4.

If you want better schools, grades are not the answer. The government of today wants to take action because according to them the schools today are a mess and they want to change the present system and clean it up by using grades. Grading students in primary school is just one of their latest ideas to change the school system. The problems in schools today might then be solved by using grades together with a tougher attitude.

When you use grades in early ages you label the students especially children in special need. Already in early ages you know what you are good at and what you have difficulties with, you don’t need a paper or a grade to tell you that. I think it is a big mistake to label kids; either you are a success with good grades or a failure with bad grades. If you get a low grade when you are young there is a big possibility that you grow up with a low self-concept and this also make you lose your self-confidence. Who can succeed with these conditions? This is a big problem in schools today, that we as teachers meet kids without self-confidence and with learning difficulties, how can grades help them? This is a great problem in many schools already, but if we were to introduce grades this problem would increase. No one can be thought anything if they are under pressure and don’t have faith in themselves.

Another thing that can be said about grades in primary school is that it might be easier for some teachers to evaluate the results in their classes. But then you also have to have tests that can define which grade a student has earned. As a teacher myself I should know how my students are doing without tests or grades and judge them by their improvements from their personal possibilities. Everybody is different which means that we learn in different ways and are good at different things and we also learn different things in different speed. If you were to have grades in classes with young learners this would make children classify each other by their grades. This is not good for young children because you become what people expect you to be, a low grade in an early stage might lead to a future in the academic world with poor grades.

Finally the Minister for Schools and Adult Education thinks grades in primary school would help the teachers at the schools and also the students. A funny thing is that he thinks the opposite of several professors with many years of researching in the field of pedagogic, and they are sending out warnings regarding grades for young learners. They mean that grades are not the right way to raise the standard in schools and don’t give positive effects like the Minister for schools and Adult Education thinks. Who should we trust the professors or the former officer?