I have met many atheists who are nihilists. Theirs is not a true disbelief in god or an embrace of reason, but rather a hatred of life. They are defined by the things they are against, the things they despise, the things they destroy. And this one conclusion that I share with them, that there is no god, is as morally and intellectually irrelevant to me as the fact that I share a support with many Christians for homeschooling.

What is atheism, anyway? It is simply the belief that there is no god. In a rational world such a word would have little use, like pointing out that one man is a biped. We’re all bipeds. And the term atheism is not intrinsically a support of anything, conceptual or physical. Exactly the opposite. It is an “anti” word, a word that means you are against something.

But I, and I hope you as well, do not like to think of myself in such a way. I am not someone who has a vendetta against god or the religious, I do not wish to define myself by the things I rally against. And if the entire world was atheistic it would be better, but not necessarily great, or even good.

I am not anti-god. I am pro-reason. I support logic, empiricism, universal principles. I support the Law of Identity and the definition of man as a rational, noble savage. I support philosophy and truth, and the idea that an understanding of each must be earned, tested, reevaluated and employed in daily life. I want a world without the concept of god only because I want a world where people embrace their minds, their capacity to learn, understand, grow and face challenges.

I am an atheist and I support atheism, but only as a outcome of the rational methodology that I use to understand reality. The concept of atheism is an central to my idea of self as is my belief that our senses can be trusted to unravel the world around us. The latter is hardly ever considered, because its proof is so obvious, its efficacy so self-evident, that I would have to assume that it is correct even in the act of questioning it. To me, atheism is the same. So long as I am rational, the existence of god is something I hardly need think about, unless somehow new evidence came to light about such a phenomenon.

Reason is the tool we have to understand reality, morality and ourselves. These are the things that define who I am, not the specific conclusions that I come to. You may call me an atheist if you like. But I would much prefer to be called a scientist, a thinker and a philosopher.

There are unschoolers all over the web and I hope to make their own experiences easily available. There is constant news on education, providing ever more evidence against the efficacy of compulsory education, and I hope to make those stories known from a single source. And there are writers and speakers making incredible strides in the fight to bring an end to compulsory schooling, and I hope to help keep their works in the foreground. But far and away the most important goal is to create more unschoolers! To give more kids the opportunity that most of us never had: to run their own educations and follow their own interests, to become the people they are instead of the people school boards want them to be.

Currently I am collecting resources, blog feeds, twitter follows, book lists and the like in order to get the site off the ground. Design services will provided by the uncanny Cristian Popa of ReasonWeekly.com. If you know of any resources, blogs, books or articles I should check out, please let me know! Until then you can follow my progress at http://twitter.com/UnschoolJournal

I grew up in a household where answers to probing questions (and when you’re a child, what questions don’t probe?) were “Because I said so” or “Because the Bible says so,” and the solution to so-called “bad behavior” was a belt. I believe now that actions such as this come from the incredibly evil assumption that children are born bad, and that their badness must be remedied by parents who are magically bestowed with the title of Paragon of Virtue by the simple act of reproduction. Especially in the South, at least in my experience, violence and bullying in the home are not only condoned but expected. “Spare the rod,” as it’s said. This violence is, of course, kept quiet. The fact that children are whipped on the buttocks is no accident. Is it both the easiest source for extreme physical humiliation, but also the easiest to hide. Once, I believe in junior high school, I rode my bike with a cousin down the road to a convenience store. Not a road really, a highway, populated by log trucks. It is hardly ever visited by more than a few trucks an hour, but it is dangerous nonetheless. When we got back, there was no discussion on the dangers of riding in such a road or the necessity for helmets or an attempt to connect or teach in any way. Instead I was struck across the lower back with a belt 16 times. I did not stop taking risks. In fact, since then I have taken much larger ones. I did, however, stop respecting my father. Violence can only get you obedience, nothing more. And before I hear cries that this man was only concerned with my safety, then please explain to me why bike safety was never discussed, helmets were never encouraged, and why I was allowed to ride on that same highway to a nearby relative’s at will? Moving on…

During high school I went to live with my mother, and my slightly older sister had a baby girl, Desiree. When she cried it was as if everyone in the house was being personally attacked. Looking back, it pains me to think that I reacted so anxious and bothered at something so natural and necessary. As Desiree got older it became apparent that while I had switched homes, the tactics had not. Spankings were a norm, along with bullying and unquestionable authority, from my sister and mother. I gain small comfort in the fact that I never carried out any of these spankings myself, as I often threatened them and turned her over to her mother.

