The worst part of North American education is that there are people in the “industry” of education who think like yourself. I assure you that all of those brilliant Russian and Indian immigrants I went to school with were very concerned with their marks and outperformed their North American counterparts in all cases. Outperformed them precisely because they had a sense of accomplishment.

Certainly, we all wish to appreciate some discipline for its own value – but what does that value translate into but the much-derided accomplishment? Writers don’t just write. They write for a reason and with some mastery of their craft. Some write well, others write poorly. Unless you’re the New York Times bestseller list, you would probably choose to read the former and not the latter.

Grades – if correctly applied – measure accomplishment and students are more interested in doing those activities that have a greater impact on determining their level of accomplishment in the real world. This is even more relevant in a post-secondary education environment where work is often overwhelming and time is limited.

By the way, your example is entirely out of context. Keeping oneself in shape is a continuous process, which in the case of endurance training can be accomplished in shorter steps. Students having to do uninspiring and largely irrelevant busywork without feedback on their sense of accomplishment (something that aids rather than hinders the continuous acquisition of knowledge), are certainly bound to find it a waste of their time.

In other words, confused and rather uneducated Educators strike again.

-B.

Of course, that argues that there is no value in the “doing of the thing”. Writers write; everyone knows that. However, most students will not write unless some type of “grade” is assigned: all professors know that.

In my writing courses, the students do an incredible amount of writing, not all of which receives a grade. Does that make it a waste of time? The same way, I would argue, in which running 10 kms a day is a waste of time when preparing for a marathon (44kms); shouldn’t the runner just run the 44kms?

The worst aspect of North American education is the value placed on grades, standardized tests, and “accomplishment”, rather than the continuous striving for knowledge and better ways to apply it.

This is something that really bothered me from my own undergrad days. I would routinely have to spend several hours on assignments that were only worth a percentage point or less of my overall grade. Because of my test and term paper scores, I didn’t need the points from those minor assignments. But neither would my professor allow me to skip them (for zero points). So of course I felt I was wasting an incredible amount of time, and it angered me. I can see why so many of my classmates cheated on those assignments…