There is tremendous social pressure in America to set the bar as low as possible. I first saw it in high school. My classmates resented every high grade a teacher passed out. It took a few confrontations to figure out what the problem was. The students had a collective plan to lower the grading curve. A’s were still possible. They were merely achieved not by the objective measure of total learning, but by the subjective comparison with the level of other students learning. As a result, every one could achieve a passing grade with less effort.

I couldn’t accept this because I wasn’t raised that way. My parents placed a high value on learning and never accepted “good enough” as good enough. My teachers in the DOD high school in Germany also maintained high performance standards based on the assumption that every graduate of the school was college bound and needed proper preparation. Department of Defense schools routinely out-perform civilian school in all standardized tests. Perhaps this is the reason. Perhaps it is because military parents are not notorious for tolerating slacking kids.

As an adult I have seen underachieving almost institutionalized in the work place. A new employee who works too hard is “educated” by veteran employees about making others look bad by comparison, or for raising the expectations of management. In fact, there are many examples of hard work being punished while a laggard is rewarded, often promoted. At one job, I was with a group of subcontractors hired to bring a project back on schedule. We were all ex-military with strong work ethics. In three years we took a project that was nearly a year behind and completed it four years ahead of schedule. This saved the government millions of dollars and got the primary contractor a huge bonus. Since we were subcontractors we didn’t get a cut of the bonus. What we got was laid off. Our hard work made us unemployed.

I wonder when America got to be so, well lazy? It has to be fairly recent since I remember listening to the lessons and stories of older generations as a child. Americans were known the world over for their Yankee Ingenuity. The Great Depression might have crippled most countries, it almost did ours in, but the working class simply would not sit still. The nation worked its way out of the depths of the depression doing whatever work they could find.

We still have the longest work week and are the world standard for productivity. However, we aren’t living up to our own standard. Sooner or later, the nation will have to wake up or it will find itself playing catch up to a modernized, industrious nation with a better work ethic.