The scheming ways of GPAs and how they are dragging our species into an abyss from which we will never return.
The opening clause of the Barstow Honor Code says, “As Barstow scholars, we value wisdom and knowledge over grades and rewards, and we strive to let the love of learning drive our education.”
But does Barstow really coalign with such a statement? Do students truly place knowledge over the grumbling gruddle of grades? Has Barstow, following the cruel college admissions departments of our nation, plummeted into the pit of achieving a state of perfection determined by gleaming grade point averages and worthlessness in all other cases besides?
Mr. Joe Fox, Head of Middle and Upper School, says, “I do think that grades are important. We live in a competitive world. Everybody has a different viewpoint on competition, but grades are one measure with which we compete in a variety of ways, so that’s why we have a scaled system and that’s why we have GPAs and that’s why, at the end of the day, one hundred percent of our students get accepted to colleges and universities and that’s based on the grades that they receive.”
But why would one’s intellect be measured by their level of competitiveness? Why would their diligence as a student be overruled by the stress of avoiding mistakes, mistakes nestling comfortably in the actions of all? If this grade-centric paradigm is indeed the case, it would not be Barstow at fault, but rather, our society as a whole.
Levels of anxiety and depression in the United States have proliferated in recent times, due largely toward our society’s preposterous position on perfection, as aforementioned above. There has sprouted an idea that worth is measured by grade-point averages and test scores alone, for a shining highschool record (or blistering wealth and fame) are the only ways to go about securing a lofty college education, such an education being an alleged prerequisite to a successful life.
High school students around our nation stuff and sob and cram their wheezing minds with leagues and leagues of small-print twaddle-bumpkins, for our our society has hammered into them the cacophonous concept of a pretentious college education being the highest source of status among our fellow Americans. Students partake in clubs and extracurriculars for the sole reason of its sumptuous aura on their college transcripts, and students slump their heads against thickly bounded textbooks after hours and hours of futile studying.
Evidently, if one were to, say, go to a modest college after high school and were to learn profound amounts of knowledge, they oughtn’t mark their career as an auspicious one as they would find themselves unable to vaunt their education to their post-university colleagues.
In the world we find ourselves in, the name of a highly sought after university is essentially of higher importance than actually having learned something of worth, because the name of such an institution elevates one’s status to the top of our social hierarchy, while possessing knowledge has become a hackneyed and wearying trait that is as commonplace as a rock-hard saltine cracker.
Mistakes, which are frowned upon as belligerent outsiders, are actually crucial to the learning process. As they have no place in our standoffish society, education as a whole is swiftly deteriorating in an eerily dystopian fashion.
But this pattern (abusing oneself into piddling perfection for piddling perfection’s sake alone) is not only occurring in the United States. According to Zak Dychtwald in his book, Young China, Chinese students studying, say, engineering, would graduate knowing how to take a test of engineering rather than knowing anything regarding engineering itself.
South Korea, another education-emphasized state, is thought to house one of the most brutal high school systems in the world. Students are said to partake in an average of sixteen hours of school and after school tutoring a day, which has quite obviously taken a toll on its students, suicide being the leading cause of death among Korean adolesents.
Mr. Fox remarked that he’s “never been too much of a supporter of not having grades, or deemphasizing grades, because we know that they are important because they are a reflection of how society operates.”
But our approach is not, as our education system has assuredly promised us, the sole method of evaluating pupils’ commitment and dedication to their schoolwork.
Brown University (whose system could be nimbly adapted to that of a highschool’s) allows its students to operate under whichever of various grading systems they happen to fancy, including an A/B/C system with which plus and minus signs are shoved by the wayside and failing marks are not recorded on their transcripts. A Satisfactory/No Credit method is also offered as an option there, with the fripperies of perfect scores a long since slain foe.
Alverno College, a small liberal arts school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, displays another possible alternative. They dispatch lengthy literary works narrating their pupils’ growth as intellectuals and as human beings based on happy self-assessments that pop about throughout the semester and meticulous examinations, in place of the evil shaming of letter grades that loom over one’s consciousness on transcripts and report cards alike.
By-and-by, the alternatives in place of the austere grading systems we shackle ourselves to are plenteous in numbers and dreamy in standard. Why, then, do we study for the quantitative numerical outcome of school rather than for the tremulous wisdom gathered by mankind since the beginning of time itself?
This query marks the unfathomable ways in which humans carry out their lives, and marks the gradual perishing of all we hold dearly. The staggering pressure we have plunged the rising youth of our species into will stand by in cheerful acquiescence as our world slowly crumbles away.
