Some rules kids shouldn’t learn in school

Sigh. Allegory sent back Sword of Darcy, though with very positive comments. Once again, “you’ve made the first cut!” turns out to be the harbinger of doom. Though not that dreadful a doom since I’ve already sent it out again.
Anyway, the turndown happens to tie in with something I was glancing over this weekend, an e-mail describing “Some Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School.” Although various e-mails attribute it to Bill Gates or Kurt Vonnegut, Snopes says the author is Charles J. Sykes. While I can’t but agree with some of them (“If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.”) the general tone has a kind of “Kids! Stay off my lawn!” attitude that doesn’t work for me (I seriously doubt it would work for anyone actually in high school—it’s more the sort of thing fortysomethings nod over appreciatively as they discuss how screwed-up the younger generation is).
There’s one rule on the list that I find particularly dissatisfying: “Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.”
The implication, I assume, is that back in the good old days when schools actually flunked students (and Mr. Sykes walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways), school grading did have some relationship to real life. And that’s nonsense. In school, averaging 69 percent makes you a failure; life is actually an easier grader.
Consider baseball: Any player who batted .69 would be a superhuman.
Consider writing: If 69 percent of my submissions resulted in sales, I’d have well over 100 stories and close to a dozen novels in print.
By high-school standards, me and the batter would both be getting Fs.
Nor does someone with a spectacular success have to worry about the rest of his grades dragging him down. When Edison was working on the lightbulb, he failed hundreds of times, succeeded once; he’s still the man who invented the lightbulb, not the man who kept screwing it up.
Winston Churchill had many failures: His tenure as Navy Secretary in WW I was a mess and he clung to the British Empire when the world was clearly moving toward independence. His shining success during World War II still enshrines him as one of the big names of the 20th century.
And the writer who pens one spectacular story can go down through history as the author of that story, even if the rest of his work is mediocre pablum.
Mr. Sykes sounds so very pragmatic and realistic and no-nonsense, but his “rules” are more bark than bite.