Schools should give grades

First, some housekeeping: Regarding your "real-world expectations" argument (your refutation #1), almost all of your argument amounts to agreeing with me that the resemblance between schools and the workplace is a coincidence. Then at the end you say, "Even if it is a coincidence, it is a beneficial coincide to maintain because grades mirror real-world expectations." As I have illustrated with my musician example, for a learning environment to mirror the real world often has disastrous consequences. "I made a distinction early on in this debate that Con seems to have forgotten. Grades are administrative in function. ... Con confuses the respective purposes of the two is arguing that grades should be abolished because they don't help students." Funny you should say this, because both of the new arguments you made in this round ("grades are necessary for college and beyond" and "grades reward hard-working students") argue that the function of grades is to help students. You also make the same argument in part of your refutation, and you made the same argument in the previous round (that's why I refuted it -- I didn't "forget" anything). Now I must admit I'm a bit confused, because you are contradicting yourself. I will try to ignore this and address your arguments as they come. Anyway I'm glad you decided to argue that grades are useful to students, because that's what most people believe and I was hoping to get the chance to refute it. You make essentially the same argument in three places: 1. "without grades as a differentiator and motivator, students only have their aspirations to guide them" 2. "grades reward hard-working students" 3. "grades are a motivator for perpetuating retention of information" I am going to lump them all together for my refutation. The essence of your argument is that grades are a motivator and that without grades, there would be no motivation for students to do any work at all ("schools will likely experience a "Race to the Bottom" problem in which all of the students compete to get by doing the least amount of work"). I first want you to recognize that this is purely an assumption on your part, unless you have actually seen a grade-free school suffer from this problem. As a matter of fact, there are lots of grade-free schools, and there have been since the late 1960's, and none of them on record have ever experienced a "Race to the Bottom" problem. An example is the Sudbury Valley School, which has more than 30 imitators across the world and gives no grades or rankings of any kind. From my source: "90% of graduates end up going to college. That's better than the national average of 66% (from the same income bracket). More interestingly, 42% of graduates end up becoming entrepreneurs." [1] [2] You can visit my sources for insight into how it works, but in essence, believe it or not, children have an intrinsic, inborn drive to learn, which we (almost) universally stamp out with school. I like to imagine a lunch lady who feeds her kids by shoving food into their mouths; naturally the kids resist and spit the food out. But a lunch lady who has only ever seen kids eat this way might conclude that kids just don't like food. I hope I have demonstrated in this debate that grades have a detrimental effect on children's learning, and that a grade-free system is a viable alternative. First I showed that the purpose of grades is to help teachers, administrators, etc., not children. Then I showed that in a graded system children are motivated to circumnavigate real learning in order to get grades. I also argued that grades transform the classroom from a place of learning into a place of performance, which makes stressful what should be a fun and exciting journey of discovery. Finally, I offered a real-world example of children succeeding in school without grades. Thank you. [1] http://blog.makewonder.com... [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com...