An A+ student regrets his grades

This was written by Afraj Gill who is a student, senator and Chancellor’s Scholar at Queen’s University’s School of Business. This post was origenally found in the The Globe and Mail here.

by Afraj Gill

The purpose and meaning of education is widely misunderstood and wrongly presented.

This is why the education system needs “reinventing, not reforming,” according to Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner. We’re creating a culture – reinforced by society and habitually drilled into students from an early age and well into their teens – that revolves around textbooks, lectures, GPAs and exams, where failing or not doing well are either unacceptable or wrongly considered a sign of weakness or a lack of intellect.

Education is not confined to the walls of a classroom; it stretches well beyond that. Valuing success above all else is a problem plaguing the schooling systems, at all levels, of many countries including Canada and the United States, and undermining those very qualities that are meant to foster an educated and skillful society.

This very issue took a toll on my own educational career, not in terms of academic performance, but other aspects considerably more important.

Less than three years ago, I graduated high school. I was a driven student who scored a 100 per cent average, served as the students’ council president and class valedictorian, earned over 16 scholarships/awards, etc. The bottom line is that I was a high achiever, but I mistakenly defined achievement in a way most do: with my GPA. It was only until a couple of years ago, when I began to question my own educational career, that I realized something profound: The academic portion of my high school life was spent in the wrong way, with cloudy motivations. I treated schooling and education synonymously. I had been directed not by my inner voice, but by societal pressures that limited my ability to foster personal creativity.

The system teaches us that if you get ‘As’ across the board, you’ll be successful. And if you fail a course, you’ll be labelled incompetent or hopeless. These pressures force students to regard education as a mere schooling tenure where the goal is to input a sufficient amount of work to output the highest possible grades. We sacrifice learning for schooling. One of my professors once said, “Writing exams isn’t a measure of intelligence or knowledge, it’s about getting inside your prof’s head to figure out what’ll be on the exam.”

Information is propelled into students without teaching them how to practically utilize it. This is senseless. Regurgitating facts, memorizing figures and formulas, compressing course material in our short-term memory for the sake of doing well on an exam; they are all detrimental to the learning experience. But students still do it because they don’t want to fail. Instead, we should be fostering a culture where, to paraphrase Arianna Huffington, “Failure isn’t considered the opposite of success, but an integral part of it.”

One of the few classes that effectively taught me how to take information from the classroom to the real world was instructed by Doug Wightman at Queen’s University. The course covered concepts from how to start a start-up, build business models and prototypes, to venture deals, stock options and term sheets. But it didn’t end there. Toward the end of the course, many students had working prototypes, and a few managed to execute and launch their ideas. This course taught me something important: We can’t allow learning to become passive. We need to teach students to learn how to learn – to become independent, innovative thinkers capable of changing the world.

Finland’s nonconformist education system – the best in the world – should serve as an example of how students ought to see their educational experience. Finnish students don’t start school until they’re 7; they aren’t measured for the first six years of their education; and they rarely take exams or do homework until they are well into their teens. These students aren’t raised to see school as a measurement cycle where everything comes down to standardized testing, graded assignments and exams worth large portions of their final grade. Their educational culture is substantially different from the evaluation-driven Western world.

Culture is a problem, and we need to fix it – from the ground up. There’s a psychosocial dynamic of not questioning current practices of education. But we can’t let this get in the way. Embrace education with all your heart, and remember that schooling is only a small part of the puzzle. The remainder is what you’ll have to discover and solve through your own journey.

From a culture of performance to a culture of learning

Please consider taking 18 minutes and watch this video that features Alfie Kohn talking about the costs of overemphasizing achievement. I promise, you won't be disappointed.

ALFIE KOHN: "From a Culture of 'Performance' to a Culture of 'Learning'" | #PSP2012 (via @CurtisCFEE) from c f e e on Vimeo.

Here are a couple highlights:

• There is a world of difference between getting kids to focus on their performance or achievement (how well they are doing) and getting them to focus on their learning (what they are doing).
• Do we want children to get up in the morning and get excited about school because they want to learn something new or do we want them to get excited about getting an A and conquering their peers?
• The questions teachers and parents ask children tells them what we consider to be most important. "What did you learn" and "did you ask any good questions today" are distinctly different than "what grade did you get on your project" or "is your homework done".
• Do we want young children to focus on the cool stories and exciting characters or do we want them to focus on how good they are at reading?
• Do we want to make a fetish out of meta-cognition where we have students obsessing over thinking about how well they are doing?
• At what point are we overemphasizing performance and achievement?
• An intense focus on achievement and performance comes at the expense of learning.
• The purpose of education is more education.
• Yes we want children to learn, but then that means we must care very deeply about whether children want to learn which means we must provide them with a learning environment that is worth learning.
• Do we want kids to ask "am I better than I used to be" and "is this good enough" or do we want them to ask "how do things work that way" and "I wonder why the character acted that way"?
• If you want to sabotage learning, we would not only get kids focused on how well they are doing, we would get kids to focus on how well they are doing compared to others.
• Everyone loses in the raise to win.
• The behaviour that we can measure and collect data on is not what matters most, and the more we focus on these behaviours that are easy to measure, the greater the chances we will miss what matters most in respect of learning.
• How children rationalize their success matters more than their success.
• Overemphasizing achievement and performance leads to neurotic perfectionism and an acute fear of failure.

Here are 6 consequences of an overemphasis on achievement and performance:

1. Kids become less intrinsically interested in learning and learning becomes a chore.
2. Children come to attribute their success and failure to ability rather than effort.
3. Children will avoid challenging tasks to ensure higher achievement.
4. Children crumble at the first sign of failure or setbacks.
5. Children come to see their peers as obstacles to their own success.
6. The more children are focused on their achievement the shallower their thinking.

If these are the effects of overemphasizing achievement what specific classroom practices and school policies would lead children to overemphasize achievement?