You ask me about Paulo Freire’s theories of education and about my aversion to grades. I will respond through the adaptation of an article about pedagogy that I wrote with my colleague Stina Soderling, titled “Against Grading: Feminist Studies beyond the Neoliberal University.” It was published in the journal Feminist Formations in August of 2021, with an accompanying video on the digital platform Critical Legal Thinking.

Stina and I each hold a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies (in fact we met in graduate school) and poet Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider was standard reading in our doctoral program. In her famous essay on the “master’s tools,” Lorde argues that they “will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Through our ten years of friendship, Stina and I have discussed Lorde’s sharp questioning of our strategies for liberation: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.” We see grading as a master’s tool in our master’s house: the neoliberal university.

You see, higher education faces a curious situation: In spite of a growing body of literature that shows that grades are generally ineffective and harmful, the grading mandate remains firmly in place. In the era of Covid-19, teachers are encouraged to be “innovative” in all kinds of ways: to “flip” our classrooms, replace books with online materials, and to constantly update and rethink what we are doing, but even in the pandemic, the final outcome is still supposed to be a grade.

So, what is wrong with grades?

In their article “Can the Cognitariat Speak?” Isabelle Bruno and Christopher Newfield argue that “neoliberalism is a philosophy – an anthropology – of human relations that makes competition the organizing principle of society.” Today, as yesterday, businessmen populate the boards of trustees of universities and “subject nonprofit activities like education to financialization and cost-cutting techniques, and they give philanthropic dollars to fields most likely to offer economic returns on investment. Little thought is given to the social and public value education creates that can’t be captured through accounting.” Ranking students through grades fits perfectly within this agenda.

Indeed, examinations are, as philosopher Michel Foucault points out in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, an individual and individuating mechanism that ranks each student's aptitudes. And Foucault also points to something else: the way in which a graded, hierarchical model of education individuates students in order to judge and measure them against others. The individuality that educational institutions laud is fundamentally tied to a model where some are seen as better than others, and each person is to be slotted into the particular niche that their individuality is suited for. We are disciplined to be hierarchized individuals so that we can be better controlled.

One of the foremost critics of the grading regime is Alfie Kohn. Summarizing his decades of research on grading, primarily in K-12 contexts, Kohn points to the following conclusions: “Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning”; “Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task”; “Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.” He also mentions findings from other researchers: grades incentivize cheating, grades induce a fear of failure, and removing grades seems to have little to no negative effect on student learning.

One of the points raised by Kohn should be cause for concern for all educators: research indicates that grades can have a counterproductive effect on learning. When grades become the most important aspect of education, learning becomes secondary. Achieving the desired grade takes up so much of students’ time and energy that there is little room left for attempting to actually do any learning – the activity of self-exploration in which, through intellectual and affective encounters, the student attempts to discover her own subjectivity and as a result intervenes in the social and political life of this planet.

Moreover, grading’s effects on students are not evenly distributed, but rather are distinctly racialized and gendered. In his book The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson argues that “excellence” is often used as a way to keep marginalized populations out of academia, by positing Eurocentric and classist knowledge formations as the definition of excellence.

“Excellence” in higher education is a curious thing. Colleges and universities talk of themselves as striving for – or having already achieved – excellence, an excellence that is supposed to suffuse every student’s educational experience. At the same time, by insisting on grade “distribution,” university administrators make clear that only a certain percentage of students can achieve “excellence,” despite the excellent education they are all given access to. The excellence circumstance only functions if it fails. What is seen as failing, however, is not the guiding star of “excellence” but instead the students, the teacher, or both.

Grading is problematic because it turns education into an individualizing competition, and also because it assumes that the knowledge we hold lies within each of us, and not in a collective body. It assumes that when students leave the classroom, they each take their share of the knowledge with them, such that the whole is never more than the sum of its parts.

In his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, educator Paulo Freire writes of the “eminently pedagogical character of the revolution.” For Freire, education takes place when there are two learner-teachers who occupy different spaces in an ongoing dialogue. Since both participants bring knowledge to the relationship, the pedagogic process seeks to explore what each knows and what they can teach each other. In the context of learning, “the learners will be engaged in a continuous transformation through which they become authentic subjects of the construction and reconstruction of what is being taught, side by side with the teacher, who is equally subject to the same process.” Using grades as a way to assess learning does not recognize that the process of teaching is also a process of learning, and vice-versa.

On the contrary, grading to assess learning is akin to what Freire calls the “banking concept” of education. Under this model, the student is seen as an empty vessel, absolutely ignorant and waiting to be filled by the knowledge of the teacher. Related to this is the notion of knowledge as “universal and essential.” Knowledge is seen as something that exists outside the person doing the studying. The student in this model is an object in the learning process, which is designed to produce a subservient mass of workers and consumers who will not question the status quo or their capacity to transform it. Stina and my stance against grading echoes Freire in his position against the banking system of education and in the recognition that “education as a humanist and liberating praxis posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation.” Education, rather than ranking students, must function as a catalyst for the conscientization of students and teachers alike, as social and political actors capable of creating alternative futures.

You close by asking me what advice I would give to other academics who do not see decolonizing the curriculum as a priority. I would follow Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and ask them: Are you engaging your students’ auras, their ideas, their dreams of transforming the world? Or are you merely moving them to temporary and reactive action?