17 ms·

The pressure to achieve academically is a crime against learning

232 points by tokenadult 11y ago

hoopd 11y ago
> ....for our willingness to put their long-term developmental and emotional needs before their short-term happiness. For our willingness to let their lives be just a little bit harder today so they will know how to face hardship tomorrow. Isn't decreasing the pressure to be a perfect student the exact opposite of letting their life be a little bit harder today?
- crpatino 11y ago
  Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges. And to quit whenever the chance of getting any less than an "A-" grade seems uncertain. The whole article builds the argument that since adults are only concerned with the kid's results but cannot be bothered on how those are achieved, all kids eventually learn to fake it and end up sacrificing their intellectual curiosity for the sake of self-worth validation from their parents/teachers. Therefore, making the student's life a little bit harder today means to push them to tackle real challenges and making peace with the fact that they might spoil their perfect record in the process.
  - hoopd 11y ago
    > Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges. That's nowhere near becoming a perfect student and it isn't even high on the scale of parental pressure.
    - crpatino 11y ago
      That's what the article said, no how I think things should be. With my own children, I've never make a fuss about bad grades (which thankfully have been few and far between). I do care about them giving their best effort, and let them know in no uncertain terms. But I know plenty of parents that are minimally involved but nonetheless demand "good grades" from their kids. Fooling those into believing their kids are raising academic stars would be extremely easy.
1971genocide 11y ago
I call this "Too smart to fail". When I was a below average student, I used to have a lot less stress. The expectation was so much lower. Once I started getting As across the board I started panicking. The problem is we have essentially "privatized" learning. What that means is once we started attaching money to learning via the university industrial complex and cheap credit. Your knowledge became a store of wealth like your house ( which itself is a terrible idea ). Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities. If you get As you get to go to Stanford and be 10X in debt as someone who went to a Community College. It reminds me of the argument by Louise CK, where loans are much easier to get when you have liquidity already. This has lead to a situation of "Too smart to fail" among students who get good grades, when in reality we should be allocating more education resources to weaker students in society and handing them the most credit, and not celebrate grades so heavily, but celebrate when that education leads to value in society.
- daemin 11y ago
  Well there's something to be said about helping people up to a certain level, but there's also the point that we should be encouraging people to kick ass at what they are good at. So instead of having a bunch of average people we can have a bunch of people that excel at different specialised tasks and so we are better off for it.
- hoopd 11y ago
  > Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities. What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private school. Half of the top ten engineering schools are public: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... The top ten liberal arts schools are all private: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
  - 11y ago
sandworm101 11y ago
I do not think the pressure comes directly from the need for higher grades. I think it come from how those grades are created. I my academic history (highschool, undergrad, law school, now teaching) I only felt real stress where grades were incremental. Take my civpro class. We had an assignment after only three lectures, an assignment worth 5% of our grade. I had barely wrapped my head around law school and already my final grade, my scholarship, was on the line. I did poorly on that assignment, immediately chopping a few points off my final grade. On the other hand my crimlaw class had no assignments, just a big exam at the end. That class allowed me the time to figure things out and was much less stressful. The highschool kids I talk to today are in a constant panic. ((That's how I see it. For them it's just normal.)) Grades are ridiculously high, with class averages well north of 90%. So every test, every graded assignment, requires the focus of a final exam. They cannot afford diversion or outside learning. Each week is prep for the next test and each of those tests directly impacts their grade. Have a bad week, or even a bad afternoon, and it might stick with you for years. They don't dare read anything that isn't assigned for fear of not aligning with the teacher's "learning plan". If it didn't come from teacher it isn't on next week's test and is therefore useless. Imho this constant "exam mode" is the real source of stress. So drop the microtests. Give them the one big exam and let them relax and learn at their own pace the rest of the time.
- onionjake 11y ago
  I took a class from Matt Might and I like how we were graded: "Your grade is your tests grade or your projects grade, whichever is higher." http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/#grading http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/#gradin... This allowed both the really good test takers to succeed and also those who did better on projects, without all the pressure.
  - toomim 11y ago
    ...at the expense of people who are moderately good at both.
    - 11y ago
sanxiyn 11y ago
