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English Composition II
2 May 2014
Lets Take Back Our Minds
A student asked his Zen master how long it would take to reach
enlightenment. Ten years, the master said. But, the student persisted,
what if he studied very hard? Then 20 years, the master responded.
Surprised, the student asked how long it would take if he worked very, very
hard and became the most dedicated student in the Ashram. In that case,
30 years, the master replied. His explanation: If you have one eye on how
close you are to achieving your goal, that leaves only one eye for your task.
(Kohn)
For decades now, researchers have criticized the way we grade our
children within the current education system. Their eye-opening work
reminds us just how long its been clear that theres something wrong with
what were doing as well as just how little progress weve made in acting on
that realization. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that
we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it
won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which
we're educating our children (Robinson). By imposing expectations on what
and how to learn, students are not given the freedom to explore their own
curiosity, express their creativity, and challenge their minds in an
enlightening way.

Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.

This is because it was invented. Before the 19th century there were very few
public systems of education, if any, and they all came into being to meet the
needs of industrialism. The hierarchy we see is rooted on two ideas. First, the
most useful subjects for work are at the top; you were probably steered away
from things in school, things you may have liked such as music or dance, on
the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. And second is
academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence,
because the universities designed the system in their image. Creativity
expert Sir Ken Robinson argues that the whole system of public education
around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the
consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think
they're not, because the thing they were good at school wasn't valued, or
was actually stigmatized (Robinson). It is my belief that we cant continue
down this path any longer.
Picasso once said all children are born artists. The problem is to
remain an artist as we grow up. Children are not afraid to be wrong or make
a mistake, they will take chances. And if youre not prepared to be wrong,
you will never come up with anything original. However, by the time they get
to adults, kids have lost that capacity; they have become frightened of being
wrong. And now were running our national education system where
mistakes are the worst possible thing you could make. As a result, we are
educating people out of their creative capacities. As Sir Ken Robinson puts it,

we dont grow into creativity, we grow out of it; or rather, we get educated
out of it (Robinson). My contention is that creativity is as important in
education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. Students
should not be led to focus on avoiding mistakes, but rather given the
opportunity to explore their creativity and not be penalized for being wrong
or challenging the material. Learning is supposed to be an enjoyable
experience along the road towards enlightenment that we all must travel,
and impeding that journey with a constant bombardment of criteria and
assessments meant to measure our level of intelligence to show progress
along that road, seems to corrupt the creative process and dilute the sense
of fulfillment or accomplishment that should be obtained.
Too much attention to the particulars of implementation may be
distracting us from the bigger picture, or at least from a pair of remarkable
conclusions that emerge from the best theory, practice, and research on the
subject: Collecting information doesnt require tests, and sharing that
information doesnt require grades (Kohn) There are three things we know
about intelligence. First, its diverse; we think about the world in all the ways
that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think
kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly,
intelligence is dynamic. The brain isnt divided into compartments; if you
look at the interactions of the human brain you will find that intelligence is
wonderfully interactive. In fact, creativity which can be defined as the
process of having original ideas that have value more often than not comes

about through the interactions of different disciplinary ways of seeing things

(Robinson).
The third thing about intelligence is that its distinct. Gillian Lynne, a
famous choreographer best known for her works doing Cats and Phantom
of the Opera, gave a very unique and interesting story about how she got to
become a dancer in an interview for the book the Element, by Ken Robinson
and Lou Aronica. She said that when she was at school, she was hopeless.
The school, in the 1930s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian
has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think
now they would say she had ADHD, but that had not been invented yet as an
available condition to have.
Anyway, she went to see a specialist with her mother. There, she was
led and sat on a chair, where she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this
man talked with her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at
school. And at the end of it because she was disturbing people, her
homework was always late, and so on; a little kid of eight the doctor went
and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that
your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately. He said, "Wait
here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," and they went and left her. But
as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his
desk. When they got out of the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and
watch her." And the minute they left the room she was on her feet, moving to
the music. They watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and