Let me make one thing clear before I move on. Violence against anyone, and especially against children, who must live and grow with the largest power disparity possible to human beings, is abhorrent and entirely immoral. If you believe otherwise, please have the decency to tell me so that I can stop communicating with you.

It is no surprise to me that when I see Desiree now she switches between extreme openness - in an attempt to gain the affection she lacks - to extremely closed-off - in an attempt to avoid punishment and contempt just for voicing her opinion. She has the tendency to go completely still and quiet when you are angry with her. I watched this develop as she grew. Desi would declare a preference or desire, and she would be attacked for doing so. And so how can one expect anything but silence when you angrily ask her what she wants? She learned all too well that wants are something she must keep to herself.

For so long I was an accomplice to this style of parenting, unwilling to face the effects it was having on Desiree, and the effects it long ago had on me (something I will go into some other time). My younger brother had a child and my sister had a second. My sister’s brand of violence was somewhat mild, although still debilitating. My brother, however, had grown up with our father, and his parenting was a chaotic mix of demands for abject devotion and outright screaming and violence. But still I saw them on a semi-regular basis, and spent each trip tossed between elation at spending time with such wonderful kids and the agony of tiptoeing around the horrible parents in the room. As time went on and I introspected about my own childhood, and learned more about child development, the trips became more irregular and the steps not nearly as light. Then late last year a friend informed me that my brother was having a second child. With a second woman. Whom he hardly knew and is no longer with. I was amazed at how angry I became. I have since made it clear that I will not see him again until he seeks therapy.

I have since spent more time exploring my own childhood, discovering the principles and emotional intelligence one requires in order to be a good parent, and seeing the great struggle that children of even the most common families must endure just to keep their capacity for open thought, curiosity and empathy. I have tried to live by the rule that one should always side with the child, and that children are interested in reciprocation, affection and negotiation. That they wish to moral and rational just like the rest of us. That they can be trusted. And that as a parent, the child’s respect for you must be earned, just like you have to earn it from everyone else. Paraphrasing Stefan Molyneux (since I don’t know the exact quote): “We are choosing to bring a child into this world. She didn’t choose to be a part of our family. And so it is up to us to make sure that could she choose any family on the planet, she would still want to be with us.”

I still have quite a lot of work to do before I can really understand my own childhood, and even more before I could consider having a child of my own. Years of work. But already, just observing the way I feel and act around kids is consistently amazing. Seeing a child makes me grin every single time. Yesterday a dad was pushing a stroller and had another toddler on his shoulders, and I held the door open for them. Moments later I realized that I hadn’t even considered the father, I had opened the door for the kid on his shoulders. Today at the laundromat I watched a few kids play between the rows of washers and dryers. They were happy, but so polite and self-managing. Their parents didn’t constantly harangue them and I didn’t once see a child who had ran too fast or get too loud shoot a frightened glance at this mom or dad, awaiting the coming punishment. One of the kids, too small to join in on the running, strolled around watching everything. I mean everything. There wasn’t a time that I passed by that he didn’t hold eye contact, reading my expression.

What I hope to do in the near future is find a way to increase my knowledge of children and their learning process by getting involved either in the local unschooling community or tutoring of some kind. Or both. Before the current compulsory education system came into place (around 1915, and it’s been tweaked and “perfected” ever since then) children at even the young ages of three and four were doing incredible things. Now a child in public school who can spell “cat” by age seven is considered an acheivement of free education… The school is one of the many chains that hold children back, and it is the chain that I intend to dedicate myself to breaking. If children grow up knowing that they can ask questions, there is no limit to what answers they might find.

The Balance Beam

In one class Holt had a beam balanced in the center which could be held in place with a peg. The game was used to teach kids about balance and weight distribution by placing a certain number of weights out a certain distance on one end and having a student place a certain number of weights on the other end at a distance they thought would balance it out. For instance, the teacher places 4 weights at 5″ out on one end, and the child is given 2 weights to place on the other end, which in this case would balance at 10″ out. To provide incentive for involvement, the students were divided into two teams. Each student would place his weights, then every teammate, one by one, would bet whether or not the beam would balance. Each correct answer counted as one point. Can you guess what happened?

