomed to believe the praise they received their whole life might misjudge what "failure" means. There's a fake praise feedback loop instead of feedback based on real world performance, or real world scenarios where performance doesn't even impact the outcome, which is quite common in real life.

Grounding kids in real world scenarios would produce a much healthier society based on realism, but it's a lot easier to manipulate a population that's trained to pursue ribbons, trophies, and public praise and fake money.