Learning is a beautiful thing when it happens, but it mostly does not happen in education. Learning is a delicacy, a luxury, thing which not everyone will appreciate. On the other hand, vocational training is necessary and most people appreciate the necessity. It is time to officially redirect universal education to vocational training. Expecting education to provide learning is expecting too much. By expecting too much we will only be disappointed.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  I disagree that learning is a delicacy. Learning is an innate human behavior. It's what separates us from the animals. It's how we became apex predators across multiple biomes stretching across the globe. You can see this in children, they have unbridled curiosity and depthless enthusiasm for learning. But they have a limited tolerance for tedium and bureaucracy, and those are in extreme abundance in education today. It's a system that's practically designed to beat out any hint of desire for learning, intellectualism, and reading. In some ways it's a wonder that any vestige of those things survive at all through such experiences.
mc32 11y ago
I'm all for teaching kids curiosity and how to learn and how to prepare to be ready for a future years hence. Surely we need to question methodology and results thereof. Yet for all of one child's failure there are many other successes. So it's more a matter of what methodology gets your educational system the greatest results for people entering adult society years hence. Any system will be a disservice to some. Perhaps for some children tailored or perhaps less structured home schooling or other alternative forms of education would be more beneficial to them in the long run. On the other hand, it's not as if east Asia and south Asia are doing poorly economically due to their focus on achievement. On the contrary they are very vital economic engines, china due to surpass the us in ppp GDP. So, its not clear that this model is that detrimental. Any model will incur casualties, it's up to us to seek better alternatives with fewer casualties but proof of the pudding is in the eating.
- aianus 11y ago
  Total GDP is meaningless. China is nowhere near the US in PPP GDP per capita.
donflamenco 11y ago
There is a field of study around "mindset". The fairly famous book is called Mindset by Carol Dweck. This infographic summarizes the ideas very well. http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png
- dbhattar 11y ago
  My attitude had always been "if it is grades people want, they will get it" i.e. to get good grades that will help me go up the ladder academically while at the same time keeping in mind that the grades are not going to help me in the real world. This pushed me to learn continuously because at the end of the day, it is what you know and what you can do that counts rather than your grades.
Elte 11y ago
Ah, yes, this. When I went back to university after taking a break a couple of years ago I promised myself it would be out of pure interest, because I cared about the subject, not to get good grades. Of course it didn't work out exactly that way, pretty soon there's an assignment to hand in tomorrow, and exam to get points on next week... and again I found myself preparing to answer the questions I knew I was going to get, rather than delving into that one subject that seemed interesting, or reading through the proof of a theorem being used. The grades were good, the learning... maybe not so much. Right now I'm working on my final thesis research, and I found a good subject. Everyone keeps asking what my deadline is, when it is going to be done, how I'm progressing. I don't care. I'm learning, creating and having fun. I want to be able to spend the whole day exploring a topic I don't understand, or refactoring parts of my simulation code that I don't like. I know I'll get it done at some point, and when I do it'll be a valuable contribution at least to myself and hopefully the field I'll be publishing in. That's what learning's supposed to be like for me.
- gshubert17 11y ago
  I read and discussed classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, for 8 weeks per summer for 4 summers, for a master's degree; and there were no grades. (Yes, the grades are on a transcript which I could request, but haven't.) It is my understanding that the undergraduate program has the same grading policy. It was refreshing to be able to learn without grade pressure.
netcan 11y ago
This is a sort of a hamster-ball problem. You have a school that is severely underperforming, an children are not learning at all. You have a big achievement gap in the classroom, where a good chunk os students are illiterate. Then we try to solve this with grades, as a way of holding teachers and students responsible and provide a feedback loop. Then the grades inform the learning process, changing everything. It's an example of a wider problem that I think I've heard it called "legibility." It can exist police departments, for example. You know that half the cops are lazy, so you measure arrests and such. Then cops' job becomes arresting people rather than maintaining peace. All sorts of damaging dynamics play. Even if a measure (eg arrests) might be good at telling you who's a good cop, optimizing for the measure does not necessarily make cops better. It's demoralizing to the good cops, who are now judged by stupid measures. Schools have this problem and lots of others too. Lets start with the fact that a 6+ hour schooldays for 8 year olds is nonsensical. More hours does not result in more learning. You could halve the hours (double the teacher/student ratio for the same price?), but schools need to be babysitters too. A big group of kids of equal age is an unnatural environment for juvenile humans to interact and learn