Grades? What Grades?

One area that seems to confound people the most when they scrutinize our home school is the relative lack of grades. I used to try to keep grades, but what are grades anyway? Aren't they just a set value associated with a group of peers that you are competing with? A 100% says I got everything right in comparison with everyone else. An 80% says I got quite a bit right in comparison with everybody else, but others did better and some did worse. We see this become very competitive when we get into high school and college with grade rankings of 4.0 to 2.8.

Where were you ranked in high school/college? What did it have to do with real life? How did it make you feel? Does it matter today?

In my studies, I've come to believe that we are really only in competition with ourselves. Heavenly Father wants us to do our best, to continually be on a path of improvement. I don't believe He cares if we are in the top 5% of our peers as far as grades are concerned. He wants us to be our best selves  and compete against our own abilities.

The Path of Mastery
When I show people that we are based on mastery, they (those who ask about it) often are stumped, angry, or shocked. My questions then become:

• Did you master everything in high school? 
• Can you demonstrate that knowledge today on what you learned?

Most of the time the answer is, "No."

Our education system has lost the ability to teach how to think, focusing on what to think instead. Therefore, the ability to retain information over a long period of time becomes much more difficult. If you don't use it, you lose it. That is what happens to memory over time. Our current educational system relies so heavily on memorization, that the education only lasts for a short time.

Did we master a topic or not? Can we teach it to someone else? Can we demonstrate mastery? These are the "grades" in our home education. If they have learned a topic enough to explain it to someone else, then they have learned the thought processes behind the topic and have built the neural pathways to connect that learning to other things...most importantly, how that information relates to the other information they know, thus cementing it more firmly in their long-term memory.

Education for the Future
We've been hearing on the news and from political leaders that we need to have innovators to compete in this global economy. Our current public education system is the cause of this decline in innovative thinkers. The shift should be towards learning how to think by mastering basic subjects and topics to create the building blocks in the minds of our children (and ourselves) so that we can become innovative thinkers. No other overhaul of the education system will work. Not more tests. Not more grades. And definitely not more short-term connections in the brain through memorization.