The Grades Aren't The Problem
Between AI, slipping competency, and a diminutive relationship with learning, education has an existential problem. However, the answer isn't in compromise with the threat.
Modern AI systems have further opened the conversation around the flaws of modern education. Many people are reporting their personal experiences with academia: A lack of relevancy, communication, personalized curriculum, and proper pacing are all raised as reasons why people left or failed in school. While academia is indeed far from perfect—with some of these complaints having a substantiated backing—many proposed solutions that would supposedly fix academia actually serves to erode the rigor and and effort that is mandatory for meaningful learning. Because for all the issues present within academic institutions, there are just as many issues with the learning processes of individuals who proclaim that education has failed them.
Learning is an active cognitive process on the part of the learner, requiring both initial acquisition and continued retrieval1 and reflection2 of the knowledge, and there is no way around this (Brown et al.). As a consequence, any and all meaningful academic context requires substantial effort on the side of the pedagogue and the student both. This is rarely accepted by those who proclaim education as failing them—even if they do, it is begrudgingly so. This reality of learning, and education, alongside the modern expectations for all to be provided equity in education, has led to a distinct divide between meaningful learning and commodified education. For no amount of value placed upon the act of learning can be exchanged for the growth of the mind that meaningful learning imbues.
My Relationship With Academia
I was not a good student most times—in fact it could be argued I’m hardly a fantastic student now. But what has changed is the focus and respect I give to the learning process, and the pedagogues who help guide me through the process. I was a very bright student up until the end of middle school, leading to a high school fraught with a lack of attention, focus, or care. I wasn’t stupid, I had just made up my mind: I was going to go into technology without worrying about my academic performance. It was a lofty goal, one I was able to fully succeed in, but it left my final years of public academia rife with the strife one only encounters through their own negligence. This strife eventually caught up with me as the technology sector I sought to make my home was eroded itself; intellect gradually replaced with process, knowledge replaced with a social mythology.
Throughout this, I held many of the same beliefs that I see online: That education is repetitive, irrelevant, and that I never “learned correctly” inside an institution. I never stopped learning—In fact, through self–teaching I overtook many I know with B.S. and M.S. in the realm of Computer Science—I simply focused myself away from academia, viewing it as superfluous. From this I came to downplay what a degree even means, especially in the space where those with one came to me for help. This became reinforced as individuals with a diploma in Computer Science came to depend on chatbots to regurgitate knowledge easily afforded by retrieval, and as such that award can’t truly be worth much at all. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the true nature of the problem: Education has become a commodity, one that enough money can surely buy. Because of course, Cs get degrees.
This lead me down the path I am committed to now: A B.S. in Education, a love and focus on the metacognitive aspects of learning, and the ways in which we can best optimize ourselves to learn meaningfully. This is a path with little to no shortcuts, for any shortcut afforded to one’s learning systems erodes the system itself. If you automate with a chatbot, read a reader’s guide instead of the actual novel, or copy the answers from another student, you are harming your own cognitive faculties. Cheating an academic institution is self-harm just as much as it harms the academic integrity of that institution. Many schools will touch on this fact, but they rarely dwell on it; it is a dire state where most students are unconcerned with their own cognitive well-being, but instead the diploma alone. The commodification of education means that the diploma holds more weight than the actual learned knowledge.
Education Isn’t a Commodity
In the ideal, a diploma from an academic institution would carry with it the assurance that the one awarded had meaningfully learned the relevant subject matter. Instead, the attitude of many attendees of both secondary and post–secondary education is that the diploma is a good to be sold. This inevitably leads to a change in the academics of the institution itself: Relaxed grading and tardiness enforcement, make-up work becoming commonplace, and a myriad of methods to improve one’s overall grades in a course. This comes as many teachers feel that they are incapable of failing students, leading towards an academic environment where no meaningful expectations are placed upon the student (Grose). All of this can lead to a spiraling away from learning in academia: Curriculum is simplified to pass more students, and students work less as they feel either obligated or disinterested towards the degree they are working towards.