in, causing (among other things) emotionally turbulent self judgement constantly. Everyone is your yardstick. Overall, these are problems we hit as we create institutions. I think it's a problem all over the modern world. Our anemic & sanitized work culture isolated from our home life, and the split personality people develop living in these two worlds. The anonymity and isolation of the oversized and transient "communities" we live in. We develop "unnatural" institutions to deal with life in these inorganic world. Formal reviews and targets in a company instead of the normal peer pressures you would find in a more organic setting like a family farm with a dozen workers (or a hunting party if you want to take it that far). We replace school discipline, grading and such with children's innate desire to learn and discover. I have a hint of a grand historical theory floating around in my mind that I don't understand well enough to articulate: It's becoming very clear that technology is developing much faster than culture and psychology. Comment trolling and the even more common emotional overreactions and general emotional idiocy of our online selves are an obvious example. But, I suspect it might go much deeper and longer maybe to the paleolithic revolution. Early civilizations were (we think) these slave societies with god kings and terrible oppression. They had seeds in our natural (even prehuman) instincts for dominance, status, subordination. But, they were really pathological worlds where people couldn't thrive. They built institutions like slavery and priesthood out of the existing "natural" dynamics (say tribal shamans and chieftains) but most of the brickwork was this clunky new stuff barely holding together this new way of doing society: slavery, cast hierarchy… When we think of the "Charles Dickens World" of street urchins, poorhouses, filth and urban poverty we're seeing people living in a newly constructed industrial world with cobbled together institutions and culture. Organic cultural takes time, generations. The alternative is an engineered culture with its legible, formalizable logic and none of the nuance. It's particularly sad though, when it comes to small children.
lordnacho 11y ago
My gut feeling is that some of the top universities could change this with no effect on employment, but positive effect on actual learning and related exam stress. You could give the kids internal assessments that don't count. "Here's some questions that should be easy if you understood the linear algebra course. It's up to your own conscience to decide how well you know it." And then have a pass/fail line that is external. "This kid went to Harvard and did these courses and passed. All our kids are smart, and there's not much point in you, as an external employer, trying to figure out who is better based on a GPA." I get the feeling a lot of the grade stress is unproductive. Kids divert their attention to exams, which employers have no idea how to assess. Some kid gets an A in math. How much of a predictor of business success is that really, for your average consultancy/bank/whatever? The result is the kids end up spending their energy on something that isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.
- gozo 11y ago
  I think it's pretty telling that most courses outside school aren't structured... Course: Math, Grade: A-F. ...but... Course: Math E, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math D, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math C, Grade: Pass/Fail. ...etc. I think the former mindset unfortunately can be quite common in the tech industry. "We need an A grade programmer". When what you really are looking for is a "C grade programmer with A grade ruby, B grade security, B grade network knowledge".
petewailes 11y ago
Here's an idea. Drop exams entirely, and examine at the point of job application. If a person learning understand the material, encourage them to move to the next thing. If they're still addressing subject matter, let them continue.
ryanmarsh 11y ago
And this is why we homeschool. Have a weird fascination with the human eye? Here's three medical textbooks, knock yourself out kid. Suck at math? No problem, we will take it as slow as we have to until you feel comfortable. There's no grades and pressure there's just things you've learned and things you're still learning.
- chii 11y ago
  so what happens if you suck at maths, and took an extraodinarily long time to get to the same stage as institutional schools would have? When would you know you are ready to leave homeschooling, and move to university?
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    I believe that when my parents homeschooled my younger brother he was still expected to pass all the state achievement benchmarks. I'm sure any such rule would vary by state in the US, though.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  The time commitment is pretty intense. I think that I'd love to homeschool my hypothetical child because I trust myself to do it right-- but I couldn't also provide for my family in the meantime.
  - debacle 11y ago
    The time commitment is actually way less than you would expect. The amount of "fluff" that goes on during the school day is obnoxious. You could probably spend less than 3 hours a day and get a better education.
    - bigd 11y ago
      You really should hear how presumptuous you sound. How are teaching your son to deal with people? How is he going to learn that he lives in a society? That sometime life is boring? that sometimes you are not the only one? 3 hours a day might be enough for the curricular material, but schools are much much more than that.
wahsd 11y ago
