Respected Tennessee teacher Samira Hardcastle resigned after being pressured not to flunk a student who didn’t complete a homework assignment. The student’s parents complained to school administration after she refused to change the student’s grade, and school staff ordered the grade changed. When Hardcastle refused to comply, school administration changed the grade themselves.

For schools like the one at which Hardcastle taught, it seems the grade itself is far more important than the intellectual and moral development of a child.

Unexcused late work or failure to turn in an assignment at all should be unacceptable. Except in a few fringe cases where prior authorization is given for an extension or exception, school should be one of the first environments in which children learn to do what they are obligated to do – and do it on time.

“They can’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” Hardcastle said of current students. “They believe everything should be given to them, and it ultimately takes away their work ethic. There’s no pride in anything that they accomplish, which will seep into the work industry as they grow older.”

Hardcastle’s searing indictment is spot on, touching on an aspect of the oft-bemoaned plight of the modern student in a way most overlook. Seasoned teachers constantly complain about how entitled their students are, and most even understand that this will have a negative effect on how they operate in a future career. But few acknowledge how a parade of such graduates entering the labor force will have macro effects on entire industries.

Indeed, just as conservatives scoffed that campus liberals would be in for a rude awakening when they had to operate in the “real” apolitical world, only to find that the real world simply became the activist’s proverbial campus, educators who think that their students’ laziness or entitlement will only make it harder for them to get or keep jobs are missing the bigger problem. Companies have to hire someone, and the generations who were educated in the manner in which Hardcastle’s school administrators are educating their students will be able to bring that same attitude and work ethic to the workforce. Such an attitude will denigrate future industries, as these students enter the labor force and bring industry standards and practices down to their level.

We’re already seeing this happen. Customer service is worse, wait times are longer, and food service employees often can’t make quality food or handle a rush anymore. White collar jobs are dominated by people eager to use AI to accomplish a much worse, albeit more easily completed, version of what a properly-applied human brain could do.

The general degradation of work quality is why we no longer – or at least very rarely – make great buildings, great companies, great art, or great books. This is getting worse with time, especially with the influx of third-world migration, but it is not necessarily a plight that only plagues Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Entitlement plagues generations back to the very boomers who opine about “lazy and entitled young people these days.”

Hardcastle’s stand is exactly how parents should respond to the world’s relentless pursuit of “easy” and “good enough.” Most children will and should experience a bad grade or a last place or an academic rejection. A parent’s instinct is to protect their children from such things, but failing is often the greatest gift you can give both your child and the world in which he will live and work one day.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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