Transcriber: Mirjana Čutura Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Everybody wants to talk to you about something you can do.
We really screwed up the planet, and I'm sorry about that.
That's what you're going to inherit.
But let's talk about something you have to fix
before you can figure out how to fix your planet -
one small step.
Now, raise your hands out there -
and I'll need a little bit of house lights -
raise your hands if you've licked a nine-volt battery.
Oh, it's a pretty good crowd.
Let's try one more.
Raise your hands if you've climbed high enough in a tree
to make your parents nervous.
Yeah! That's what I'm looking for. Okay, we're going to get along fine.
Six years ago, I started a school called Tinkering School,
disguised as a summer camp.
We explore the notion that kids can build anything
and through building learn anything.
Now, I could spend the next six minutes talking to you about my school,
but I want to talk to you about your school.
One more time.
Raise your hands if you get letter grades.
Okay. Great!
I'm really sorry to say that you've already been messed up.
My school started over dinner one night.
We were having chicken, as it turns out.
Do you know where your school started?
No?
It was all Napoleon's fault.
This guy.
See, this is the Prussian Army,
and the Prussian Army was having their asses handed to them by Napoleon.
And they decided that the problem lay not with their strategy -
of course, the generals were right; they couldn't be wrong -
it had to do with the kind of soldiers they had out there,
which were undisciplined, freethinking farmers, essentially.
And they needed a way to make new soldiers.
And they invented a school system.
And in the 1800s,
we brought that school system across the Atlantic Ocean.
And in Boston,
when mandatory schooling was started,
they based it on this system invented by the Prussians.
And as you can imagine,
for a system designed to turn freethinking farmers into regimented soldiers,
it relied a lot on drilling and testing,
which is exactly what they needed for the Industrial Revolution -
millions of people doing the same kinds of jobs and buying stuff.
So it worked okay then.
But do we still need people to work in factories
and buy exactly the same things?
This guy, Ellwood P. Cubberley, said,
"Our schools are factories in which the raw products" -
and he meant you, guys -
"are to be shaped and fashioned.
And it is the business of the school to build its pupils
according to the specification laid down."
Being built to a specification -
what an idea for people.
One of the ramifications of that are letter grades.
How can we? I mean, honestly?
And what do we mean when we sum up somebody's entire high school as:
oh, he has a 3.5 grade average or she got a 4.0?
Does that really capture what we are as people and students?
Well, it turns out, this practice is not only insufficient,
it's incredibly harmful.
This guy, Alfie Kohn - he's a retired high school teacher -
has gathered a mountain of really good scholarly research
about just how harmful these practices are,
because, as it turns out,
in the last 100 years of giving letter grades,
there's never been one single study that showed a positive benefit for you;
it was all for the system.
Because grades tend to put the focus on the grade;
no matter what topic the teacher is teaching you,
you're actually trying to figure out how to get the good grade,
not actually how to learn history, art, science, doesn't matter.
They deter you from trying hard problems.
Why would you try the hardest problem on the page if you knew
that it was going to be in your grade and on your permanent record?
It just doesn't make sense.
And most horrible of all,
they reduce the quality of your own individual thinking.
There's a great study.
If I present you with a problem
and tell you that you're going to be graded,
you'll only look at two or three options that you know might work,
instead of all the possible solutions.
So, knowing all this terrible stuff about the implications of grades,
why do they keep doing it to you?
MRI, CAT scans show us that in your brain
when you are in the learning phase, when you learn something new,
you get the biggest dose of dopamine of your entire lives.
This is the thing that makes you feel good when you discover something for yourself.
It has to do with these two parts of the brain,
but do we want to study neuroanatomy on a day like today?
I don't think so.
Basal forebrain organizes and catalogs information, tells us when we're learning.
Lateral habenula recognizes surprises.
Basal forebrain gives you a little dose of dopamine for learning something new.
Lateral habenula gives you a little dose of adrenaline
and suppresses dopamine when you're surprised by something.
But when they fire together due to a cool piece of wiring,
you get a quadruple dose of dopamine -
learning that surprises us.
Alright.
The opposite of that -
(Laughter) (Applause)
is apathy.
Apathy.
This is death of the love of learning, right here.
Okay. So knowing all this, why do they keep doing it to you?
Well,
it's a lot easier to keep track of 4.0 grade average
than every individual student.
This is a report card.
It's the worst practice you've ever been exposed to.
And I've just run out of time, so get ready.
What can you do?
Well, it's time to tell these people
to stop doing this thing that they know is harmful to you.
The only reason they don't stop is nobody is asking them to.
And the way to ask them is to borrow something from my parents.
You should stage sit-ins.
I want everybody here when you go back to your schools -
it doesn't take many people; find five or six, ten, twenty, a hundred,
whatever you can gather together -
and sit yourselves down in front of the administration office,
on the steps of your school.
Call the newspaper, call the TV news companies,
and tell them you're going to do it, and get them out there,
because they're only going to stop doing it
when you and your parents ask them to.
I've started this Facebook page, Students Against Grades.
My part was easy.
(Cheers) (Applause)
Join me on this page.
I'll help you as much as I can,
but you just need to sit down in that administration office.
Pick a period that you're not going to use.
Do it at lunch time, do it at the end of the day,
do it before the day starts.
It doesn't matter.
And call the newspapers, and put your pictures up here.
It's going to help other people do the same.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)