Although I think the whole "the fear of failure has destroyed learning" thing is rather dramatic, I realize there is a basis for that perspective that I think lies more in that academic achievement destroys exploratory, off-script types of learning that lead to fulfillment. America is rather innovative and we are arguably innovation leaders, but the quantitative success factor overlooks the qualitative measure of living life. Innovation in the USA in particular seems to largely focus on chasing some sort of target and/or be driven by some paranoia based anxiety. A perfect example of this whole issue is something I heard the other day, that technology could be used to solve earth's environmental problems. It's so schizophrenic if you start even barely thinking about it ... we're going to invent solutions to problems that we are causing ourselves, at this very moment? It strikes me as a similar strategy as growing yourself out of net loss. It's really kind of mind boggling and quite similar to obsessive compulsive disorder; just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean, just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean .... innovate our way out of the problems that our last innovation caused, innovate our way out of the problems our last innovation caused ... and on and on.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
The issues raised here are side effects of the discontinuity between how humans evolved to learn, and how we are taught today. Fundamentally, the problem is similar to the problems of mass production. The need is to produce greater volume, with standardized results and less variance in the end product. But this is exactly opposite of how humans evolved to learn. We're evolved to learn primarily from our parents, secondarily from extended family and then from the larger group. This is why children in general have a desire to please their parents, and parents have both anxiety about struggling children and and pride when they do well. There is another force for learning, curiosity, that is the underlying factor for children's increasing knowledge and innovation, and which drives persistence and resilience. In a prehistoric environment, teaching and learning were highly personalized. 2 parents may have to nurture 2 or 3 children at a time. Prehistoric children also learned quite a bit on their own, in their own way, at their own pace when no teacher was paying attention. [0] In today's world, the amount and type of what has to be learned to function far exceeds what parents and family can teach. Even with homeschooling, advanced topics may be learned from texts that the student reads, rather than from tutoring by their parents. Most parents don't have homeschooling as an option, so we invented schools, which are by their nature, not personalized. Instead of ~1 teacher/parent per student, we have 30+. Teaching is not personalized, which goes strictly against human nature. [0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten
JamesBarney 11y ago
I always thought it would be better to measure a student by how much they've learned not how good they are. For example one student would be on algebra 1 and another on calculus. I think it is easier emotionally to think of someone else as just farther along than better than you. Traditional in room lecture based learning required all students to be at the same point. This is a terrible assumption because many times it's not true. Assume a student was not able to focus during Algebra 1 because of a tragic event during that year, like the loss of a parent. Without herculean effort that student will be lost in geometry, trig, and calculus because they lack the Algebra 1 foundation. One year of missed learning turns into four. I hope that MOOCs allow for this to be fixed. No longer would the assumption need to be made that all students need learn at the same pace. This means the 40% of gifted kids won't be bored, and 20% of kids who learn a little slower won't be hopelessly lost. The other benefit to the learning being self paced and through computers is that you could test progress through small quizzes. If a student failed a quiz, she could simply relearn the material. This eliminates, the TEST, a huge unnecessary stresser in children's lives. You could also test material from several quizzes ago to make sure the important points are hammered home through spaced repetition. Most teachers I know currently spend 80% of the year teaching to the test. Self paced materials means that you'll be able to measure performance of a kid and a teacher by how they do over a year, and not how they do on one day. Anyway that's my dream of MOOCs and automated learning in the class room :).
Nevermark 11y ago
My radical view on education is that everyone should work at their own pace until they have an A understanding/test scores in each topic of each class before moving on. This completely takes the focus off the grade (its always an A) and focuses it on learning well. It also means that nobody falls behind which is a source of a lot of stress. Slow learners get extra time and teacher attention before trying to move on to more advanced topics. Fast learners enjoy racing through subjects at their own top speed. It is extremely rewarding to be able to skip forward as soon as you are ready. This naturally develops self-managed education habits. I got to learn this way for one year in elementary school and it was the best experience I have ever had in education. To do this, teachers need organized lesson plans for each class that students can follow at their own pace, and act more as self-learning mentors and a learning resource, as apposed to controlling the pace with all-class lectures. The commonality between all classes is teachers are teaching kids how to learn by their own efforts, not just topics they will forget.