It became all about strategy! Making the best guess to minimize the maximum possible loss, a decision rule in game theory called minimax. Children focused on hedging their bets and covering their bases, not only for the purpose of gaining points but also to be sure a wrong answer didn’t embarrass them. One student, after being asked to confirm her choice of weight placement, said “Yes, but I don’t think it will balance.” The predictions of other students were very similar in their vagueness. In every case the result was clear: the students were no longer interested in balancing the beam, but rather of beating the points and predictions system.

Few students ever figured out the balance beam.

The Q Shriek

While Holt allowed much more talking and freedom in his class than most teachers, he still needed quiet sometimes. So, rather than simply demanding it like most teachers, he created the Q. The rule was simply this: When he wrote the Q on the board, the class was to be quiet. Holt writes:

And then, slowly, the children invented or developed a delightful custom. When I began to write the Q they would all make some kind of hum or murmur or sound, which would get louder and louder, rising to a shriek as I boxed in the Q with a flourish. But as soon as my chalk hit the edge of the blackboard, completing the box, dead silence.

A year later Holt has his own fifth-grade class in another school, and again used the Q. This class, just like the other, eventually invented the shriek, never knowing that it had been done before.

Competing Objectives

The lesson drawn from this, I think, is that an educator’s objective in a game or class practice should never be assumed to be shared by the students. In the first case, Holt’s objective was to teach kids about balance and weight. But the children, in their brilliance, created their own objective, and attempted to make the game their own, focusing on the incentive rather than the goal. (Also, it’s important to point out that in future classes, Holt put the balance beam and the weights in the back of class, never mentioning it or attempting to teach it. Without his predefined objective hindering them, almost all the kids in the class, even some very poor ones, figured it out on their own.)

In the second case, Holt’s objective was to get quiet in the class. But the children reminded him that this must be their’s as well, and invented the Q Shriek to make it so. And Holt was smart enough to allow the Q Shriek, where other teachers would have stolen the only personal connection those kids had to a rule they chose to follow.

You see, kid’s do not naturally want to please teachers and parents, they do not naturally want to learn specific facts, but are rather content to follow their own interests and will learn as it becomes necessary to fulfill those interests. When forced to learn (very oxymoronic) or forced to obey, children will immediately substitute their own objectives, never focusing where the teacher assumes they will. We are going to talk about this more in the future, as we discover the fear and danger that surrounds a child in compulsory education, and the many, many ways in which the very nature of schooling pulls a child’s mind away from learning.

In “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” Mr. Gatto fills us in on what children are really being taught in compulsory school:

1. Confusion:  ”Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.”
2. Class Position: “My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at least endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly policies itself into good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
3. Indifference: “I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do.”
4. Emotional Dependency
5. Intellectual Dependency
6. Provisional Self-Esteem: “Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged… The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.”
7. One Can’t Hide: “I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance… There are no private spaces… no private time… I assign a type of extending schooling called ‘homework,’ so that the effect os surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households.”

In “The Psychopathic School” Gatto points out some of egregious (but ultimately obvious) problems with compulsory education:

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of live and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you in the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its homework.

When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

In “The Green Monogahela” Gatto describes his first foray into education as a substitute teacher. He soon learns of Milagros, a girl in the class of bad readers despite obvious skill. When he takes his case to the administration, he is not met with excitement and thanks, but rather with indignation:

“You have some nerve, Mr. Gatto. I can’t remember when a substitute ever told me how to run my school before. Have you taken specialized courses in reading?”
“No.”
“Well then, suppose you leave these matters to the experts!”
“But the kid can read!”
“What do you suggest?”
“I suggest you test her, and if she isn’t a dummy, get her out of the class she’s in!”
“I don’t like your tone. None of our children are dummies, Mr. Gatto. And you will find that girls like Milagros have many ways to fool amateurs like yourself. This is a matter of a child having memorized one story. You can see if I had to waste my time arguing with people like you, I’d have no time left to run a school.”

The administrator not only open criticizes Mr. Gatto’s intelligence, but immediately accuses the girl of fraud rather than having any curiosity whatsoever… And is it surprising? Among the many other horrid conditions of the schools he taught in, Gatto noticed a significant lack of curiosity and interest:

“…the inexplicable absence of conversation about children among the teachers (to this day, after thirty years in the business, I can honestly say I have never once heard an extended conversation about children or about teaching theory in any teachers’ room I’ve been in)”

Dumbing Us Down is an excellent work with many other lessons besides the few I’ve shared here. I would definitely recommend reading it (it’s actually quite short) if you are at all interested in school reform.

