In last Sunday’s education supplement to The New York Times, there was a table showing a sampling of U.S. colleges and universities and the distribution of grades “earned” by students, as well as the change from ten years earlier – and in a number of cases, the change from twenty or forty or fifty years ago. Not surprisingly to me, at virtually every university over 35% of all grades granted were As. Most were over 40%, and at a number, over half of all grades were As. This represents a 10% increase, roughly, over the past ten years, but even more important it represents a more than doubling, and in some cases, a tripling of the percentage of As being given from 40-50 years ago. Are the teachers 2-3 times better? Are the students? Let us just say that I have my doubts.
But before anyone goes off and blames the more benighted university professors, let’s look at society as a whole. Almost a year ago, or perhaps longer, Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, pointed out that almost every Broadway show now gets a standing ovation, when a standing ovation was relatively rare some fifty years ago. When I was a grade-schooler, there were exactly four college football bowl games on New Year’s eve or New Year’s day, while today there are something like thirty spread over almost four weeks. Until something like half a century ago, there weren’t any “divisions” in baseball. The regular season champion of the American League played the regular season champion of the National League. It’s almost as though we, as a society, can’t accept the judgment of continual success over time.
And have you noticed that every competition for children has almost as many prizes as competitors – or so it seems. Likewise, there’s tremendous pressure to do away with grades and/or test scores in determining who gets into what college. And once students are in college, they get to judge their professors on how well they’re being taught – as if any 18-21 year truly has a good and full understanding of what they need to learn [admittedly, some professors don’t, but the students aren’t the ones who should be determining this]. Then we have the global warming debate, where politicians and people with absolutely no knowledge and understanding of the mechanics and physics of climate insist that their views are equal to those of scientists who’ve spent a lifetime studying climate. And, of course, there are the intelligent design believers and creationists who are using politics to dictate science curricula in schools, based on their beliefs, rather than on what can be proven.
And there’s the economy and business and education, where decisions are made essentially on the basis of short-term profit figures, rather than on the longer-term… and as a result, as we have seen, the economy, business, and education have all suffered greatly.
I could list page after page of similar examples and instances, but these all point out an inherent flaw in current societies, particularly in western European societies, and especially in U.S. society. As a society, we’re unwilling or unable, or both, to make intelligent decisions based on facts and experience.
Whether it’s because of political pressure, the threat of litigation, the fear of being declared discriminatory, or the honest but misguided belief that fostering self-esteem before establishing ability creates better students, the fact is that we don’t honestly evaluate our students. We don’t judge them accurately. Forty or fifty percent do not deserve As, not when less than thirty percent of college graduates can write a complex paragraph in correct English and follow the logic [or lack of it] in a newspaper editorial.
We clearly don’t judge and hold our economic leaders, or our financial industry leaders, to effective standards, not when we pay them tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to implement financial instruments that nearly destroyed our economy. We judge those running for political office equally poorly, electing them on their professed beliefs rather than on either their willingness to solve problems for the good of the entire country or their willingness to compromise to resolve problems – despite the fact that no political system can survive for long without compromise.
Nor are we, again as a society, particularly accurate in assessing and rewarding artistic accomplishments, or lack of them, when rap music, American Idol and “reality” shows draw far more in financial reward and audiences than do old-fashioned theatre, musical theatre [where you had to be able to compose and sing real melodies], opera, and classical music, and where hyped-up graphic novels are the fastest-growing form of “print” fiction. It’s one thing to enjoy entertainment that’s less than excellent in terms of quality; it’s another to proclaim it excellent, but the ability to differentiate between popularity and technical and professional excellence is, again, a matter of good judgment.
In fact, “judgment” is becoming the new “discrimination.” Once, to discriminate meant to choose wisely; now it means to be horribly biased. The latest evolution in our current “newspeak” appears to be that to judge wisely on the basis of facts is a form of bias and oppression. It’s fine to surrender judgment to the marketplace, where dollars alone decide, or to politics, where those who are most successful in pandering for votes decide… but to decide based on solid accomplishment – or the lack thereof, as in the case of students who can’t read or write or think or in the case of financiers who lose trillions of dollars – that’s somehow old-fashioned, biased, or unfair.
Whatever happened to judging wisely?