Schools should give grades

For this discussion, we have to begin with the assumption that the purpose of school is to help children learn. First, I will show that grades cannot and are not intended to fulfill this purpose. Then I will show that grades inhibit children's learning. Most people involved in schools will say that grades are a sort of feedback for the children, so they know how well they are doing. If this were the case, grading would look much different. It would not be a simple handful of letters -- A's, B's, etc. -- but more nuanced and personalized. All the work the child does gets converted into letters because it is much easier for someone who does not know the child, or for a beaurocracy or a machine, to look at the letters and quickly determine whether the child is a winner or a loser. In addition, if grades were for the child they would be private, and not handed out to school administrators, politicians, and colleges, and kept on record for everyone to see for all time. Most people say that they want all children in schools to learn everything the schools are trying to teach them. But if any teacher ever achieved this, and all the children learned everything, she would have to give them all A's. But if she did that, she would get complaints from administrators, from parents, saying it must be a joke, you're not taking your job seriously, you need to be harder on the kids. In a school where everyone gets A's, an A is useless for helping a kid get into college or get a good job. From John Holt's "Instead of Education": "At another college a teacher told me that his department head told all members of the department that experience had shown that only a certain small percentage of students deserved A's, a slightly larger percentage B's, a few more C's, and so on, and that any department member who gave much higher grades than these would be considered to be "sabotaging" -- his word -- the grading system. Such experiences are common." See, grades are not feedback at all, but a way to rank children. They turn school from a place of learning to a place of performing. Children must always be on guard to perform their best. If you were learning to play the guitar for the first time, how would you feel if your teacher brought a clipboard and spent the lesson busily making marks? How about if the lesson took place in front of an audience? You would not feel comfortable experimenting or exploring, both of which are necessary precursors to learning. Learning should not and cannot be a performance. Because the ultimate goal of school is to earn a grade, a child who can find a way to earn the grade without learning will not learn. This could take the form of cheating, but it doesn't need to; there are plenty of legal ways to circumnavigate learning. Children in schools are always thinking, "What does the teacher want me to say?" not "How do I solve this problem?" They can watch the teacher for clues about what he wants. They can figure out how to do the specific problems on the test rather than developing a true understanding of how to solve problems. They can commit solutions to short-term memory just before a test. All children in all schools do these things all the time, except perhaps the extremely gifted.