The effects of this spiral are seen as high–school graduates are passed along to higher education, where a shockingly large sum of students require remedial classes (Butrymowicz). Students are being passed forward without any meaningful learning occurring; this leads towards a state where students are not expecting rigor or effort to be a component of learning. This leads back towards the feeling of obligation in higher education—something I have encountered among fellow students myself. This obligation makes even more sense when tied with the perception that a diploma increases one’s employment prospects and wage, one that is justified: A Bachelor’s degree, for example, substantially improves these aspects over a simple high–school diploma (National Center for Education Statistics). Therefore, academic institutions need to combat the expectations many students have, reinforcing that learning must be the foremost outcome of the processes employed.
Convenience Erodes Learning
As a first step towards moving the academic lens back towards learning, convenience needs to be challenged and thoroughly discarded. Despite the many promises of AI, EdTech, and other privatized “learning” platforms: convenience holds an inherently combative relationship with learning. Jared C. Horvath has showed how technology platforms, despite having been shown to increase learning, actually fall below the minimum threshold for acceptable learning improvements. This follows the intuitive argument that attention is the currency of learning. The more one can put their undivided attention upon learning material, the greater the learning outcome will be. Such currency is afforded to the learner by motivation—both intrinsic and extrinsic—as well as stimuli3. It should come as no surprise then that digital technology, a champion of providing our minds with competing stimuli, struggle to positively impact learners.
The subject of attention, including the fact that our sustained attention spans are shrinking to stumps of their former glory (Mark), is a fascinating and deep subject. But in the context of education, its correlation to learning outcomes is clear; if academia is to best serve students—and students their learning—attention must be at the forefront of this discussion. The result of this includes a conversation difficult for many, where students must recognize their active role in their own learning process. The best pedagogue will still “fail their students” if students simply are not meaningfully engaging in the materials provided. Pedagogy is a two-way path4, one that cannot afford shortcuts, one that must be focused on the correct branch of knowledge.
Foundations of Learning
In this article, I come forward with a philosophy of education that espouses the need for equal opportunity in rigorous, meaningful, and authoritative learning environments. The learner, of all forms, is a beacon of the prospective future that precludes the ignoramus present in us all. As such, this foundation ascribes loosely to Plato’s ordered republic of the self5, specifically that the reasoned and learned mind must remain atop the id. In order to embolden this beacon, fueling the flame of the mind, pedagogues must be capable of rigorous and authoritative instruction and dialogues with them. Expectations and outcomes must not only be established, but enforced, with the pedagogues role being to assist the student towards meeting these goals. Institutions must then enable this behavior, providing the punishment framework for students who are unable to maintain the rigor and order necessary to become a learned individual.
The remainder of this article need be prefaced: I am not an accredited pedagogue, nor am I an authority on education. But in the age of blind opinions on education; I being a student of education—a learner of learning; I feel I may as well add my own philosophy into the wind. This taken as a given, what is expatiated here is a philosophy that originates within myself, one that may share similarities and differences with other educational philosophies, one that may change as I delve further into the depths of education. These ideas are formed by my role as a student, not a pedagogue; they additionally form the basis of a reality of education that is greater than the real itself. This philosophy is not oriented around the particular, but the general: A framework for all learners, pedagogues, and institutions that utilize learning.
It must also be said that although the education sciences provide invaluable insight into the ways adults and children alike learn, they are useless in the development of a full philosophy. This is not a failure of the particular, but a limitation of the general nature of science: For the sciences mandate the controlled variability of objectification, something that the gestalt learning environment is unable to be contained by. So while the science of education remains as our thermometer, testing the strength of our academic fire, we must further develop this philosophical baseline such that we can supplant our current educational systems.
Roles of The Learner
It should be of no surprise that the learner is the most pivotal group in all of education; the center of the entire academic apparatus; the container of the flame of learning. For it matters not how many sparks or winds come in from the institutions of education, if the learner pulls all shutters and allows the flame to die. Additionally, however, must the learner fetter the winds of the flame, else the fire will consume the structure it emboldens. So between inattentiveness and burnout sits the ideal student: One who pays mind to the winds of knowledge, processing and pulling it in, without being swept away by the current. Such a student must be willing to seek assistance, grappling to the other structures within the torrential storm, while not allowing their own flame to putter out.
