Tis the season for grades, grading, and graduation.
The academic year for most educational institutions has come (or is soon coming) to a close, elevating thoughts of education for everyone, even those who have long since been in school.
With graduations to attends, scholarships to apply for, and television ads focused on graduates, the question of “What will you do with your education?” is inevitable.
While there are many reasons people pursue their education—and some only because it’s compulsory—I simply want to assert the fact that what education is for is actually immeasurable. Unfortunately, we are a people who too quickly conflate the symbol for the thing for what it signifies. What does an “A” on a report card stand for, anyway?
Discarding arguments about “grade inflation” or any number of other factors that go into giving and receiving a grade, what does it really signify? What does the diploma signify?
I suggest neither have much to do with an actual education.
I further suggest that the student, the human being doing the studying, has changed himself more or less, according to the quality of effort he has put into his studies.
For example, that means someone endowed with a proclivity for intellectual prowess that gave little effort toward study may end up with the same grade as the student who, not endowed with the same level of intellectual prowess, put forth great effort toward exercising his intellect and therefore changed himself.
One changed much. The the other changed little. Both received a similar grade.
My position is that the changed student demonstrates his education to be worthwhile—“in a myriad of immeasurable ways simply by being”—while the unchanged student has simply paid (or his parents have) for a letter on a piece of paper that will go in a drawer somewhere to be mostly forgotten.