Flunk Capitalism: School grades control students

BROOKLYN, NY, October 8–Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) hosted a study group of over 20 teachers and students from different countries to discuss the role of grading in a capitalist system. The discussion opened up with a report back from communist teachers who were involved in a rally earlier that day to garner support for Raymond Chaluisant, an 18-year old Latin teen who was murdered by the kkkops in the Bronx in July (see  last issue).

This day of action and study marks PLP’s effort to win more teachers and students to the idea that capitalism uses divisions to keep workers and youth from uniting together and fighting back with communist revolution. In this study group, we put this idea into practice by fighting the division between students and teachers and between speakers of two different languages. At today’s study group, the leadership of a teacher in bringing nine students raised the stakes of what is possible to achieve that communist future. Students asked if they could bring friends to the next study group.

Grades conceal the horrors of capitalism
We asked students to take leadership in the study group by starting out the discussion with reflections about their lifelong relationship to grades. Teachers were challenged to engage students with vocabulary such as capitalism, exploitation, racism, and class consciousness to help them link their expertise regarding grades with revolutionary ideas.

Specifically we discussed an article “Grades Are Capitalism in Action. Let’s Get Them Out of Our Schools,” which argues that grades do not aid learning; instead, it perpetuates capitalism by spreading the lie of meritocracy. The school system prepares the next generation of workers for an inherently unequal syste​​m by teaching them that some deserve more than others based on productivity levels. Not only does this give capitalists more productive workers, it also makes workers blame themselves, rather than the system, for what they have, or don’t have in adulthood.

These ideas could be heard in some conversations: Some students reported feeling that their classmates–their future fellow workers–were sometimes their biggest obstacle in achieving better grades. These students, just like teachers, can be made to feel resentment toward each other rather than joining forces against their true enemy, the bosses.

There were also clear examples of class consciousness and solidarity amongst the students, as they also spoke about unfair grading practices they felt were keeping all students down and also making students feel depressed. They also spoke of racism and other forms of discrimination affecting students in schools.

Teachers shared that grading hinders, rather than aids, their ability to teach: Time that could otherwise be used providing useful feedback with students is instead spent mechanically giving students a letter or number that lacks context, an explanation, or productive feedback.

Ultimately, grades give students practice in having their labor exploited by the bosses. They are used to sort students—into As, Bs, Cs, or Fs—and to determine which group of bosses will exploit which students when they join the workforce.

Grades, Big Fascists, and World War III
World War III is on the horizon and understanding what role the working-class students play is crucial. The U.S. ruling class is facing serious consequences if unable to fend off its imperialist Russian rival in Ukraine, and the Russian ruling class is showing no signs of backing down.

Meanwhile, regardless of the grades they receive in school, millions of youth around the world are being won to share the Ukrainian flag, the Russian flag, or the flag of their nationality. Many students with “bad” grades see joining the military as the only possible alternative to a future of suffering within the working class.

Meanwhile, their classmates who get the “best” grades are won to either fight for their national bosses or become the professional workers who ask their fellow workers to be the cannon fodder in an imminent world war instead.

While Big Fascists (the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class that is dependent on its imperialist empire) amp up for World War III, Small Fascist Republicans are fighting to make students’ education more of an individual family’s choice, because they have little interest in maintaining the Big Fascists’ expensive project of controlling students through a united public school system. By Small Fascists, we mean the more domestically oriented bosses whose interests are less tied to controlling the flow of foreign oil and hence are less willing to make sacrifices (heavy taxes) for a boots-on-the-ground war against rivals Russia and China. 

Meanwhile, Big Fascists are co-opting working-class impulses for multiracial unity to provide “equal opportunity” for testing for all students. These tests produce grades which are turned on, turned off, and recalibrated based on the needs of these misleaders to pacify the families they say they serve. This is necessary when the capitalist system dives into the types of crises, such as a pandemic, that make parents and students reveal how useless capitalist education is.

For students and teachers, silently accepting grades means accepting the type of self-blame necessary for Big Fascist bosses to implement wider fascism. Fascism is a capitalist system in decay where they can no longer maintain a liberal democracy and instead resort to more direct control and state terror. This includes disciplining their own ranks and building more nationalism and allegiance for the lesser-evil bosses to “save” workers from the Small Fascists.

In order to succeed, the Big Fascists need the open support of a necessary portion of the working class. When students and teachers alike are taught to blame students for their “bad” grades without understanding the system’s role in creating that reality, they are supporting the bosses’ potential for greater fascism in the future.

Healthy communist struggle and evaluation
In a communist education system, there would be no need for grades. Education and training itself would be the priority, not the division of students into a racist hierarchy for the bosses’ profit interests.

Workers from all industries would have more time to focus on the youth, build their confidence, and create a safe environment where theories can be tested in the real world and evaluated. The lifetime process of fighting to learn, and learning to fight for the needs of the international working class would be our system of education. Join us!