Returning to the explanatory, this is where the roles of attention and motivation are paramount: the learner must remain engaged and active in the learning process, not merely a receptacle for knowledge. The student must be capable not only of receiving knowledge, but examining both it and themselves, through retrieval practice and reflection. They must recognize the teacher as a subject matter expert, a pillar in the storm resting on the strongest of foundations, and as such reach out towards them in times where they are being cast away. This active role bestowed upon the ideal student likely comes as obvious, as learning itself must rely upon active effort. The support is, however, just as critical: For while such a student is capable of autonomous education, they can be swept away from the ideal path towards a liberated mind.
For the prospective learner, the book Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown cannot come as a high enough recommendation. The book explains many of the scientific bases in which learning can be best employed. This includes a focus on the aforementioned retrieval and reflection: Flash cards, regular self-quizzing, meditative pondering of the subject matter, explicit relating of one subject to another, etc. Through these processes a student can best learn not only the subject at hand, but how it relates to other subject they already had come to know. This effort additionally leads to the key ability in a student to recognize their own inhibitions; this meta–cognition and recognition of self enabling them to reach out to pedagogues in meaningful ways.
The Learner’s Guardians
A critical subject in the aspects of a child learner is that of their guardianship. Whether it be parents, siblings, or an assignment of the state, the needs that must be met by them are the same: an authoritative environment in which the child can safely develop skills, assisted by the guardian. From riding a bike to tying one’s shoes, this authoritative environment is what enables the healthy guidance of a child towards enlightenment. In this way I feel I must reiterate the space in which authoritativeness occupies: The setting and enforcement of expectations with a foundational focus on assisting the learner towards achieving these expectations. Punishment is not of paramount importance in learning environment, despite the fact that it is necessary to uphold certain non-educational rules.
But even with the behavioral need for punishment, corporal punishment remains wholly unavailable to the authoritative guardian. Physical violence has been well established to provide no beneficial outcomes in children, in fact holding a serious positive correlation to depressive symptoms in children (Turner & Muller). For this reason, among other obvious reasons, punishment must be clearly devoid of physical violence. Additionally, punishment must never be a component of learning itself. The purpose of punishment as a system is for behaviors of disruption and destruction, never for the purposes of education.
Roles of The Pedagogue
The teacher, pedagogue, professor, instructor, librarian, and many other names. The role they hold is the second most pivotal—behind the learner. Staunch bulwarks in the winds of knowledge, they serve not only to expose the learner to the winds, but to shield them from the fastest of the currents. In this ways teachers are not held to their positions by physical authority, but by the authority of wisdom, guiding students along a curriculum tailored to allow a safe accrual of knowledge. Physical authority may still be necessary—but such things are not the role of the pedagogue. This is in contrast to Rousseau’s argument, that in his truth the teacher’s authority lies in physical coercion, as such an authority undermines the nature of pedagogy itself.
By this authority in wisdom, a teacher has two primary modes of instruction: the Socratic dialectic, and the Confucian (or Aristotelian) didactic. Both of these approaches to instruction are useful—simply serving a difference of outcome—and must be gauged and applied when necessary. Dialectics, or intentional dialogues, are critically useful in the development of a students mind: Where the liberal arts, or a philosophy of a subject, comes to be tested and refined through a discussion guided directly by the pedagogue. Inversely comes the didactic, lecturing instruction that seeks to instill facts into the student. Didactic instruction is clearly useful in the learning of simple facts and the sciences, favoring a one-sided approach in which the student is relegated to study and examination.
