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Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.

But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.

We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.

We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.

Introduce value, insight and direction with each engagement.

Consistently create, contribute, and reinforce service and value.

Establish and nurture beneficial relationships online and in the real world as long as doing so is important to your business.

keep you connected to day-to-day engagement.

becoming a resource to your communities.

Give back, reciprocate, and recognize notable contributions from participants in your communities.

If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair

whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner

the purpose of copyright—to promote the advancement of knowledge through balancing the rights of owners and users.

In some cases, this will mean using a clip or excerpt; in other cases, the whole work is needed. Whenever possible, educators should provide proper attribution and model citation practices that are appropriate to the form and context of use.

educators should provide reasonable protection against third-party access and downloads

educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their own classroom work

Students’ use of copyrighted material should not be a substitute for creative effort

Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a manner appropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted work repurposes or transforms the original.

but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs simply to exploit their appeal and popularity

material that is incorporated under fair use should be properly attributed wherever possible

attribution, in itself, does not convert an infringing use into a fair one.

If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existing media content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wide audiences under the doctrine of fair use.

When sharing is confined to a delimited network, such uses are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine

there are no cut-and-dried rules (such as 10 percent of the work being quoted, or 400 words of text, or two bars of music, or 10 seconds of video).

Transformativeness, a key value in fair use law, can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both

Copyright Act itself makes it clear that educational uses will often be considered fair because they add important pedagogical value to referenced media objects.

If educators or learners want to share their work only with a class (or another defined, closed group) they are in a favorable position

if work is going to be shared widely, it is good to be able to rely on transformativeness

courts have found that asking permission and then being rejected has actually enhanced fair use claims.

We don’t know of any lawsuit actually brought by an American media company against an educator over the use of media in the educational process

many ways for a school to be “good

Normative questions are not easily settled by empirical means

a craft model of professionalism

Thus requiring the television program to be judged by the same assessment methods as for the classroom lecture unfairly measures the potential value of the TV program. In this example, it may be better to use both methods: didactic teaching to teach understanding, then a documentary approach to apply that understanding. (Note that a television program could do both, but the classroom lecture could not.)

many media are better than one.

The use of different media also allows for more individualization and personalization of the learning, better suiting learners with different learning styles and needs.

technology on its own does not lead to the transfer of meaning.

This of course is what we do with technology in education. We try either to incorporate new technology into old formats, as with clickers and lecture capture, or we try to create the classroom in virtual space, as we do with learning management systems. What we are still developing but not yet clearly recognizing are formats, symbols systems and organizational structures that exploit the unique characteristics of the Internet as a medium.

Given the need to create and interpret meaning when using media, trying to use computers to replace or substitute for humans in the education process is likely to be a major mistake, at least until computers have much greater facility to recognize, understand and apply semantics, value systems, and organizational factors,

it is equally a mistake to rely only on the symbol systems, cultural values and organizational structures of classroom teaching as the means of judging the effectiveness or appropriateness of the Internet as an educational medium.

Change is always complicated. A the least it involves people, personalities, cultures, beliefs, values, emotions and identity.