Another symptom of doing school is that, for many students, getting good grades is their driving motivation.  This is especially true of successful students.  They avidly pursue any avenue for boosting their accumulation of points.  They engage in legalistic wrangling over their test scores.  Here are some of the defining features of such academic materialism.

Training for the rat race

There is a relentless, insatiable quality to the pursuit of grades.  A flow chart of activity in school might look like this for many students:

Sadly, this repetition cultivates a preoccupation with accumulating good grades in the minds of successful students.  For some, it becomes an obsession.  I have dealt with students who were desperately unhappy, even weeping, because they didn’t get enough points on a test to get an “A”.

This intense training lends itself to a posture towards life that is, in my opinion, unhealthy and fundamentally addictive.  It places the meaning of what the student is doing firmly on the outside.  The issue of external motivation will be explored in great depth in this book, since it is, ironically, a principle barrier to genuine learning.

Grades are the fuel that drives doing school

Grades can be viewed as a form of bribery, designed to pressure students into doing school.  If you doubt that, ask any teacher or student what would happen if grades were removed from school completely.  The answer is clear — very little work would take place.  Doing school would grind to a halt. 

Unfortunately, like all bribes, grades pervert the motivation of both the briber and the one being bribed. 

Grades quantize learning: they are the currency of doing school.  They objectify and monetize the learning process.  Recent experiments in actually rewarding learning with cash are merely taking grades to their logical conclusion.  Academically successful students are often greedy about points in the same way that materialistic people are greedy about money.  Teachers often disparage that greediness, but I think that is blaming the victim;  it’s important to always remember that school is where students learned that greed.  

The competitive urge

Another aspect of academic materialism is that it encourages competition.  The end of the school year at my school brought a slew of awards ceremonies.  The science department awards alone took over an hour and involved several hundred students.  Every department did something similar primarily to recognize the students with the best grades.

This competitive urge is internalized by successful students who strive to have a higher grade point average and class rank than their peers.  They know that these factors may well determine which colleges they may get into.

The symptoms of academic materialism will be familiar to every teacher: arguments over grades, over how many points a student gets on a test, the perpetual question of “what do I need to do to get an ‘A’?”  The legalistic battles that occur to determine a grade to the second decimal place have nothing to do with learning.