Turn Every Page: making the grade
Turn Every Page: making the grade
Developing a love of learning instead of taking a test
An article by Yascha Mounk in a recent edition of The Spectator, “Why the British think differently from Americans,” raises interesting questions about whether our U.S. education system teaches the right things, what the purpose of education is, and the people that our education system produces. Mounk frames her discussion around the way schools in America grade differently from those in Britain:
When I first started teaching undergraduates at Harvard, the grading system the university employed struck me as very odd. Even ambitious students at top colleges in the United States see it as their job to answer any essay question in the most thorough and reasonable way. They regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner. If they pull this off without making major errors, they fully expect to get an A. And with grade inflation rampant in the Ivy League, they usually do. . . .
This stands in stark contrast to the grading scheme – and the implicit value system – I learned as an undergraduate at Cambridge. There, my teachers explained to me that the earnest and methodical essays I initially submitted as an overseas student fresh off the boat (or, rather, fresh off the Ryanair flight) from Germany would, at best, qualify for a high 2:1. To contend for a first, I needed to learn to be ‘brilliant’.
The British system Mounk describes has been in place for a long while. In Metaphysical Animals, the authors explain how the four protagonists each obtained a “First”—an “A” in the American system—in their studies. The story about Elizabeth Anscombe demonstrates Mounk’s point. Anscombe was, according to her professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, “‘undoubtedly, the most talented female student I have had since 1930, when I began to lecture; and among my male students only 8, or 10 have either equalled or surpassed her.’” Metaphysical Animals, 132–33. Anscombe was lauded by some professors while others did not think much of her at all. “Elizabeth was awarded a First at the insistence of her philosophy examiners, despite spectacularly failing the Roman History paper.” Metaphysical Animals, 86.
“Famously, when asked in her viva: ‘Miss Anscombe, is there any fact at all about the history of Rome which you would like to comment on?’ the learned Catholic replied: ‘No,’ with a ‘mournful shake of the head.’” Metaphysical Animals, 86.
Because Anscombe was “brilliant” in her philosophy exams, it did not matter that she had no interest in Roman History or other subjects. Her philosophical star shone so brightly that it removed the shadows of ignorance in other subjects. But should brilliance in one area conceal a lack of knowledge or interest in other areas? And should we reward students for being “brilliant” for its own sake?
Brilliant answers do not necessarily correspond to reality or truth. I’ve told a story about a friend from school, Xavier, who refused to answer a professor’s question because he though it was the wrong question. After answering the question that he thought the professor should have asked, Xavier got an “A.” Brilliant. Mounk tells about her experience, where “[t]hese counter-intuitive answers were often plain wrong, sometimes for reasons that would have been evident to anybody who had studied the topic at hand for more than a week. But that, we were given to understand, wasn’t so grave a sin. As long as we argued for our wrong positions with flair and panache, we had a chance of that coveted first.”
Should arguing for a “wrong position” and doing it well give someone higher marks than, in Mounk’s words, to “regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner”? We do not operate that way in other areas. In business, you either get the quarterly numbers correct or you don’t. No amount of fanfare can distract people that your bottom-line number is wrong. But being “brilliant” can help in the law—some trial attorneys have a gift of being so smooth in the courtroom that juries may overlook certain facts and bits of law to decide in favor of that lawyer’s client.
“Each grading system communicates a set of deeper values. And each set of values has both benefits and drawbacks.” One of the drawbacks in the American system that Mounk sees is that it “has helped to create a deeply conformist elite. As early as college, the best-credentialled people in the country learned that the benefits of brilliance or contrariness were low and the best way to get ahead was to be both competent and compliant. This created the Democratic party of people like Hillary Clinton: candidates and advisers who were deeply fluent in the received wisdom of their time yet failed to appreciate the pulse of their own population. Ones who barely made any misstep but sounded so scripted that they ended up alienating millions.”
But “Britain’s grading system also has serious drawbacks. It creates a culture in which charismatic amateurs are nearly always prized over earnest professionals; a political system in which cabinet ministers rarely have any deep knowledge about the subjects for which they are responsible; and a broader public culture in which the art of spin is often prized over the imperatives of substance.”
I have experienced both sides of these drawbacks. I knew a business whose CEO had been trained in England and worked his way up the corporate ladder not by having any actual business sense, but by being a “charismatic amateur” who was a master at “the art of spin.” As Mounk notes: “[I]t turns out that an elite that has become habituated to blagging it isn’t always good at running major companies, making important inventions, or governing a country.” That was certainly true. And I have also seen leaders so devoid of any personality that no one feels any desire to work for them because the employees do not feel like they have a vibrant leader. It’s all spreadsheets and KPIs.
There is a time to “shoot for a first,” as Mounk says, to try and be brilliant. And she argues in favor of promoting “the instinctive preference for the thought–provoking over the reasonable.” But how do we balance what Mounk describes in the U.S. and British systems of education? Can we have a system that prizes actual knowledge of a subject with energetic investigation into how that subject interacts with other areas and what the outer contours of the subject are? The British grading system helps students expand their minds and to think about things in different ways. It may even help them enjoy what they are studying. That’s a valuable contribution. “The love of learning opens up dimensions of humanity that might be hidden in ordinary life and to which common experiences are hostile.” Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, at 95.
If we are too conformist, we risk letting our schooling get in the way of our education, as Mark Twain quipped. When I was young, I was expected to get straight A’s in school. And I quickly figured out that to get an A, you didn’t actually need to learn the material. You needed to know and remember the material just long enough to regurgitate it on an exam. But then you could forget everything as you walked out the door. That’s not a way to be more human or develop a love of learning. “The capacities of the mind lie strangely in tension with our motivations as shaped by those around us: the social expectations for a service worker or for a young overachiever; the demands made on a young woman preparing for marriage; the human diminishment deliberately induced by segregation, racial prejudice, or prison life. . . . We escape from these images to recover fuller and truer ways of thinking about ourselves, and thus to find fuller and truer ways of being.” Lost in Thought, at 96. We need to break free from these external expectations that are placed on us so that we can reach our full potential.
“Our humanity is not a profession to be left to the accomplished few.” Lost in Thought, at 101. If we are more daring in what we read and how we think, we can find ways to combine deep learning with charismatic presentation. And we just may capture a bit of what makes us more truly human.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best,
Aaron