Given the ideal student, the ideal pedagogue must be capable of perfect identification of instruction methods; capable of forming the knowledge to best captivate the student; capable of the patience and softness in which to engage with a meaningfully learning student. I hope that many readers here have a teacher of yore that comes into view, I know I certainly have, but I am sorry if many realities simple fall short of this ideal. Just remember that the ideal teacher requires the ideal student, and not the inverse. Many real teachers are simply consumed by a landscape of poor institutional and student behaviors: If too much responsibility—behavior management, punishment, student catch-up, too many students, etc—is placed upon the teacher, they will never have the time or stamina to instruct well.
Meaningful Measurement
At long last comes the point of the article title: the relevancy of grading in education. In didactic instruction there simply must be a way to measure the attainment of facts students exhibit, including the necessary ability to fail a student if necessary. Comparatively, in dialectical learning the teacher must be able to assign an outcome to a student’s dialogue with them, although by no means must this grading be the same or even equivalent to the didactic grading approaches. The design of and enactment of examination is, itself, a fundamental skill of pedagogy and learning; students who exhibit such things as testing anxiety need assistance to work with said anxiety, not accommodation that undermines academic examination.
What constitutes the ideal academic measurement, however, is a far more complex matter. Measurement does not mean traditional letter grading for example, which may not be ideal given evidence that specs—or mastery—grading yields better student sentiment and learning outcomes (Katzman et al., Marshall). However, this does not make letter grading superfluous: Static grading such as these traditional methods are much more beneficial for inter–school and intersectional assessment. While mastery grading allows students to work through the material and be assessed until passing, traditional grading is far more important to measure trends in the overall knowledge of a student body. This is why, despite the disdain they hold, standardized testing remains important for measuring the learning of entire populations. For this reason, in place of a singular ideal, both forms of grading can be used to best assess and assist students throughout their learning.
Roles of The Institution
An academic institution can be many things: A school, university, library, or one’s own home. Resultingly, the particular roles can vary greatly. However, generally there are shared traits that an institution must hold in order to facilitate learning: enforcement of expectations, regulations of the learning environment, and support of teachers and students alike. It is the institutions job to hold a student who engages maliciously, or disengages entirely, from the learning experience accountable. Additionally, it is the institutions responsibility to ensure that classrooms remain designed for learning, including the removal of digital technology and other distractions. In this way the institution is the wind–tunnel that controls the flow of knowledge; the same flow the teachers regulate upon their students; the same flow the students ingest as part of learning. As such, they must step in on behest of pedagogues, providing the support for non-instructional tasks.
In the particular, this is where I believe education has fallen the farthest. Parents simply are unwilling, or incapable, of enforcing expectations upon their children. This continues into schooling environments, where institutions are unwilling to fail or enforce rules upon students unless absolutely necessary. Ultimately, this leads into higher education and industry, where they must either allow or remediate the seemingly inscrutable failings of the newest adults in our society. That said, the difference between institutional failings and the other aspects of this philosophy is that it is already known what must be done. The crumbling walls of the tunnel need be patched, smoothed back over. Reinforcing these walls by forcibly maintaining expectations; with the removal of undue distractions and academic shortcuts; with the average parent engaging with and parenting their children; with schools holding the power to fail and ascertain acceptable learning performance. While much more can be written on the role of the institution, such as the economic revolution needed to support parents themselves, I feel it mostly falls onto the particulars6 and is as such out of scope for this article.
Learning is Difficult
Over the course of this philosophical torrent should come the overwhelmingly correct sense that learning is difficult. It is astonishingly rare to find a student who can withstand the great windfall of knowledge on their own. For this reason stands the true purpose of education: To ensure that the learner does become learned. The further all aspects of this system—the students, teachers, and institutions—drift from this goal, the deeper the erosion of our minds and society will become. Education remains a core pillar of a developed society, a pillar that has been seemingly abandoned by our social structures at large. While no erosion is ultimately irreversible, the longer we wait begets a deeper and deeper chasm for us to fill.
Regardless of the large, and numerous, moving parts of education one act remains universal: The individual must truly value—and partake—in learning and education again. Whether a student, independent learner, pedagogue, or education administrator, we must all recognize and elevate the role that becoming learned holds within a society. Given our social institutions all stem from the grouping of individuals, so too do all problems that society faces. But equivalently, so too can solutions all start from the individual, reinforcing this call towards education. At the culmination of everything the point stands: Go learn something.