232 points by tokenadult 11y ago

hoopd 11y ago

> ....for our willingness to put their long-term developmental and emotional needs before their short-term happiness. For our willingness to let their lives be just a little bit harder today so they will know how to face hardship tomorrow. Isn't decreasing the pressure to be a perfect student the exact opposite of letting their life be a little bit harder today?

crpatino 11y ago
Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges. And to quit whenever the chance of getting any less than an "A-" grade seems uncertain. The whole article builds the argument that since adults are only concerned with the kid's results but cannot be bothered on how those are achieved, all kids eventually learn to fake it and end up sacrificing their intellectual curiosity for the sake of self-worth validation from their parents/teachers. Therefore, making the student's life a little bit harder today means to push them to tackle real challenges and making peace with the fact that they might spoil their perfect record in the process.
- hoopd 11y ago
  > Not if the preferred way to become a "perfect student" is to go only after the easier/safer challenges. That's nowhere near becoming a perfect student and it isn't even high on the scale of parental pressure.
  - crpatino 11y ago
    That's what the article said, no how I think things should be. With my own children, I've never make a fuss about bad grades (which thankfully have been few and far between). I do care about them giving their best effort, and let them know in no uncertain terms. But I know plenty of parents that are minimally involved but nonetheless demand "good grades" from their kids. Fooling those into believing their kids are raising academic stars would be extremely easy.

1971genocide 11y ago

I call this "Too smart to fail". When I was a below average student, I used to have a lot less stress. The expectation was so much lower. Once I started getting As across the board I started panicking. The problem is we have essentially "privatized" learning. What that means is once we started attaching money to learning via the university industrial complex and cheap credit. Your knowledge became a store of wealth like your house ( which itself is a terrible idea ). Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities. If you get As you get to go to Stanford and be 10X in debt as someone who went to a Community College. It reminds me of the argument by Louise CK, where loans are much easier to get when you have liquidity already. This has lead to a situation of "Too smart to fail" among students who get good grades, when in reality we should be allocating more education resources to weaker students in society and handing them the most credit, and not celebrate grades so heavily, but celebrate when that education leads to value in society.

daemin 11y ago
Well there's something to be said about helping people up to a certain level, but there's also the point that we should be encouraging people to kick ass at what they are good at. So instead of having a bunch of average people we can have a bunch of people that excel at different specialised tasks and so we are better off for it.
hoopd 11y ago
> Now their is a pervasive attitude - if you study engineering for example you pay 4X for tuition compared to humanities. What? If you want to be an engineer you can go to a state school, work hard and pass the FE/EIT exam your senior year for 1/4 the price of a private school. Half of the top ten engineering schools are public: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/engineering-doctorate http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... The top ten liberal arts schools are all private: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
- 11y ago

sandworm101 11y ago

I do not think the pressure comes directly from the need for higher grades. I think it come from how those grades are created. I my academic history (highschool, undergrad, law school, now teaching) I only felt real stress where grades were incremental. Take my civpro class. We had an assignment after only three lectures, an assignment worth 5% of our grade. I had barely wrapped my head around law school and already my final grade, my scholarship, was on the line. I did poorly on that assignment, immediately chopping a few points off my final grade. On the other hand my crimlaw class had no assignments, just a big exam at the end. That class allowed me the time to figure things out and was much less stressful. The highschool kids I talk to today are in a constant panic. ((That's how I see it. For them it's just normal.)) Grades are ridiculously high, with class averages well north of 90%. So every test, every graded assignment, requires the focus of a final exam. They cannot afford diversion or outside learning. Each week is prep for the next test and each of those tests directly impacts their grade. Have a bad week, or even a bad afternoon, and it might stick with you for years. They don't dare read anything that isn't assigned for fear of not aligning with the teacher's "learning plan". If it didn't come from teacher it isn't on next week's test and is therefore useless. Imho this constant "exam mode" is the real source of stress. So drop the microtests. Give them the one big exam and let them relax and learn at their own pace the rest of the time.

