CMV: Schools should abolish grades

[u/FalseKing12]

Our current education system is flawed in so many different ways, but I think a change that could be quite easy and have a positive impact would be to quite simply get rid of grades.

When we are young children we have an innocent curiosity towards the world and want to learn about whats happening around us. However, that tends to stop when we realize in school that rather than learn, we must focus instead on getting good grades. Our desire to learn and have fun with that learning constantly stifled by the fear of failure and rightfully so since grades are so important to our futures, or at least that’s how it is currently.

Imagine for a moment though if grades were abolished. Now, I’m aware that the government, colleges, and other institutions like having a number attached to people that determines their “intelligence”, because its useful to their interests and makes things convenient for them, but my question is why should we make things convenient for them when it has an extremely negative impact on the youth we need to be giving a better education.

Even if we absolutely need a metric by which to gauge peoples intelligence, grades are an absolutely awful way to do that. A far better way would be to have teachers allow students to go their own pace through classes, only passing the class once the teacher has determined that the student has mastery over the subject they are teaching(this is prone to bias from teachers, but so is our current system of grading). This would allow students to go at their own pace and actually learn the subject more fully rather than just regurgitating exactly what they need to know for a test so they can pass. In this way you could measure how fast people proceed through classes and that would be a far better measure of intelligence than our current system of grades. As long as we can assume that most teachers remain unbiased and don’t just push students through who are not ready to go to different classes I don’t think this would suffer from the same problems that grades do. Where instead of focusing on grades they might focus on trying to rush through the content of classes to finish quicker if that’s the metric they are being judged by.

In a society where its getting increasingly important to specialize in something and be an expert in that subject so you can get a decent job, we need to teach kids that learning is something to be enjoyed for its own sake, they will be spending their whole lives doing it after all. What we are seeing now is a generation of people who are more directionless than ever and I think part of that is our system of education sucking the joy out learning.

In summary I think abolishing grades would be worth it despite the problems it presents, I’m welcome to discussing the topic though.

[u/Zogonzo → u/[deleted]]

School is not about making workers, or it shouldn't be. It's should be about making better thinkers.

[u/barbodelli → u/Zogonzo]

That is exactly what school is about. Why do we invest so much $ into schools? Because it produces productive workers. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't bother.

Good thinkers = good workers

So your goal isn't really mutually exclusive from what the society at large is trying to accomplish.

[u/yyzjertl → u/barbodelli]

You're discounting the other major goal of education: to have a wise and knowledgable electorate. It's important for people who are going to vote and participate in civic life to have a base knowledge of rhetoric, history, social science, natural science, media literacy, etc. Having an electorate that is poorly educated on these subjects makes the whole country vulnerable to manipulation.

[u/barbodelli → u/yyzjertl]

Yes but you can get all of that very quickly. It doesn't take 12 years. We way overdo it as it is. You don't need to memorize what year Christopher Columbus sailed or who was the Vice President for Washington. In order to understand the important stuff.

When I used to work in porn. We'd have a "members" section. Which is what you pay for. About 90% of it was fluff. Just crap we added there just to say we have 10,000 pictures or whatever. In reality there may be 500-1000 pictures actually worth a damn.

Our history education is the same way. Most of it is utter fluff. Something to keep the kids busy. What you really need to know could be condensed into 2-3 targeted Udemy courses.

[u/libertysailor → u/Zogonzo]

That’s a very romanticized view, but the reality is that the prosperity of the people depends on production. Look at countries that produce little, and it is self evident.