A parable for our times...
Once upon a time, there was an enormously talented young student who stood head and shoulders above his peers, and was the teacher's favourite student and the envy of the poorer students. He was polite, punctual, respectful, helpful, and had all of the traits that teachers wish every student had. Unfortunately, they didn't, and a number of his fellow classmates were rude, obnoxious, and spent far too much time fooling around entertaining themselves at the expense of the entire class's education.
The teacher, who was that day trying to present a lesson on cooperation, decided to show the students the benefit of cooperation. She came up with an idea to essentially give everyone a free grade bump. This is the story of how it turned out for the worse.
The teacher called the class to order (well, as much as she could, with the lazy and poorly disciplined students interrupting), and announced the day's project. She would give an assignment to one group of students in the class, making one student the team leader, and everyone in the class would get a grade based on how well that team did on the assignment. One member of the team would be chosen, and he would be given the task of taking all the best ideas of the team on how to complete the assignment, and writing them up to hand in.
Naturally, the A+ student was chosen to be the team leader, because the teacher's idea all along was to give everyone a good grade, and she trusted him to take only the good ideas on the project (which, secretly, she knew would be almost all his) and write them up. But then, to the surprise of the class, she filled much of the team with the classroom clowns who disrupted learning and goofed off every chance they got.
The class as a whole was dismayed, but our teacher was not, because she 'knew' her star pupil would be able to write up a very good assignment, and hoped that this might actually make the goof-offs believe that there was a way for them to contribute to something greater than themselves, and benefit from cooperation. Some of the children in the class even kept saying to the worried ones, 'Don't worry, he's very bright, he knows exactly what he's doing, we'll all get A's, no matter who works on the project with him!'
Now for all his intellectual prowess, the class genius had one fatal flaw. He wanted to be liked by EVERYONE. So when the goof-offs who made up so much of his team started coming up with really stupid things they thought would be funny to put in the project, he actually decided to add them, figuring that it would make the screw-ups happy, and he would include enough academically rigorous material to offset the silliness so that they could still get a good grade.
But the goof-offs, seeing that he would actually do that, kept coming up with ever more stupid things they wanted in, until suddenly, the good student realized he no longer had time to write up the parts of the paper that would get the good grade, and it was time to turn the assignment in.
The next day, the teacher came in, and had to announce, to her entire class, that the assignment was essentially a failure, and that they had all gotten 'D-'s for the day, simply because she didn't want to give them F's. A lesson had indeed been learned, but it was not the lesson she had wanted to teach.
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Which lesson are we going to learn?