said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance
school."
When asked what happened next, she said, "She did. I can't tell you
how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like
me, people who couldn't sit still, people who had to move to think." Who had
to move to think! They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did
modern, and they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the
Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist and had a wonderful career at the
Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School
and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company (Robinson
and Aronica). She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical
theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a
multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told
her to calm down.
We have been led to believe that grades are the most important thing
in school, not the process we go about getting those grades or the individual
characteristics we build by expressing our creativity and pursuing our
passions. Two educational psychologists, Maehr and Midgley in 1996, pointed
out that an overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the
pursuit of excellence. So basically, the more students are led to focus
on how well theyre doing, the less engaged they tend to be
with what theyre actually doing (Kohn). Assessment consultants worry that
grades may not accurately reflect student performance; educational

psychologists worry because grades fix students attention on their

performance. Jessica Lahey argues, in her article on The Atlantic, that what
grades offer is spurious precision; [teachers] are asked to assess students
precisely and with the appearance of objectivity while using an inherently
subjective process (Lahey). They are then asked to present and defend
those numbers on official documents and in parent-teacher conferences as if
they are objective measures of students learning. But how can you quantify
the learning process, with intelligence being such a diverse implementation
of the mind, and who decides which characteristics are the most favorable?
As I stated before, our current education system was created over a
century ago in order to serve a purpose that has become outdated. And not
only is there a problem with the destructive acts grades play on students
creativity and intelligence, but grade inflation has become a huge problem as
well. According to the Boston Globe, for example, in 1950, only 15 percent
of Harvard students got a B+ or better; in 2007, more than half of Harvard
grades were in the A range (Young). What do grades really tell us about
performance or course mastery when most universities main interest is
presenting themselves with prestige and favorability? Professors have to
worry not only about being objective in grading accurately and consistently,
but also, more than ever before, how students will perceive and eventually
evaluate them.
I was fortunate enough to have been able to attend such an elite
institution, Cornell University, and have experienced some of the grade

inflation conundrum myself. Many of the courses I took were graded on a

curve that is to say the grades should fall within a normal distribution that
is predetermined and my courses were structured in a way that the
average grade would usually fall in the B to B+ range. Due to this
predisposition, many of my professors would intentionally structure their
course either overly simple or excessively difficult; my experience, in the
school of engineering, dealt predominately with the latter of the two
scenarios.
I recall many exams where I received grades around the 50 percent
range, yet due to the class based curve, it was as if I had gotten a B because
most of my fellow classmates also received a similar grade. I remember one
exam in particular (in my Material Science and Engineering course) where
the class average, and thus an actual score pertaining to the B range, was a
41 percent with the highest score being only a 78 percent and considered an
outlier. This is by no means to say the class was incompetent in any means;
every student in the class was exceptionally skilled in the subject matter and
deserving to be at Cornell. The exam was just that difficult and challenging
(please be aware this is only one extreme example that I have personally
experienced). Looking back, I understand why the professor exacted the
exam in such the way he did; it was in order to test our conceptual
understanding of the material and challenge even the absolute brightest
among us. However, if such be the case, why not evaluate the students
based solely on their own performance and either raise the standards of the

course in general or lower the difficulty so it is on par with the abilities of the
students? The reason is because the professor would not be viewed
favorably by both prospective students and the institution with a course that
fails half of those enrolled. This fear of judgment is extremely prevalent
among instructors throughout our national education system, and can even
be found at such elite universities.
In an article written by John Young, a student at the Johnson Graduate
School of Management at Cornell University, he outlines and summarizes
some of the research done by Professor Vrinda Kadiyali, who analyzes
competitive strategies using game theory and econometric modeling,
illustrating some of the issues even elite universities face around grade
inflation. Kadiyali believes that inflated grades lead to failures in the
matching markets that connect graduates with employers and more
advanced academic opportunities. Grades that fail to accurately convey
academic performance mislead employers and others, and could distort
hiring and salary decisions. This leads to economic losses and reduced
overall welfare, argues Kadiyali. Employers lose if new hires underperform,
and low-performing students may be set up for failure if they are matched
with opportunities that are too demanding, she explains. Better students
also stand to lose if their grades dont accurately communicate their abilities
to employers (Young).
If the discrepancies of grade inflation are so well known, then we
should do everything in our power to challenge and reshape the current

