Could Chasing Grades Sabotage Your Kids?
Moving schools for "academics," seeking outcomes, and the problems that arise when we make the metric the mission.
Hello, good people!
Last week, I was talking to one of my favorite senior students about one of his friends (let’s call this friend Josh) who went to a different school. He explained that Josh had gone to elementary and middle school with him, but that Josh’s parents transferred him into another high school within our same district for “academic purposes.” I was confused.
“But our school is better than that one? What?... Did he want to go to a worse school?”
“Yeah,” the student responded as if it were so obvious that he was shocked to have to explain it. “So he could get better grades and get into better colleges. Josh is in the top ten in his class and he’s gotten into all the colleges he’s applied to. It worked. I respect it.”
What a peculiar and uniquely modern perspective. Where to begin?
Remembering the Why
Let’s start with the most obvious problem with all of this. The parents and their son chose a lesser education over a better one. They chose less challenge and lower standards just to manipulate the outcome—just to get a higher class rank. That’s a bit like seeking out the easiest driver’s ed teacher so that you don’t have to do a lot of driving practice in order to get your driver’s license. Might bite you in the butt.
The point of an education is to learn. We often forget that. By allowing and even encouraging this young man to transfer to the easier school, Josh’s parents communicated a few unfortunate messages that will stay with him as he goes forward. These messages include:
Learning does not matter. Grades matter.
Effort does not matter. Outcomes matter. When you can, manipulate the outcome so that you look better. (This is the best way to create a fixed mindset where students avoid challenges for fear of failure.)
You are smart, but not smart enough to compete with the best. Look to surround yourself with less talented people so that you look better.
Rather than rising to the occasion to reach your goals, seek less challenge.
You may say, yeah, he is getting a worse education now, but this is going to set Josh up for a better education later. But will it? Isn’t this approach likely to hurt his chances of success in college? If he has not been challenged sufficiently because he was at an easier school, isn’t it likely that he will be less prepared for college and, therefore, less likely to be successful when it matters more? And that isn’t the only reason this move may diminish Josh’s success in college.
If this young man has learned that education is just about getting the grade, is he going to have the right disposition, approach, and mindset to appreciate his college education? Will he show up with his mind eager and open? Or, will college just be another stepping stone in a transactional life where the point is always to game the system to produce the outcome that you presume to be most important? Will it just be another series of tests to game with little concern for the actual point of an education?
More still, what’s to say that Josh wouldn’t have had the exact same opportunities if he’d stayed at the better school? Josh is in the top ten in his current class. He was capable of being successful at the harder school (which is still not near as challenging as his college courses will be). Perhaps Josh would have risen to the occasion and ended up with a class rank in the same range. Often when you are immersed in a more competitive environment it brings out the best in you.
The reality is Josh will graduate college. He will get a job. He’ll probably even be “successful.” But will he thrive? Will he live deeply? Those are the questions we have to start asking.
Digging Deeper
Josh’s decision and his friend’s “I respect it” comment are the inevitable downstream effects of generations of cultural programming that started with the self-esteem movement and the consequent participation trophy culture. In our attempt to make everyone feel good all the time, we made outcomes the point of everything. The result is a pervasive superficiality which was amplified exponentially with the birth of social media.
We so often mistake the metric for the mission. We focus on the outcome without any thought for why that outcome was deemed worthwhile in the first place. Grades become more important than learning. Individual statistics and getting film for college scouts becomes more important than discipline, sacrificing for a team, or creating healthy habits. For many, even religion has become a cheat code to get to heaven rather than a path to real spiritual development.
Author and teacher David McCullough Jr. describes this cultural phenomenon best in his viral 2012 commencement address:
“We have come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We’ve come to see them as the point and we’re happy to compromise standards or ignore reality if we suspect that is the quickest way or only way to have something to put on the mantelpiece—something to pose with, to crow about—something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose or learn or grow or enjoy yourself doing it. Now it’s, “so what does this get me.” As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors. Building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bodin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic.”
The things that we do should have a purpose in and of themselves. Otherwise, why do them? For the social media likes? For the cheap, short-lived praise of people who don’t take the time to note the difference between wisdom and grades?
THIS is your life. Right here. Right now. It matters. But so many people live their whole lives gaming for that next outcome that is supposed to make them happy. Such an approach is not only bad for our souls, but if you look at our particular moment in history, you’ll realize it is more foolish than ever.
Our Particular Moment in History
In parenting and life today, we often chase metrics that were created to gauge success in a world that no longer exists. It’s as if the industrial revolution is going on. Heavy industry is creating a world where one farmer can do what ten used to. But you are still training all your kids to milk cows and rotate crops because that was what worked for your father and his father.
A college diploma was once cheap and it guaranteed you stable long term employment with wonderful benefits. College was cheap, rare, and precious. Today, by contrast, the means of learning are infinite. Access to knowledge is infinite. But a college diploma has become exorbitantly expensive, common, and less difficult. It doesn’t guarantee you stable employment and it isn’t the only way to get access to precious skills and knowledge, but it now requires most people to go into substantial debt.
In this world, getting a college diploma may not be near as important as the ability to learn deeply and to apply new learning in creative ways.
Don’t take my word for it. Here is what Balaji Srinivasan, the serial entrepreneur and author of The Network State, has to say about college:
I think that college credentials were more of a signal twenty-something years ago. Nowadays, I don’t hire from Harvard or Stanford. I hire from Twitter. I hire from Github. Literally, you’re looking for someone’s portfolio. Either their content as a writer… or their code on Github, or their designs on Dribbble. Your portfolio is your resume. And that allows people from around the world—the middle east or the midwest…—inside the US or outside the US. You may not have a name brand but you’ve got a really legit portfolio and you’re smart on social media. That’s absolutely someone who you’d interview and hire…
In fact, being at an expensive college, it’s sort of going back to what it used to be, which is like a gentlemen’s finishing school… It’s not something that’s pushing people in technical education. It’s like the most privileged people who are having this useless thing… time wasting.
Srinivasan says your portfolio matters most. Actually creating great stuff is what matters. Your portfolio is the content you’ve created. It is a far more honest assessment of your skills and personality. It is the evidence that you can see a need and then solve it.
We are in the fourth industrial revolution. We have no idea what jobs will look like in twenty years, much less forty. Today’s students will be working forty years from now. We can’t teach them the specific skills they need to know. So what matters?:
Resilience and adaptability
The desire to continuously learn
The ability to learn well and deeply
The ability to manage time and focus
The ability to communicate and grow from honest, sometimes uncomfortable feedback
A basic understanding of finance (debt kills; compound interest makes your rich)
The capacity to notice and apply patterns in creative ways (which machines can’t do)
The ability to connect with people and create great relationships (which machines can’t do)
The health and vitality necessary to pour energy into your relationships, your learning, and the projects that matter most.
These are the skills that actually matter to all students and all people in the modern world. And, despite the fact that almost all of them are entirely ignored by our public school system, these skills could and should be entirely covered by the time students graduated high school.
The number of avenues to learn are infinite. MIT has their entire computer science degree online FOR FREE. What’s missing is the desire to learn and learn deeply. If you have this desire along with the ability to think like a business owner and the adaptability to overcome challenges, you’ll do great!
The point of this rambling isn’t that college isn’t a good idea, but that we have to go deeper. We have to value more than superficial outcomes.
Go deeper. Care deeper. Think deeper. Love deeper. And be willing to risk breaking the mold when the mold doesn’t make sense. That is the route to a richer life.
Thank you for reading and sharing with any kindred spirits who you think would enjoy this.
Have a wonderful week!