I'd like to expand my criticism of grading.

I'm not against telling students that they need to improve, or that their papers suck (constructively, of course!) I worked for a year as a research assistant doing just that.

But I actually do think that grades are oppressive. They don't just signify a job well or worse done; they're part of the grade economy. Students aren't in school just - or even primarily - to learn; they're there to get qualifications that will enable employment. The course material isn't what's at issue anymore - it's the letter that makes you an honours student, gets you into grad school, etc.

In turn, this has to be placed within the context of de-skilling - today you need a university degree for what took a high school diploma 20 years ago. That's not because jobs are more complicated (indeed, with the increasing technical division of labour, they're less), but because too many highly qualified workers puts too much upward pressure on wages.

Required reading (click to enlarge) - School is Hell, Matt Groening

I'd much prefer to teach a pass/fail course, which focuses students to engage with the material, rather than the tricks of trying to get a good mark. And I'd much prefer not to see the terror in my students' eyes as they experience alienation, the deeply personal judgment on their ability that a grade represents, according to some external standard they don't grasp and only care about because they have to.

Obviously, this has to be combined with critical pedagogy, which teaches students to think about how the educational system as a whole is a product of capitalism. Which, in turn, implies it's a contested space of capitalism - just like the workplace can be, if its workers actually do the contesting. Which is why I raised this critique in the first place.

Here's a quote from Peter McLaren, a Marxist educator. Through reading Marx, he rejected postmodernism's acceptance of the market and became convinced the biggest contradiction in society was between capital and labour. That since his students are future workers, he feels it's his responsibility to open them up to a radical critique of the system that will be exploiting them:

Today, as has been the case throughout the history of capitalism, labor-power is capitalized and commodified and education plays a tragic role in this cruel history. But—and here is a fundamental point—in so far as schooling is premised upon generating the living commodity of labor-power, upon which the entire social universe of capital depends, it can become a foundation for human resistance. ... One of the goals of revolutionary critical pedagogy is to discover socialist alternatives to the current value form of labor that drives capitalist society. In so far as education and training socially produce labor-power, this process can be resisted.

I think grades, as opposed to constructive feedback, are an imposition of that capitalist discipline. I may not be able to do away with grading in my current work relation, but I definitely don't like it.