Website review: The Ascent of Humanity: Grades: A G...
Preeters discovered this in Humanitarianism
•18 reviews since Jan 29, 2008
humanitarianism, education
•ascentofhumanity.com/grades_gun_to_your_head....
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Reviews of this website
Predak rated 8 days ago- essay on learning
- Cavale rated 3 months ago
- From the page: "How could we make the students learn? This sentiment leads us to almost everything that is wrong with education today, a wrongness is built in on such a deep structural level that no reform is possible unless it accompanies a social transformation of revolutionary proportions. First off, why is it necessary to "make" anybody learn? Up to a certain age, children learn willingly, spontaneously, and with an alacrity rarely seen in adults. No inducements or threats are needed to make an infant learn to control his arms and hands or to learn to talkā"a task far more difficult than, say, long division. Similarly, no coercion is needed to make some teenagers learn to ride a skateboard, others to play the guitar, others to learn chess. Aristotle was right when he said that curiosity is human nature."
- pankajsapkal rated 5 months ago
- An argument against ranking students in schools and colleges. I fully support abolishing grading systems that pit one student against another. But the paradigm of education as a competition is definitely a destructive idea - more so for young minds. We live in an incredibly paradoxical world - every shrink and enlightened parent knows that it is destructive to compare a child with others. And yet, we calmly accept an educational system in which a child is constantly compared to other children in its most formative years. I do recall that my happiest and most productive learning in school was before I learnt that grades were important to people, and in college, it was after I decided that I would never again study for the sake of grades ever. I think we need Ivan Illich's concept of learning networks (elaborated in his classic "Deschooling Society") to counter the paradigm of education as a competition.
- sanitized rated 5 months ago
- This is an interesting argument. However I believe a new system could not be instituted on a large scale until we lived in a society where the true desire to learn was evident. Instead we live in a world where other things are important, such as money or social status. I am certainly not old or wise enough to know what route is the correct way for any society to take, but if we were to change the public schools to function the way this person suggests I do not believe they would last long in the united states.
- Aquiles rated 5 months ago
- From the page: "An even more powerful association of grades with the survival instinct happens through their connection to self-esteem. Human beings, especially children, have a deep-seated, biologically based fear of parental abandonment and ostracism from the tribe, both of which are essentially a death sentence. Early on in childhood, good grades are linked to approval and bad grades to rejection, an association soon internalized as self-approval or self-rejection. We teachers wield a powerful weapon indeed, powerful enough to make children spend countless hours doing what we tell them to." I agree with this article in that grades are a very powerful tool in education. If improperly used they can even have deadly results. But I think that exams and grades are the best tool to make average people learn. Because even most curious people (I am an extremely curious one) are to some degree lazy too, and learning is not easy, it requires a good dose of effort. The average American would rather look baseball on TV and drink beer rather that study hard. My fellow countrymen would rather look football (soccer) on TV and drink mate (an infusion we drink here)instead. We are all more or less the same all over the world. But our societies require educated people not full time TV watchers so they use another natural characteristic we have: we want to compete, and winners usually become leaders. Using grades in school is more or less fair and painless way to compete. Passing examinations and getting good grades is exhilarating, isn't it? Grades are given to people not only in school but also in work, sports, arts, and more in importantly in choosing our mates, and any other social activity we may indulge in. In our increasingly educated cultures we need to allocate more resources to best students because they will become tomorrow leaders and make important, life or death decisions that will affect the existence of lots of people and even the survival of our societies. Because societies compete with each other, and that is a really deadly competition. What happened with Indian tribes in USA (and also here in Argentina) they were deliberately exterminated to make room for European immigrants, a successful move which allowed our ruling classes to become richer and more powerful. It has always and everywhere been that way and will probably be the same in the foreseeable future.
- SweetSarah rated 5 months ago
- From the page: "I hope someday I can teach in a setting where students are not graded, examined, numbered, bribed, or coerced; where they come to me out of a free desire to learn what I have to offer."
- F3nr1L rated 5 months ago
- I have been saying this for a while, and been thinking about it a lot recently. It's really quite true. And the non-thumbs up reviews are hilariously ignorant. As if teenager, or people at all, need a strict totalitarian order to learn. That particular person is a particularly particular dumbass.
- Damned-Impossibl rated 5 months ago
- From the page: "The desire to learn comes from within, but that doesn't mean teachers are useless. The teacher should be a resource, someone students seek out and incorporate into their own learning agenda, not the imposer and enforcer of academic discipline. I hope someday I can teach in a setting where students are not graded, examined, numbered, bribed, or coerced; where they come to me out of a free desire to learn what I have to offer. Charles Eisenstein, 2005"
- Jedencorrell rated 5 months ago
- "Sometimes for fun I will suggest to my colleagues, 'You know, we should abolish grades at Penn State.' Usually, not imagining that this quixotic suggestion is in earnest, they offer a flip reply, and I'll leave it at that. When I persist, though, the most common response is something like, 'If there were no grades, then how could we make the students learn?'"
I may finish reading this at a later date, or I may not. I know you'll just be hanging on to find out...I know. Anyway, why not abolish grades? If the prof sets out the class structure as attending class sessions, taking notes, occasional quizzes, and then a cumulative, open-note final, I don't see how that would inhibit learning at all. I don't know about this tag ("humanitarianism"), but I'm not sure what else to tag it, so whatever.
I suggested this to my husband; oh my lands, I should have known better. The research he has done into this area is quite extensive and he thinks I'm crazy for suggesting a "pass" or "fail" system. Tee hee. (Although the university program he is in right now is based on him passing or failing, exclusively. So it depends on the level, ha! I win.) - "Sometimes for fun I will suggest to my colleagues, 'You know, we should abolish grades at Penn State.' Usually, not imagining that this quixotic suggestion is in earnest, they offer a flip reply, and I'll leave it at that. When I persist, though, the most common response is something like, 'If there were no grades, then how could we make the students learn?'"