Our mind, as it is, would not be able to do what the child’s mind does. To develop a language from nothing needs a different type of mentality. This the child has. His intelligence is not the same kind as ours.

It may be said that we acquire knowledge by using our minds; but the child absorbs knowledge directly into his psychic life. Simply by continuing to live, the child learns to speak his native tongue. A kind of mental chemistry goes on within him. We, by contrast, are recipients. Impressions pour into us and we store them in our minds; but we ourselves remain apart from them, just as a vase keeps separate from the water it contains. Instead, the child undergoes a transformation. Impressions do not merely enter his mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him. The child creates his own “mental muscles,” using for this what he finds in the world around him.

This, to me, has two very immediate and very important implications. The first is that currently both parenting and education methods do a great deal to stunt and mar this process. The second is that children who are brought up with this principle in mind will prove that extremely bright, curious, precocious children are not an aberration, but rather the natural, normal state that the child is compelled towards.

Until a handful a decades ago, the most important portion of a student’s development was considered to be university. There he received “higher learning,” there he was prepared for the world. Younger children were all but entirely ignored as curious, learning beings. But now we know better, and vague stabs at applying this knowledge in shown in the form of preschool classes. This, however, is not good enough. A different kind of mind needs a different kind of education. And to Montessori, and myself, this implies a complete abandonment of the educational principles currently supported. Montessori writes of the role of parents and teachers:

The discovery that the child has a mind able to absorb on its own account produces a revolution in education. We can now understand easily why the first period in human development, in which character is formed, is the most important. At no other age has the child greater need of an intelligent help, and any obstacle that impedes his creative work will lessen the chance he has of achieving perfection. We should help the child, therefore, no longer because we think of him as a creature, puny and weak, but because he is endowed with great creative energies, which are of their nature so fragile as to need a loving and intelligent defense. To these energies we want to bring help; not to the child, or to his weakness. When we understand that the energies belong to his unconscious mind, which has to become conscious through work and through an experience of life gained in the world, we realize that the mind of the child in infancy is different from ours, that we cannot reach it by verbal instruction, nor intervene directly in the process of its passion from the unconscious to the conscious - the process of making human faculty - then the whole concept of education changes. It becomes a matter of giving help to the child’s life, to the psychological development of man. No longer is it just as enforced task of retaining our words and ideas.

If that notion doesn’t excite and anger you, then I can only think to blame the French to English translation, because it seems so clear to me that we are missing out on incredible opportunities in the minds of the young, that they are literally being beaten into bored stupidity when they could be raised to such heights of intelligence and freedom that those of us who experienced compulsory school can only imagine.

The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori: Maria Montessori, the creator of the Montessori Method, made incredible and long-lasting contributions to the principles of educating children. She promoted the concept of the “Normalized” child, meaning that independence and a love of learning of normal qualities which all children possess. The Absorbent Mind is considered her cornerstone work.

The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn: This book, written for and to teenagers, presents the argument for quitting school to pursue your own education. Definitely controversial, but very thought-provoking. She makes her points on the negative - but intentional - practices of compulsory education, while providing heaps of information and anecdotes about quitting school and those who have done so successfully.

How Children Fail and How Children Learn by John Holt: Two excellent books by the pioneer of the unschooling method.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto: Coming out very soon, this new book by Gatto exposes the true nature of compulsory education. His book is “a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate, following high-level political theories constructed by Plato, Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Darwin, Wundt, and others, which contend the term “education” is meaningless because humanity is strictly limited by necessities of biology, psychology, and theology. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable.”

Think back to the friends you made in grade school. Think about the things you had in common, the things you were pressured to do. Think about, really, all the kids you knew back then. They came from different backgrounds, sure. And some were differently skilled than others. Some grew or read a little faster. Some had a bit more money, or a bit more melanin in their skin. But you also shared so much. At the same stages of development, the same number of years of experience, the same awe of the upper-classmen and the same distaste for the lower-classmen. But most of all, you had all the same classes, learned the same things at the same time, and moved at the same pace.

Again we look back at a situation that seemed perfectly natural. You had all your classes with kids the same age, and you did all the same stuff. Makes sense from a purely organizational standpoint. But the truth is that children are once again robbed of a rich learning experience in the name of easy management.

Age

There is of course nothing wrong with learning alongside students your age. The problem is that students are not given a choice, and cannot learn with older and younger students around even if they wanted to. And their learning potential greatly suffers because of it.

