Asparagus for an A, Cabbage for a C
February 20th, 2007 Believe it or not, school is a very egalitarian system.
However elitist a given school may be, kids with better grades do not have fancier uniforms, they do not eat nicer food at school lunches, they do not get better chairs in classrooms or better spots in the schoolyards. This absence of objective short-term reward in return for a learning effort is probably why so few schoolkids are eager to learn more and better. This is totally rational: if there is no reward, why bother. If you do, you are stupid and are treated as such. School excellence is frowned upon by popular kids, and bland mediocrity is the golden standard if one wants to get respect from one’s teenage peers.
In addition, this egalitarian system gives kids the wrong idea about society: when they leave school, they will be totally inadapted to today’s economic system when one does not get anything for nothing. Unless one strives to be among the best, one is gradually sucked down into the economic drain. The sooner they learn this sad truth, the better armed they will be.
Wouldn’t it be a fabulous incentive if kids with better grades were granted special privileges? Like choosing their meals, like sitting in plush first-row armchairs, like having the right to wear brand-new colorful designer uniforms and the right to publicly humiliate kids with lesser grades? When the mediocre pupils eat only cabbage soup, sit on wooden benches at the far row, wear crude second-hand linen uniforms and get daily insults from brilliant students, they will think twice before slacking.
Epilogue
Legend: You will eat when you are competitive
This poster was part of a large communication campaign by CCFD (Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development), which is a French charity organisation. I think this picture and the slogan did more for my political/economic awareness than anything before. Perhaps because it came at the right time, when I was ready to hear the message.
When you think of it, transposing the heartless capitalistic economic model to a smaller social scale (like a school or a family) inevitably looks like a monstrosity. If it is monstrous at a small scale, how can we find it acceptable at a large scale? Beats me.
You’re right that we ought to figure out some way to encourage kids to understand what the “real world” is like. And the problem with grades is that sometimes all they reflect is a child’s ability to take tests, and not hard work, effort, imagination, creativity, etc. Wish there were some way to take all that into consideration and have rewards tied to them.
Probably individual grades are the worst possible way to entice kids. And I just formed the idea that maybe the ruthless competition spirit that drives the “real world” down the drain is the consequence of the grading philosophy.
How about grading/rewarding the whole class? The competition would be with other classes (or classes of previous years), and kids would feel encouraged to work, learn and make the most of their abilities as a group. Maybe it would reflect more accurately the “real world” that we want for our children.
Mandarine, your idea would also foster cooperation as well as start giving a real world example to the kids of how valuable different talents are. If you have a group of kids trying to accomplish something together, suddenly you start to see why it is important to have some people who can measure accurately as well as those who are really great at wielding the power tools.
I have never liked the letter grades as a measure of excellence. I agree with Emilybarton that too often they reflect the ability to take tests. Now in this area we have the “Achievement Tests” which are being used to rate the effectiveness of the schools, which has resulted in children being taught what will be on the test to the exclusion of everything else. As a result, their overall education is lacking.
I remember a biology teacher handing out our graded papers, with nothing but Cs and Ds. She saw our gloomy faces and exclaimed: “just when will you start working for something else than grades?” And I remember thinking: “When you’ve got something else to offer!”
I never had to work for something like grades in biology. I just loved it. My most memorable Christmas present ever was when I got a REAL scientifical style microscope for christmas when I was 11. Then my mother taught me to make capillary tubes, and how to make a pure culture of parameciums, and then for the next 4 years suffered patiently a collection of 5 gallon jars of pond water containing pure cultures of various one celled organisms. My favorite were the vorticelli. Okay, I realize I am a weirdo.