Farish bashing

This is a really interesting read....an article that appeared in 2005. I don't know if I can generalize this about all educational courses - but when I did my CA, we had a precious 2.5 to 3 months of leave to prepare for our exams - that was all, and we had to begin by cleaning the dust off the study material. And we had intentions of getting an all India rank too. With that kind of an ask, basic intelligence told us that we needed to focus on areas where the marks were loaded. So even in the most unpredictable of papers like that on Direct Taxes (which is a mind-numbing subject), there was a clearly discernible pattern of where the marks were stacked and we learned those topics really well. Predictably, I did get an all India rank. Equally predictably, none of what I studied is at all relevant in my working life. The bane of modern education....and here is how it all began. An excerpt from the link above which contains the whole article:

"The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got to know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child's understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material ... or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely.

When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them.

This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then came William Farish.

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were "up to grade." It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)

* Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn't match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used. * Grades didn't give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter. * Grades didn't encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn't promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they're no longer listed among the goals of public education.
* Grades didn't stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.

What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to spend in the classroom. He no longer needed to burrow into his students' minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.

Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling: a revolution as rapid and overwhelming as the Industrial Revolution from which it had sprung. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where one heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction.

While grades didn't help students a bit - and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of "dumbing down" entire nations - they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in the early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible. With grades, whole categories of children were discovered who didn't fit onto the conveyer belt, providing an entire new realm of employment for' adults who would diagnose, treat, and remediate these newly-discovered "learning disabled" children.

Responsibility for the success of learning shifted from teachers to students: when kids failed, it was their own fault, because they obviously had a defect or disorder of some sort.

A process of sorting and discarding the misfits began Oust like in the shoe factory) which, to this day, rewards the "standard" and wounds the "different."

William Farish gained, but something precious was lost to generations of students thereafter: the mentored learning experience."