Here is, by far, the best insight from class on Tuesday.

We read Neil Postman’s “My Graduation Speech” for class, a speach where he contrasts two groups that come to be metaphors for important ideas–the “Athenians” and  the “Visigoths.”  It’s a fantastic little piece and will only take you five minutes or so to read.  You should read it now if you never have.

http://www.ditext.com/postman/mgs.html

We asked the class think about their own (future) graduating class at Bethel, and then to speculate whether they thought the Athenians would outnumber the Visigoths.  One student suggested that a barrier to being an Athenian was actually “grades.”  My teaching partner chimed up right away and said, “That’s great!  Grades aren’t a value of the Athenians–grades are a value of the Visigoths."

I was reminded of Phaedrus' proposed university without grades in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  But that’s an entry for another time.  (btw, You should read that book, too, but not right now.).

So grades are a visigothian idea–I like that. Some of our supposedly “best students” are Visigoths in their approach to education. And who do we have to thank for that?

It wasn’t students who invented the idea of grades.  It took a group of Visigoths called “professional educators” to up with that one.