onionjake 11y ago
I took a class from Matt Might and I like how we were graded: "Your grade is your tests grade or your projects grade, whichever is higher." http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/#grading http://matt.might.net/teaching/compilers/spring-2015/#gradin... This allowed both the really good test takers to succeed and also those who did better on projects, without all the pressure.
- toomim 11y ago
  ...at the expense of people who are moderately good at both.
  - 11y ago

sanxiyn 11y ago

Learning is a beautiful thing when it happens, but it mostly does not happen in education. Learning is a delicacy, a luxury, thing which not everyone will appreciate. On the other hand, vocational training is necessary and most people appreciate the necessity. It is time to officially redirect universal education to vocational training. Expecting education to provide learning is expecting too much. By expecting too much we will only be disappointed.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
I disagree that learning is a delicacy. Learning is an innate human behavior. It's what separates us from the animals. It's how we became apex predators across multiple biomes stretching across the globe. You can see this in children, they have unbridled curiosity and depthless enthusiasm for learning. But they have a limited tolerance for tedium and bureaucracy, and those are in extreme abundance in education today. It's a system that's practically designed to beat out any hint of desire for learning, intellectualism, and reading. In some ways it's a wonder that any vestige of those things survive at all through such experiences.

mc32 11y ago

I'm all for teaching kids curiosity and how to learn and how to prepare to be ready for a future years hence. Surely we need to question methodology and results thereof. Yet for all of one child's failure there are many other successes. So it's more a matter of what methodology gets your educational system the greatest results for people entering adult society years hence. Any system will be a disservice to some. Perhaps for some children tailored or perhaps less structured home schooling or other alternative forms of education would be more beneficial to them in the long run. On the other hand, it's not as if east Asia and south Asia are doing poorly economically due to their focus on achievement. On the contrary they are very vital economic engines, china due to surpass the us in ppp GDP. So, its not clear that this model is that detrimental. Any model will incur casualties, it's up to us to seek better alternatives with fewer casualties but proof of the pudding is in the eating.

aianus 11y ago
Total GDP is meaningless. China is nowhere near the US in PPP GDP per capita.

donflamenco 11y ago

There is a field of study around "mindset". The fairly famous book is called Mindset by Carol Dweck. This infographic summarizes the ideas very well. http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png http://i.imgur.com/HGBY1tW.png

dbhattar 11y ago
My attitude had always been "if it is grades people want, they will get it" i.e. to get good grades that will help me go up the ladder academically while at the same time keeping in mind that the grades are not going to help me in the real world. This pushed me to learn continuously because at the end of the day, it is what you know and what you can do that counts rather than your grades.

Elte 11y ago

Ah, yes, this. When I went back to university after taking a break a couple of years ago I promised myself it would be out of pure interest, because I cared about the subject, not to get good grades. Of course it didn't work out exactly that way, pretty soon there's an assignment to hand in tomorrow, and exam to get points on next week... and again I found myself preparing to answer the questions I knew I was going to get, rather than delving into that one subject that seemed interesting, or reading through the proof of a theorem being used. The grades were good, the learning... maybe not so much. Right now I'm working on my final thesis research, and I found a good subject. Everyone keeps asking what my deadline is, when it is going to be done, how I'm progressing. I don't care. I'm learning, creating and having fun. I want to be able to spend the whole day exploring a topic I don't understand, or refactoring parts of my simulation code that I don't like. I know I'll get it done at some point, and when I do it'll be a valuable contribution at least to myself and hopefully the field I'll be publishing in. That's what learning's supposed to be like for me.

gshubert17 11y ago
I read and discussed classics at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, for 8 weeks per summer for 4 summers, for a master's degree; and there were no grades. (Yes, the grades are on a transcript which I could request, but haven't.) It is my understanding that the undergraduate program has the same grading policy. It was refreshing to be able to learn without grade pressure.