education system; however, its not as simple as one might come to believe.
One of the most pressing issues has to do with the competing self-interests
of many universities. If schools didnt compete with one another or strive to
be the most favorable institution for prospective students to attend or enter
into the job market, changing the system on a whole might not be so hard.
But as Young puts it, If only Cornell cracks down on grade inflation, and our
competitor schools do not, how will our students fare on the job market as
they compete with those with higher GPAs? This is a classic prisoners
dilemma, where each school acts in its own self-interest, but overall were all
worse off (Young). This competitive nature of the human physiology is
natural and instinctive, and an aspect not likely to be changing anytime
soon.
There are ways to combat the ever growing problems surrounding
grade inflation, however. One such option that I find particularly interesting
lies on the proposal of economist Tim Harford: make grade inflation more
like price inflation by uncapping the highest grade. In other words, grade
inflation would be less of a problem if the entire grading scale could shift
upwards over time, thereby decompressing the grades at the top. Under
such a system, today's B becomes tomorrow's A+, tomorrow A+ becomes
the day after tomorrow's A+++, and so on. Employers and graduate schools
could simply deflate grades the same way that economists deflate prices in
order to compare them over time (Slavov). Another such option would be
for large and prestigious institutions like Harvard to exercise leadership,

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making their stance against grade inflation well known to employers and
graduate admissions committees (Young). This would take away the need
for universities to compete to have the best students and force a different
approach to how students are evaluated. Of course things wont change
overnight, but Im confident that with time, and with a little dedication and
determination, the grade inflation conundrum can be solved and we can get
back to what really matters: focusing on the fundamental principles on which
we are educating our children.
Education should be a joyous experience for all; schools should be a
place where students can explore their minds, express their creativity, and
pursue their passions. In order to accomplish this, a radical reformation of
our education system is needed; one that is up to date and thats purpose is
to prepare us for the world we live in today, not the world from a century
ago. Grading is detrimental in that it undermines learning and creativity,
rewards cheating, damages students peer relationships and trust in their
teachers, encourages students to avoid challenging work, and teaches
students to value grades over knowledge (Lahey). If we simply abandon this
age old approach of empirically evaluating students, we can return their
freedom to take back their creativity and we can start them down a path that
prefers knowledge over proficiency.
There is so much more that can be said in opposition to the way we run
our education systems across the board, and I can only encourage you to go
out and search for yourself. I am not trying to convince you that schooling is

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bad or that education is worthless; I am simply offering you a chance to

explore what education really should be about. I believe our only hope for
the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we
start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity
(Robinson). We mustnt take away childrens creative ability and we mustnt
deprive them of the right to develop their thinking mentalities in learning to
persevere and challenge the world around them. Our task is to educate their
whole being so they can face the future. And even if it may be a future we
never get to see, they will, and it is our job to help them make something of
it.

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Works Cited

Kohn, Alfie. "The Case Against Grades." Educational Leadership (2011).

Lahey, Jessica. "Letter Grades Deserve an 'F'" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media
Company, 12 Mar. 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2014
Robinson, Ken. "How Schools Kill Creativity." Ted2006. Monterey, California.
Feb. 2006.
Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. The element: how finding your passion
changes everything. New York: Viking, 2009. Print.
Young, John E. "The Grade Inflation Conundrum." Johnson Graduate School of
Management, Cornell University, 3 July 2013. Web.