By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
S.M. writes to offer some observations about the proposal to introduce a “pass-fail” grading system for freshmen at Princeton University. The possibility of doing that was discussed in the October 9 edition of First Teachers.
He sees the idea as a “form of grade inflation that is solely intended to accomplish a simpler life for the professors, not to help more students achieve academic excellence. Our schools use carefully crafted measures of inputs, but absolutely no measures of outputs. The faculty alone decides what courses are offered, what is taught, what books are used (the highest kickback plays a major role), the hours classes are scheduled, and who ultimately is anointed to join the club. Costs have soared while the average teaching load at many universities was reduced over the years from 12 semester hours to 6 semester hours, requiring twice the faculty.”
S.M. quotes Thomas Sowell to underscore his position:
“Grade inflation is a practice that serves the convenience of the professors rather than the interests of the students. While those students who do not wish to study hard may enjoy grade inflation, it has been found the students who take lower-level courses from professors who give easy grades do not do as well in upper-level courses as students who took their preparatory courses from professors with stricter grading standards. In short, the long-run interests of students as a whole are sacrificed by grade inflation. However, grade inflation makes life easier for professors who need not face time-consuming complaints from students about low or failing grades nor put up with the unpleasantness that can accompany such complaints.
“Moreover, the unpopularity of professors who give low grades can also be reflected in negative student evaluations at the end of a course which in turn can negatively affect career advancement, especially for young faculty who have not yet achieved tenure.”
On another, not unrelated topic, discussed several times in the past by correspondents to First Teachers: Whether regular and demanding homework assignments should be encouraged as a valuable part of the learning experience, or discouraged to permit students to make use of their free time to pursue valuable outside interests, and, at the high school level, opportunities for part-time work.
J.N.S. from Lodi, Calif., writes to support meaningful homework assignments. He points to his youth in Cody, Wyo., where the students in the town “had the highest grades and test scores in the state.”
He attributes their success to the fact that “they were weathered in during the long winters” and used the time for extra reading. J.N.S. argues we could “raise grades across the board for modern students by eliminating television and the ubiquitous texting phones that take up so much of the time of young people these days.” He believes that the constant texting is an exchange of trivial matter with little educational value. “The missing element in the lives of these young people is parental involvement.”
R.W.V. of Factoryville, Pa., takes J.N.S.’s observations a step further. He contends that the minds of modern young people are filled not only with trivial material, but with a constant drumbeat of information emanating from “self-professed elites” whose objective is to diminish the role of the Catholic Church in the formation of our cultural values, and to replace the Church with propagandists for the moral relativism and secular humanism that came of age in the counterculture of the late 1960s.
“In my old age,” writes R.W.V., “I now see the philosophies that gave us Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot have been given a new life.” He fears that “modern governments are poised to do the dirty work, to manipulate the culture to serve political power.”
R.W.V. points back to the period in this country before the rise of the 1960s counterculture, when “American culture made it easy to be a good Christian, if one so desired.” He points to his own life where he found the “spiritual help” he needed “to deal with my responsibilities as a husband, a father of four, and a technician within a community of certified scientists.”
The “revolution of the 60s changed all that.” He charges it was “a rehash of ancient philosophies — an exercise in sophistry that places the authority once reserved for God in the hands of those who win in the struggle for political power. My Catholic faith teaches me that there is much more to the purpose and meaning for my existence than the crumbs that fall from the table of political power; that it is absurd to grant God-like power to define the nature of good and evil to any human being. Historically, when that happens, power is used for the pleasure and comfort of the powerful at the expense of the common man. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse-tung demonstrate this for us.”
R.W.V. calls our attention as Catholics to the stakes in this struggle: “There is no limit to the hunger for absolute political power and the major obstacle for those seeking this power is the Catholic Church and its teachings, which give us a worldview that defines the source of order in the universe and stressed the dignity of man as a creature of a loving God, with duties toward each other and obligations to our Creator. Faithful Catholics who believe this will not permit themselves to be used as material resources for any ideology in the service of political power.”
Hence, R.W.V. continues, “it is no accident that the teachings of the Catholic Church have been selected as the principal target for insult, ridicule, and mockery by the proponents of counterculture values in the media, the academy, and the government. The Church is the only organized bulwark that stands in opposition to the immoral use of political power to further the agenda of the secular left, which, in the end, is a push for worshiping the self in the name of envy, lust, and greed. America’s Cultural Revolution stands on the same intellectual foundation that brought us the genocidal evils of the 20th century.”
R.W.V.’s words call to mind the foreword in Witness called “Letter to my Children,” wherein Whittaker Chambers describes the appeal of Communism to the intellectuals of his era: “It is not new. . . . Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. . . . The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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