netcan 11y ago

This is a sort of a hamster-ball problem. You have a school that is severely underperforming, an children are not learning at all. You have a big achievement gap in the classroom, where a good chunk os students are illiterate. Then we try to solve this with grades, as a way of holding teachers and students responsible and provide a feedback loop. Then the grades inform the learning process, changing everything. It's an example of a wider problem that I think I've heard it called "legibility." It can exist police departments, for example. You know that half the cops are lazy, so you measure arrests and such. Then cops' job becomes arresting people rather than maintaining peace. All sorts of damaging dynamics play. Even if a measure (eg arrests) might be good at telling you who's a good cop, optimizing for the measure does not necessarily make cops better. It's demoralizing to the good cops, who are now judged by stupid measures. Schools have this problem and lots of others too. Lets start with the fact that a 6+ hour schooldays for 8 year olds is nonsensical. More hours does not result in more learning. You could halve the hours (double the teacher/student ratio for the same price?), but schools need to be babysitters too. A big group of kids of equal age is an unnatural environment for juvenile humans to interact and learn in, causing (among other things) emotionally turbulent self judgement constantly. Everyone is your yardstick. Overall, these are problems we hit as we create institutions. I think it's a problem all over the modern world. Our anemic & sanitized work culture isolated from our home life, and the split personality people develop living in these two worlds. The anonymity and isolation of the oversized and transient "communities" we live in. We develop "unnatural" institutions to deal with life in these inorganic world. Formal reviews and targets in a company instead of the normal peer pressures you would find in a more organic setting like a family farm with a dozen workers (or a hunting party if you want to take it that far). We replace school discipline, grading and such with children's innate desire to learn and discover. I have a hint of a grand historical theory floating around in my mind that I don't understand well enough to articulate: It's becoming very clear that technology is developing much faster than culture and psychology. Comment trolling and the even more common emotional overreactions and general emotional idiocy of our online selves are an obvious example. But, I suspect it might go much deeper and longer maybe to the paleolithic revolution. Early civilizations were (we think) these slave societies with god kings and terrible oppression. They had seeds in our natural (even prehuman) instincts for dominance, status, subordination. But, they were really pathological worlds where people couldn't thrive. They built institutions like slavery and priesthood out of the existing "natural" dynamics (say tribal shamans and chieftains) but most of the brickwork was this clunky new stuff barely holding together this new way of doing society: slavery, cast hierarchy… When we think of the "Charles Dickens World" of street urchins, poorhouses, filth and urban poverty we're seeing people living in a newly constructed industrial world with cobbled together institutions and culture. Organic cultural takes time, generations. The alternative is an engineered culture with its legible, formalizable logic and none of the nuance. It's particularly sad though, when it comes to small children.

lordnacho 11y ago

My gut feeling is that some of the top universities could change this with no effect on employment, but positive effect on actual learning and related exam stress. You could give the kids internal assessments that don't count. "Here's some questions that should be easy if you understood the linear algebra course. It's up to your own conscience to decide how well you know it." And then have a pass/fail line that is external. "This kid went to Harvard and did these courses and passed. All our kids are smart, and there's not much point in you, as an external employer, trying to figure out who is better based on a GPA." I get the feeling a lot of the grade stress is unproductive. Kids divert their attention to exams, which employers have no idea how to assess. Some kid gets an A in math. How much of a predictor of business success is that really, for your average consultancy/bank/whatever? The result is the kids end up spending their energy on something that isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

gozo 11y ago
I think it's pretty telling that most courses outside school aren't structured... Course: Math, Grade: A-F. ...but... Course: Math E, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math D, Grade: Pass/Fail. Course: Math C, Grade: Pass/Fail. ...etc. I think the former mindset unfortunately can be quite common in the tech industry. "We need an A grade programmer". When what you really are looking for is a "C grade programmer with A grade ruby, B grade security, B grade network knowledge".

petewailes 11y ago

Here's an idea. Drop exams entirely, and examine at the point of job application. If a person learning understand the material, encourage them to move to the next thing. If they're still addressing subject matter, let them continue.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

And this is why we homeschool. Have a weird fascination with the human eye? Here's three medical textbooks, knock yourself out kid. Suck at math? No problem, we will take it as slow as we have to until you feel comfortable. There's no grades and pressure there's just things you've learned and things you're still learning.

chii 11y ago
so what happens if you suck at maths, and took an extraodinarily long time to get to the same stage as institutional schools would have? When would you know you are ready to leave homeschooling, and move to university?
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  I believe that when my parents homeschooled my younger brother he was still expected to pass all the state achievement benchmarks. I'm sure any such rule would vary by state in the US, though.
cryoshon 11y ago
The time commitment is pretty intense. I think that I'd love to homeschool my hypothetical child because I trust myself to do it right-- but I couldn't also provide for my family in the meantime.
- debacle 11y ago
  The time commitment is actually way less than you would expect. The amount of "fluff" that goes on during the school day is obnoxious. You could probably spend less than 3 hours a day and get a better education.
  - bigd 11y ago
    You really should hear how presumptuous you sound. How are teaching your son to deal with people? How is he going to learn that he lives in a society? That sometime life is boring? that sometimes you are not the only one? 3 hours a day might be enough for the curricular material, but schools are much much more than that.

