It is not rare for people to want to take the easy way out. Physics and philosophy have demonstrated this through concepts such as the path of least resistance and Occam’s Razor. Besides, it’s basic logic: if there is no incentive, why do more than is expected? Doing more than what the status quo desires of you, in this proposed situation, simply has no use.
This is, in my opinion, why we have grades, finals and concepts like participation. The school, rightly, seeks to curb the seemingly irresistible pull of a blasé mentality towards performance by rewarding those who excel rather than letting them slide by. It puts pressure on those who, for a full school year, have put in the minimum effort to show interest or care in showing they actually can keep the grades they have.
In a perfect academic system, this is exactly as it should be: those who care — and can show that they care — have the reward of not having to worry at the end of the year. In his essay “Compensation”, American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it up best: “Do the thing, and you shall have the power, but they who do not the thing have not the power.”
But, as much as I wish that Emerson’s ideas could just as easily apply to the school, they simply do not.
In the current academic landscape of America, pressure to perform is at an ever-climbing peak, and expectations have only continued to rise. A student now can’t just have good grades or a good SAT score. Even within the school, the classroom situation has been twisted — from getting students to perform to the best of their abilities, to a single-minded focus that a single class has more value than any other the student is enrolled in. As a result, the student is expected to ‘go the extra mile, to surpass expectations, in each of his classes — an expectation that is simply unattainable.
There is a developing disconnect between the classroom and the curriculum. Students begin to care less and develop a ‘just get by’ mentality, not because they do not care, but because the sheer amount of work makes it practically impossible to have intention behind it. This inequality presents itself in the mundane parts of student life, like homework, but that very mundanity is directly caused by the disconnect. It is simply not feasible, for example, for a student to come back home, do an hour of homework for each of his five classes and be expected to do each of those with full commitment.
On the contrary, one could argue that the student’s inability to care stems from their idea of engagement itself being twisted. They do not work with the text or the content in a manner conducive to real learning. Their engagement results from their grade rather than their grade reflecting their engagement. Perhaps the way we look at this concept of ‘caring’ itself needs to be recalibrated in order to truly assess what constitutes an act of disengagement.
So, how do we find the middle ground between the oversaturated student and the inconclusive participation in the classroom? I’ll be honest, I don’t have a straight answer. What I do believe could work, though, is a return to viewing the curriculum as the standard and giving the student the power to determine how much effort they want to put in. Allow their engagement to determine their results, rather than outright performance, and let off the pressure of grades and expectations. Make the experience of learning something that rewards you rather than exhausts you.
