Sometimes a quick look at the headlines and your forced to ponder, just how lazy as a people, Americans are becoming. A Nine-year-old baseball player, turned out to be too good a baseball player, with a fastball that tops out at about 40mph that he was barred from playing at the Youth Baseball League in New Haven. The boy, Jericho Scott, it turns out, he hasn’t hurt anyone. In the past, what would happen, is that if you were good, you would serve as a motivation, for other players to get better. But in this case, other kids, will continue logging in more hours, behind their TV screens, playing Nintendo and X-box. Simply because mediocrity is becoming the norm, and if you dare become exceptional. You are going to be punished, so why not just join the lazy masses, with a route that’s so easily, you’ll be richly rewarded, with obesity. Soon, a new rule will be passed to do away with sports as the kids are too fat. It will be harmful to their fat asses.

It’s easy to put up an argument that now that less time is put in sports, more time would be invested in academics. That’s not the American way; things are being to be set-up to be easier. The federal law sanction of No Child Left Behind is changing how schools are judged making state achievement exams easier for students to pass.

Nearly 82 percent of the state’s public schools met the federal goals on the 2006 state math and reading tests, compared with 74 percent the year before, according to a Tribune analysis of state data. But 450 of the nearly 3,100 elementary and high schools that met the federal goals did so because state education officials changed the way students’ test scores were counted, not because students necessarily did better on the tests, according to the state data. Those schools made the grade because the state built in a cushion that allows subgroups of students to meet a lower passing threshold than initially required under the law.

The findings come after the federal government reported students have been making much more progress in math than in reading in recent years.

When the bar is lower, you work less harder. This gives the parents, educators and public the false impression that younger students are on the track for future success but the reality is, they’re being set up for unhappy surprises in the future.

If this is a nation that’s to continue setting the course as a world leader. Then it needs a leader who will raise the bar, higher and make the people work smarter. People who will learn to reward exceptional performance and develop great distaste for mediocrity. And the future will hold promise and pleasant surprises.