wahsd 11y ago

Although I think the whole "the fear of failure has destroyed learning" thing is rather dramatic, I realize there is a basis for that perspective that I think lies more in that academic achievement destroys exploratory, off-script types of learning that lead to fulfillment. America is rather innovative and we are arguably innovation leaders, but the quantitative success factor overlooks the qualitative measure of living life. Innovation in the USA in particular seems to largely focus on chasing some sort of target and/or be driven by some paranoia based anxiety. A perfect example of this whole issue is something I heard the other day, that technology could be used to solve earth's environmental problems. It's so schizophrenic if you start even barely thinking about it ... we're going to invent solutions to problems that we are causing ourselves, at this very moment? It strikes me as a similar strategy as growing yourself out of net loss. It's really kind of mind boggling and quite similar to obsessive compulsive disorder; just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean, just clean those hands one more time to make sure they are clean .... innovate our way out of the problems that our last innovation caused, innovate our way out of the problems our last innovation caused ... and on and on.

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

The issues raised here are side effects of the discontinuity between how humans evolved to learn, and how we are taught today. Fundamentally, the problem is similar to the problems of mass production. The need is to produce greater volume, with standardized results and less variance in the end product. But this is exactly opposite of how humans evolved to learn. We're evolved to learn primarily from our parents, secondarily from extended family and then from the larger group. This is why children in general have a desire to please their parents, and parents have both anxiety about struggling children and and pride when they do well. There is another force for learning, curiosity, that is the underlying factor for children's increasing knowledge and innovation, and which drives persistence and resilience. In a prehistoric environment, teaching and learning were highly personalized. 2 parents may have to nurture 2 or 3 children at a time. Prehistoric children also learned quite a bit on their own, in their own way, at their own pace when no teacher was paying attention. [0] In today's world, the amount and type of what has to be learned to function far exceeds what parents and family can teach. Even with homeschooling, advanced topics may be learned from texts that the student reads, rather than from tutoring by their parents. Most parents don't have homeschooling as an option, so we invented schools, which are by their nature, not personalized. Instead of ~1 teacher/parent per student, we have 30+. Teaching is not personalized, which goes strictly against human nature. [0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten

JamesBarney 11y ago

I always thought it would be better to measure a student by how much they've learned not how good they are. For example one student would be on algebra 1 and another on calculus. I think it is easier emotionally to think of someone else as just farther along than better than you. Traditional in room lecture based learning required all students to be at the same point. This is a terrible assumption because many times it's not true. Assume a student was not able to focus during Algebra 1 because of a tragic event during that year, like the loss of a parent. Without herculean effort that student will be lost in geometry, trig, and calculus because they lack the Algebra 1 foundation. One year of missed learning turns into four. I hope that MOOCs allow for this to be fixed. No longer would the assumption need to be made that all students need learn at the same pace. This means the 40% of gifted kids won't be bored, and 20% of kids who learn a little slower won't be hopelessly lost. The other benefit to the learning being self paced and through computers is that you could test progress through small quizzes. If a student failed a quiz, she could simply relearn the material. This eliminates, the TEST, a huge unnecessary stresser in children's lives. You could also test material from several quizzes ago to make sure the important points are hammered home through spaced repetition. Most teachers I know currently spend 80% of the year teaching to the test. Self paced materials means that you'll be able to measure performance of a kid and a teacher by how they do over a year, and not how they do on one day. Anyway that's my dream of MOOCs and automated learning in the class room :).

Nevermark 11y ago

My radical view on education is that everyone should work at their own pace until they have an A understanding/test scores in each topic of each class before moving on. This completely takes the focus off the grade (its always an A) and focuses it on learning well. It also means that nobody falls behind which is a source of a lot of stress. Slow learners get extra time and teacher attention before trying to move on to more advanced topics. Fast learners enjoy racing through subjects at their own top speed. It is extremely rewarding to be able to skip forward as soon as you are ready. This naturally develops self-managed education habits. I got to learn this way for one year in elementary school and it was the best experience I have ever had in education. To do this, teachers need organized lesson plans for each class that students can follow at their own pace, and act more as self-learning mentors and a learning resource, as apposed to controlling the pace with all-class lectures. The commonality between all classes is teachers are teaching kids how to learn by their own efforts, not just topics they will forget.