Every Student an A Student: The NYT on Entitlement and Grade Inflation
From Owen Strachen, Managing Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at TEDS
We should work hard when we receive a lower grade than we wanted to not gripe about it to friends. This is not mature, and it’s fundamentally prideful. It’s snarky, and ungodly, and it demeans our instructors. If absolutely necessary, we should ask the professor or teacher if we can talk over the grade. Otherwise, though, we should work to detach our identity from our grades. This is hard, but necessary, to do, and it will kill much pride in the process.
Furthermore, we need to dynamite this ridiculous notion that we, possessed with luminous, blinding brilliance deserve an A or even a B. Many of us don’t. For hard professors, very few students should expect to earn high grades. Would that we had more hard, demanding, excellent professors who taught us well and who didn’t cheat us out of a satisfying educational experience by rewarding laxity, whining, and wimpy classroom behavior.
Parents of children, accordingly, need to work very hard not to find pride in the academic performance of their children. Making this mistake will teach their children that results matter most and that effort need only be mediocre to warrant high achievement.
A Christ-centered approach to education, in sum, seems to be an approach that, above all else, prizes Christ, not grades. We don’t need high marks; we need our holy master, and far, far less of our whining, weak, proud, tremulous, man-centered natural hearts
