The moment I walked through the front doors on my first day of kindergarten, my life as a student had been planned out for me. I was destined to live my educational life dependent on meaningless numbers known as grades. Like every other aspiring American student, I would spend my days trapped inside monotonous school classrooms learning information that I would most likely never need in my life, and I would spend my nights studying that information and doing (or not doing) the never-ending piles of homework that I received every night.
My parents sent me to a private school for the first five years of my schooling because the more expensive the school, the better the college (in theory). This school inspired me to learn however I was comfortable learning, which made me enjoy waking up every morning, no matter how early the hour. I woke up. I went to school. I learned. I went home. I did homework. I went to sleep. I did it again. And I loved it.

For the first five years of my educational life, I never worried about tests or report cards. Report cards were purely effort based, and as long as students tried hard, it was nearly impossible to receive poor grades. In addition, the majority of students also received excellent numerical test grades because of the amount of one on one time with the teachers. Nobody felt the need to compare grades, and this allowed everyone to focus more on the enjoyment of learning.

However, I never ended up staying at that school because the class sizes got too small, and the school had to shut down. I switched to public school.

Public school made me a slave to the numbers. Instead of valuing the learning process like I had at my old school, I discovered that as long as I studied enough the night before a big test I could memorize what I needed from a chapter I hadn’t paid attention to the past couple weeks to do get a decent grade on the test. I became the person who forgot everything I had learned as soon as the test was over. This made me the kind of learner that I had never wanted to be, but that was inevitable after I joined public school. I would do anything to get those A+ grades, even if it meant not learning thoroughly.

Because of state mandates that require teachers to teach certain curriculums based on standardized tests, students are forced out of that childlike mindset of creativity, innovation, and the love of learning, and they are hurdled into the mindset that good without good grades, happiness is unattainable.

What really is the true purpose for education? When you get down to it, education serves two purposes in our society: to provide our youth with tools and knowledge they will need for the rest of their lives, and to improve the intelligence of our society as a whole.
Standardized tests do not provide meaning to the true purpose of education.

Standardized tests create artificial students who are only focused on good grades rather than the desire to learn, creating identical mindsets the way that a pencil sharpener sharpens pencils to be identical. A pencil may be any brand or any hardness, but after it goes through an electric sharpener, it will ultimately serve the same purpose as any other pencil, the way school creates students to be identical. Every time a student takes a standardized test, and every time a pencil is sharpened, creativity and the purpose of education is lost in the process, which is represented by pencil shavings that are simply tossed in the garbage. Once a pencil has been sharpened, there is no way to return those shavings to the original pencil and they are completely lost, the way that the desire to learn is lost throughout a student’s school career. Eventually the pencil will become completely worn down, and will become too short to be of any use.

As Alfie Kohn states in “The Case Against Grades”, “Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.” (Kohn, 2011). In public schools, students throughout the entire state are required to learn the same curriculums based on standardized tests, especially in middle school and non-advanced high school classes. Some may argue that this is a good thing, because it creates a set of standards that all teachers have to follow. However, this puts students on a track entirely based around the standardized test at the end of the year, so that students are more focused on getting good grades rather than actually learning the material.

When the state creates standardized tests, teachers do not know what material will be on it until the day of testing, so teachers will either over teach, and the test will be too easy, or they will under teach, and the test will be too hard. This creates an ill representation of what students actually have learned about that subject, and many standardized tests don’t even provide students with the answers to the questions after the students have taken the test.

So what should be done? Is there a way to fix the mess that the public schools of America have gotten themselves into? Absolutely. Instead of giving numerical grades, which drive students to become competitive in numbers that mean nothing except society’s perception of what’s right or wrong, teachers should give feedback based on improvement and effort, which will make students actually feel good about learning because they will understand their improvement. Instead of being required to follow certain state mandates in curriculum, teachers should set goals for the students to reach based on what the students’ needs are. And instead of requiring students to take state tests at the end of the year, teachers should write their own finals for their students which will show their improvement over the year.

Students don’t have to be put into pencil sharpeners and sharpened the way the state wants them to be. If teachers had less requirements by the state, then they would be able to sharpen students the way that they need to be sharpened instead of the way that the government thinks they need to be sharpened. This would inspire the love of learning, which would be better for society as a whole.

Citations
Kohn, Alfie. "The Case Against Grades." Educational Leadership, Nov. 2011. Web.