Today's NYT has yet another article about Harvard's
continuing problem with "grade inflation":
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/education/21GRAD.html
"Concerns that too many Harvard
undergraduates are receiving too
many A grades have prompted a faculty
committee to begin a campaign to
rehabilitate the honor of the B plus.
What's wrong with this picture?
"Obviously", nothing.
But, as Bertolt Brecht urged, where something is
obvious there is probably something being
ideologically mystified.
And the mystification here is that some persons --
the faculty -- have constitued themselves as
human co-subjectivity: as peer creators of
the universally shared social world, in such
a way as to constitute other persons as
*objects in their world rather than as yet other
co-shapers of that world*:
The faculty constitute
a category of object called "student".
Objects in this category get manipulated
by the faculty in ways the faculty
decides on, as if the faculty was deciding
what crops to plant in a field, or
grading the fruit.
But "students" -- especially *Harvard* students
are not merely objects. Apart from contingent
power relations, they could be as human as
are faculty members, i.e., they too could
be legislators and judges of the universally
shared human world in which both they
and the other persons currently called
"faculty": coexist.
Can you imagine young Alexander the Great
watching while his father Philip and Aristotle
discussed whether he was getting more A
grades than he deserved?
The quote with which I titled this thread is
from a surveillance camera at Bellevue Hospital,
and the words were spoken by a woman doctor as an
intruder was stabbing her to death in a stairwell.
As Elie Wiesel said:
Don't compare! All suffering is intolerable.
The late Harvard Professor Lawrence Kohlberg
used the phrase "the hidden curriculum" to refer
to what the school teaches by its form of social
life, as opposed to what is nominally taught
in the visible curriculum.
Harvard is teaching its students that some
persons are legislators and judges, and other
persons are the objects of the former persons'
legislation and adjudication. Leaders and
followers. Leaders *who also are followers* --
as opposed to free individuals who neither
follow others nor lead others but rather
govern themselves in peer intercourse with
others who similarly neither lead nor follow
but govern themselves too.
Until the idea that grades are not an assault
on human dignity sinks in, the schools will
continue to teach obedience and command-within-obedience.
It will only be by luck if these obedient persons
obey the laws of the United States instead of
obeying Osama bin Laden or Charles Manson....
In a free society, learners would freely contract with
potential teachers, and their relation would last only
as long as both sides wanted it to last. My own
doctorate is worthless -- but in the process of
writing my dissertation, I actually got to have
some of this kind of learning experience. Actuality
proves possibility. I may again yet have to submit to
being graded (as an employee on the job this happens to
me all the time), but at least I now know that
something is happening to me and that it is not
right, as opposed to trying to prove myself worthy
by striving for a good grade because as a student
my appropriate "place" is to strive for good grades,
as opposed to having to do it because I do not
have the resources to walk away and leave the dead to
bury themselves....
For the spirit alone lives, all else dies.
And that includes the grading system at Harvard,
which is a preformative contradiction of all the
ideals of the "liberal arts" that are nominally
being taught thru illiberal means.
Never again!
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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