Capitalism, Schools, and Grades, by Richard Wolff

The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous, and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, and so on. If these (and others among capitalism’s) failures were widely perceived as such, the desirability and thus sustainability of capitalism itself might vanish.

Capitalism therefore repeatedly tried, for example, to stop and reverse its tendencies toward extreme inequalities of wealth and income. When that occasionally happened – usually after and because of social explosions triggered by those inequalities – it never lasted. The underlying tendency toward inequality always reasserted itself. Likewise capitalism tried to overcome its cyclical downturns (recessions, depressions) by developing countercyclical monetary and fiscal policies, Keynesian economics, and other strategies. However, they never worked either as the cycles continue. The latest in 2008/9 was, in fact, the second worst capitalist collapse on record. The so-called “lessons” learned from the 1930s great depression – celebrated for decades afterward – proved incapable of preventing another extremely destructive capitalist crash.

Capitalism’s particular failures have thus been compounded by a general failure to overcome them. How capitalism survived can best be explained in terms of ideology. The system produced and disseminated interpretations of its failures that blamed them not on capitalism but on other altogether different “causes.” Institutions developed mechanisms to anchor such interpretations widely and deeply in the popular consciousness. One key example of the “blaming another” interpretation of capitalism’s failures is the concept of “meritocracy.” Schools are a key institution teaching and practicing meritocracy via the mechanism of grading.

From primary school through the completion of my doctorate, I suffered the imposition of grades (A, B, C and so on). Having then become a professor I was constantly required (to this day) to assign grades to my students: for papers, exams, class performance and so on. Like readers of this piece, I believe we all know firsthand what we are talking about.

Grading took much of my time that could have been better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students. Grading had little educational payoff for them. It disrespected students as thinking people. And finally, it served chiefly employers but often in ways that were not much good for them either. In short, grading was and remains an immensely wasteful, ineffective, and largely negative aspect of education at all levels: primary, secondary and “higher.”

Let’s start from the teacher’s perspective as grader. When I read a paper or exam, I can see when a student presents a reasonable version of what I intended in my lectures or what I found worthwhile in the assigned readings. But of course, I cannot be sure whether such a presentation measures mostly his or her short-term memory and repetition of whatever I stressed in class. Maybe the student genuinely understood in the sense of grasping and internalizing key points as part of the student’s own intellectual formation, his or her knowledge. Without much more time and interaction with the individual student than schools enable or allow in 99 percent of cases, I cannot know which it is when I assign a grade.

When I see that the student did not understand, the possibilities become more numerous. Did the student understand the material differently from me in ways not reducible to matters of right and wrong? After all, every piece of verbal or written material is subject to perfectly reasonable multiple different interpretations. Education is not well served by insisting on one as right and alternatives as wrong. Such insistence is more like indoctrination than education; it undermines the sort of creative, critical thinking that contributes to human progress.

Or did the student’s understanding reflect poor teaching more than poor

learning. Education in schools is, after all, a relationship between people: a relationship to which both persons contribute. Grades reflect and represent the power of one side in that relationship over the other. Grades students get from teachers affect their mental development, their school and work careers, and major dimensions of their self-esteem or its absence. Most students never assign grades to their teachers. The few that can know full well how much less power their grading of teachers wields than the grades imposed on them by teachers. Moreover, teachers and students disagree over their relative responsibilities for “poor performances” by either. I was present in countless faculty meetings where teachers bitterly and defensively blamed students 100 percent for the poor grades they “had achieved” (i.e., teachers had given them).

Should teachers have the compensated time carefully to read, listen to, or watch multiple presentations and responses by each student? Should teachers have the compensated time to explain to each student how each teacher approached and evaluated each student’s work? Would not education be best achieved when students and teachers together discuss, compare and debate their respective interpretations of questions, answers, issues, and analyses? If all that were done (very rare in the US educational system today), why also assign a grade? It would add little of substance.

Today’s economic system precludes teachers engaging so carefully, repeatedly, and thoroughly with students. Capitalism’s private and public educational enterprises – driven by their shared employer-vs.-employee structures and financial constraints – cannot afford the extensive and intensive interactions among teachers and students that real education requires. Beyond docile acceptance of the second-rate education they can offer, most schools exonerate the system from all responsibility. While capitalism’s imposed limits explain, they do not excuse grading: a very poor substitute for far superior educational practices thereby foregone.

Grading is not only a mechanism designed to save money spent on “education.” Grades also function as a major foundation and support for the meritocracy. The merit ideology functions as a crucial defense mechanism for capitalism given its failures. The US idea of meritocracy asserts that one can quantitatively rank individuals’ qualitative capacities. Each individual’s work skills, production capabilities, contributions to output – but also their intelligence, discipline, social skills, and much more – can be ranked. There are some individuals who best or most possess such qualities; some who possess the worst or least of them; and many who occupy rankable positions between those two quantitative extremes.

Within the framework of meritocratic ideology, employers seek to hire the best employee and are willing to pay such individual workers more than they pay workers with less merit (ranked lower on some scale of productivity). In meritocratic logic, those offered no jobs can only blame themselves: they have too little merit. Workers learn in school to seek to accumulate merit, achieve higher rankings along the scales that count for employers. Coalitions of educators and employers have inserted the educational system into this merit system as an important place to acquire and accumulate merit that employers will recognize and reward. Better jobs and rising pay reward rising merit acquired through more education as well as “on-the-job” training, learning by doing, etc.

Schools not only enable the consumers of education to acquire and accumulate merit, their operations also exemplify the merit system they support. Harvard University conveys more merit, per credit, than Kentucky State University. Schools can charge students more the more merit is signaled by the degrees they confer. Among schools, within each school, and within each classroom, merit rules.

Meritocracy and the educational system’s key place within it are important because capitalism’s survival depends on them. The merit system organizes how individual employees interpret the unemployment they suffer, the job they hate, the wage or salary they find so insufficient, the creativity their job stifles, and so on. It starts as schools train individuals to accept the grades assigned to them as

measures of individual academic merit. That prepares them to accept their jobs and incomes as likewise measures of their individual productive merit. Your grades, jobs, and income are all appropriate and fair: rewards proportional to your individual merit.

That leaves little room for any systemic criticism. Grades and grading are not blamed on an inadequate educational system unable or unwilling to fund high quality mass schooling. Unemployment, bad jobs, insufficient incomes, and an inadequate educational system are not blamed on the capitalist economic system. Had they been so blamed, both systems could well have come under criticism and opposition and died off long ago.

Meritocracy redirects the blame for capitalism’s failures onto its victims. Schools teach meritocracy, and grading is the method.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York City.