Works Cited
Brown, Peter C., et al. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Butrymowicz, Sarah. “Most Colleges Enroll Many Students Who Aren’t Prepared for Higher Education.” The Hechinger Report, 30 Jan. 2017, hechingerreport.org/colleges-enroll-students-arent-prepared-higher-education.
Grose, Jessica. “Opinion | Teachers Can’t Hold Students Accountable. It’s Making the Job Miserable.” The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/10/04/opinion/teachers-grades-students-parents.html.
Horvath, Jared C. “The EdTech Revolution Has Failed.” Afterbabel.com, After Babel, 12 Nov. 2024, www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-failed.
Katzman, Shoshana D., et al. “The Effect of Specifications Grading on Students’ Learning and Attitudes in an Undergraduate-Level Cell Biology Course.” Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, vol. 22, no. 3, 29 Oct. 2021, pp. e00200-21, doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00200-21.
Marshall, Linda Drabek. “Effects of Mastery Learning Grading Policies on Student Achievement.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2016.
Mark, Gloria. “Speaking of Psychology: Why Our Attention Spans Are Shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD.” American Psychological Association, Feb. 2023, www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans.
National Center for Education Statistics. “COE - Annual Earnings by Educational Attainment.” Nces.ed.gov, National Center for Education Statistics, May 2024, nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnings.
Turner, Heather A., and Paul A. Muller. “Long-Term Effects of Child Corporal Punishment on Depressive Symptoms in Young Adults.” Journal of Family Issues, vol. 25, no. 6, Sept. 2004, pp. 761–782, doi.org/10.1177/0192513x03258313.
Retrieval practice is critical for the prolonged retaining of knowledge. This is the first meaningful step of learning beyond simple acquisition, and begets a serious effort from the learner. Some examples of retrieval practice include flashcards, rewording or paraphrasing of notes or course texts, or use of the information in a cognitively engaging activity.
Reflection is critical for using retained knowledge meaningfully. Reflection on knowledge enables the synthesis of new uses (known as transfers) of the knowledge, as well as the formulation of new knowledge itself, derived from the retrieved. Usually, reflection is not spontaneous: It requires active forethought in order to find relations between knowledge, and to spin a new strand of knowledge from the given relations.
This is, importantly, a simplification. Many psychological and cybernetic aspects of existence impact one’s attention, however these two are the primary ones that are important for learning. Many components of an educational environment feed into them: content relevancy, course structure, etc.
This two-way pathway is extremely complicated; many aspects of it come into and out of our vision depending on the context of the practice. In a Socratic dialectic the pathway becomes nearly circular, as both the pedagogue and the learner circle each other through logical reasoning towards a better understanding. Meanwhile, didactic instruction tends towards a muted relationship between the learner and instructor, focused solely on the broadcasting of knowledge upon learners. This approach is useful, but tacitly worse at developing the mind than the path paved by Socratic thought.
This association does not include the foundational social aspects of an applied Platonic Republic, such as the enforced removal of children from parents, or the belief that all humans hold an innate nature towards certain arts. Instead, this philosophy ascribes more towards a general account of the student: One such that all learners are equal, holding within them curiosity as the primary developmental process of humanity. In this way I seek to utilize a concept similar to Rousseau’s argument of development, and of the perfect child, arguing that despite the imperfections accrued by a maligned society, the force of curiosity may continue to be tapped into from childhood well through adulthood. Within this is the critical importance that reason rules the mind.
In this case, the particular is a specific school. For example, if the reader is currently within academia, it is worth monitoring and assessing how the academic institution assists both teachers and students to best improve learning. In many cases, one will instead see a focus on data and metrics, outputs of the learning experience that can be very difficult to relate back to learning. This is especially true as those metrics become targets, in which the institution prioritizes policies that maximize that metric instead of learning.