Are good grades child abuse?

    Writers like John Taylor Gatto have very effectively explained how grades are used to artificially divide students into perceived classes at an early age. With bad grades, we can clearly see the abuse and harm done to a child. Someone who may have a number of talents, but not the school-prescribed ones, and not on the school-prescribed schedule, will be told repeatedly that he is a failure and will never amount to anything. When I spent a couple of years in a middle school I met a few of these students, and it really was sad because even if they lit up on a particular topic, as a teacher you are bound the official program, even if it hurts the child.

But what about the children who make good grades?

    After all, good grades open doors at universities, which open doors to all kinds of opportunity. And yet, as a "recovering A student," I must make the argument that good grades are also abusive, perhaps equally abusive as artificial failure.

All the knowledge in the world

    Much later in my academic career, when I was finishing my PhD, I got into a fellowship program in which we taught middle school students once a week. Part of the program is to be wheeled around to all sorts of educational bureaucrats and administrators, the most impactful of which being the bureaucrats who did curriculum development.

    They handed us sheets of the statewide content goals, and what shocked me more than anything is how utterly simple they were. Since school is built on the assumption of punting all students through the same content goals on the same schedule, the only way to achieve it is through "goals" that are of the lowest common denominator. In my lab I also had a few teachers go through, who had given up on teaching. The lack of freedom and being made to force students through mind-numbing content drove them out of schooling.

    The sheet also gave me another feeling, one of an incredible weight. As a child, when I got an A, I thought it meant I was "smart." I had mastered everything! But now I was on the other side of the report card, the other side of the textbook. We were sitting in a position where we would decide just what "knowledge" is to an impressionable child. What "achievement" means.

    I also walked away from that particular meeting with a deep despair. I graduated high school with distinction and from my bachelor's degree with honors. And during the two years before this meeting I had met international students, and I had met and read from Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Tom Woods. Every time I thought "These people are so smart. I have never seen such intelligent people!" And after the curriculum meeting it dawned on me. I was an excellent student from Georgia public schools, at the time ranked 50/50 among states in the USA. My particular high school was right on the national average. I had good grades, but I was a big fish in a small pond. I passed the curriculum, and thought the curriculum was all the knowledge in the world, but now I knew...

I was an A student who knew nothing.

You will be the boss!

     Like many typical American "smart" kids, I was picked on due to having good grades and the teacher's favor. And I remember the way my various teachers would console me: "Don't worry! Study hard, and with good grades you will be the boss of all of these children!" I have heard the phrase many times - get the good grades, win the positions, and you will have the power.

     This idea is abuse twice over. First, it isn't true - leadership comes from contribution, and the only positions where scoring gets you a promotion is in government. If you don't take that particular route, an A student bent on "revenge" may find that his promotions will never come. In fact, his enemies may even get ahead! What a despairing fate.

    But the second reason is more sinister - how abusive is it to tell a hurting child that he must turn is frustration into a multi-decade revenge plot? Who should hold onto stupid pranks and one-upmanship between 12-year-olds? Imagine someone truly holding onto this, who then becomes the asshole middle manager who makes his subordinates' life hell, because they didn't do as well in school. That isn't justice, its monstrous.

Overcoming good grades

    The good news is, good grades can be overcome. The first step, in my opinion, is to understand that in spite of the good grades, you actually haven't learned that much yet. Once you understand that you are schooled and not educated, your education can truly begin. In this case, an education from reading and meditating on that reading. An education from relationships, and an education from action, trial, and error.

    If you also are a "recovering A student," I'd love to hear from you in the comments.