Beating up on poor little disadvantaged kids

Got to tread lightly here. Any time you start criticizing kids - especially minority kids - you run a risk.
But I was at this fund-raiser last night for a group that is really a great organization. In fact, I used to go one of these clubs when I was a boy and was fortunate enough to be part of their boxing program. They were connected to the Golden Gloves.
I probably belonged more in the Copper Gloves, or Tin - and slightly tarnished at that.
Anyway, this was a really nice fund-raiser, a dinner with a silent auction at a really nice venue. And there was a lot of money raised for this worthy organization.
But the organization of the organization for this dinner was awful. And unfortunately some of the performances by the kids was, well, minimal at best.
That's not the kids fault. I blame the adults. And while I don't really know for sure, I can't help but feel the problem is that the adults in this organization simply didn't have high enough expectations for the kids they work with.
And even though I watched and applauded with everyone else when the kids did their thing, down deep I felt like we were simply applauding the kids for showing up.
Kind of like handing out participation trophies.
I honestly believe these kids could have done everything they did better.
When did we set our expectations for kids so low? Particularly kids from "tough" circumstances, whatever those tough circumstances - one parent, lower economic situation, "bad" neighborhood - might be.
This is a bit of a ramble, but hopefully you'll see the point in here somewhere.
I can't help but remember back in the 1980s, when the world finally realized what many of us knew all along: that too many of our highest level of college athletes were uneducated, if not in some cases actually illiterate. There are documented cases of this, and many more that I knew first-hand but out of respect for the athletes themselves I never reported.
So embarrassed college officials decided to raise academic standards on athletes with minimum test scores and grade point averages.
Who do you think complained? Black coaches, administrators, pastors, etc. They all said that raising these academic standards would punish black kids who came from disadvantaged environments. Oh, they screamed racism.
But you know what happened? These poor disadvantage kids - not all black, by the way - met the minimum standard!
Now, it's easy to be cynical and say that the teachers started fixing grades and other people were taking tests, and undoubtedly there was some of that. But I talked to these athletes almost every day over the course of 25 years, mostly kids in the Southeastern Conference, which recruited the best athletes in the country, many of them minorities, and many from what we'd consider disadvantaged situations.
And the truth is, every year they showed up articulate, better educated, more confident - simply smarter.
It wasn't the last time academic minimum standards were raised, either. And every time the standards  - the expectations - went up, the kids that were supposedly going to be discriminated against improved and met the standard. At least, a lot of them did.
Now, it's a whole 'nother discussion about whether these kids even belonged in college in the first place. That's something I'll blog about on another day.
But every time the NCAA raised minimum academic requirements - over the loud objections of coaches and well-meaning interested parties - the kids invariably met the standard.
RABBIT TRAIL: Survey after survey lists education as a top priority of citizens of this country, and yet those same surveys say those citizens don't want taxes raised to contribute to education. I saw one today. And while it seems like an inconsistency, I  wonder if the citizenry may not be smart enough to realize throwing more money at a problematic education process is not the answer - at least, not until schools make better use of the resources they have now. And I'm convinced that if the citizenry saw better results coming out of the public school system, they'd be more in favor of improving funding. Of course, they may also discover that public schools don't really need more funding at all, just better accounting.
Anyway, do you see my point? Somehow, too many of us feel like kids want to be appreciated for simply being kids. So we give trophies for just being on the team, we give trophies for finishing in last place, we put kids up on stages and call them "choirs'' when all they're doing is singing in unison (and off-key) to a tape, or we dress them up in nice costumes and let them "dance'' and we all applaud and cheer because, well, "they tried - and we don't want them to get discouraged and quit."
Guess what? Discouragement is part of life. And the sooner we teach our kids that, the sooner they learn how to deal with it and learn to overcome it.
And I'm convinced they will. I read a study about gangs - tough gangs, in inner cities, the kind that makes outsiders terrified to go downtown. The "expert" was talking about something called "Maslow's hierarchy of needs," where this guy Maslow said humans have a descending order of fundamental needs: physical fulfillment (food, warmth, etc); safety (love, belonging); and self-esteem.
The idea was that whoever provides those three will command love and loyalty, and a lot of well-meaning organizations provide the first two. What they don't do a good job of is building true self-esteem.
Gangs do that, by making the kids do hard things to prove themselves. And there are consequences for those kids that fail to do the hard things. Yet the kids gravitate to the gangs.
But here's the final thing, as I try to wrap up and get myself out of this mess: you don't give a kid self-esteem by handing out trophies or telling them they are great for simply showing up. Kids aren't that dumb. They will accept that, because all human beings want that sense of love or belonging.
But down deep, they know they didn't deserve anything. They don't feel any better about themselves simply because they go home with a trophy. Chances are, they wind up with so many trophies that the trophies themselves become meaningless.
Gangs do that for kids. They accept them, but they make them earn respect. They're often unforgiving and judgmental, but the kids flood to the gangs because the atmosphere provides them with their basic needs - including a sense of pride in carrying out assigned difficult (often illegal) tasks that give the kids a sense of self-esteem.
The best thing we can do for kids is challenge them. That's how they learn self-esteem.
And it's up to us - the adults - to be willing to do it.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.