• Age grouping enforces superficial differences: Children that are completely removed from the wide array of development and experience levels around them begin to see all children of other ages as inherently different. Older students become romanticized, and are seen as better simply because they are older. Younger students become demonized, and are seen as inferior simply because they are younger. And truly, it is a completely logical conclusion for children to come to given the circumstances. Why else would they be separated by age?
• Age grouping enforces superficial likenesses: The flip side of this coin is that children are greatly limited in their scope of social relationships, and it becomes very difficult for many to find others who share their real interests. And I don’t just mean their interest in purple or monkey bars. We have to stop pretending that children are these two dimensional cartoon characters that only talk about bubblegum and their wonderful daddies. They have personalities with depth and complexity, they are drawn to virtue and ability, and they long to learn about people like them. But when they are left with no choice about whom they can meet and spend time with, they will try to be social in any way possible since they are unable to foster friendships based on mutual interests.
• Increases power of peer pressure: I am not completely sure about this one yet, so I won’t go into too much detail, but I believe that by cordoning off students from children of other ages you are creating a very narrow set of perspectives, making peer pressure a far more powerful force.
• Causes stagnation in group efforts: Again this is another side-effect of the extremely limited experience levels that children are presented with. They are left with only their direct peers to learn from and brainstorm with, greatly reducing their exposure to new ideas. This also has the smaller disadvantage of leaving older students with no experience in relating their knowledge to others besides their direct peers and the requirements of a specific teacher.

Pace

In a setting where students must, by compulsion, learn all things together over the same amount of time, we are once again making the mistake of assuming that kids are all the same. But there are many levels of aptitude and interest, not only in learning in general, but within any particular subject. Even the average student suffers greatly. In some subjects he does very well, and becomes bored and stagnant. In other subjects he might not do so well, and feels rushed and frustrated.

• No Child Left Behind mentality: Again we focus on the myth that all children, once their primary education has completed, should know all the same information about all the same subjects. A utilitarian mindset leads us to believe that in order for children to be treated equally, they must all learn the same things, with none moving ahead or falling behind the others in anything. But even at the very best application, this method can only engender a level of education that is less than mediocre.
• “Gifted” programs are no solution: All gifted programs accomplish is declaring that instead of their being one type of student: the average student, there are two: average students and really smart kids. This is of course false. Every single child is extremely different, they excel and struggle at different things at different times. They are more varied than pasta sauce at the grocery store! Any educational methodology must provide for children of all types.

What It Could be Like

With a mixture of ages and paces, students can interact freely with one another as - and if - they desire. They will be able to form more solid bonds based on common interests rather than just a common age or seating assignment, and younger students can pursue mutually beneficial and respectful relationships with older students.

Students who are able to move more quickly can do so without hindrance, while students who have trouble with a particular subject - or with learning in general - can focus more on problem areas, spend more one-on-one time with teachers and seek guidance from more advanced students (on a mutually voluntary basis).

I also believe that this would have the happy side effect of a more healthy competition among students that would be based more on actual progress - I wish I knew how to build rockets too - rather than superficial standards - I wish I got all A’s.

What They Don’t Accomplish

Grades and report cards are a near-universally accepted method in public schools (and most private schools) of gaging a student’s progress in a particular subject, and are a means of highlighting their strengths and pointing out the areas where more focus is needed. Children are often scored on things like class participation and homework, but the majority of their grades comes from tests following each section of a subject (say, after each chapter of a history book), with a much larger test ending the semester and counting for a significant portion of their grade.

Do they succeed? Not at all:

• Grades emphasize arbitrary goals over the learning experience: The point becomes the A, or the Check+, or the high SAT score, rather than the subject matter itself. Learning is no longer about the joy of exploration and discovery, but is just the means to an end.
• Tests emphasize data memorization over subject immersion: The fact that “cramming” is such a well-known term in our public school should be enough to send a shudder down any parent’s back. If a child is given a four-page multiple choice test on Civil War dates, he will do his grudging best to accomplish just that, do well on the test of Friday, forget everything by 3 o’clock that afternoon, and have nothing to show for it afterwards except a distaste for history. Students are force-fed minutia without context or relevance, rather than experiencing and implementing the subject they are studying.
• It is more profitable for schools to post good test scores than it is to engender intelligence and creativity: When a school’s test scores go up, their funding increases. And the opposite is also true. When a school’s funding goes up, it must take on more students and generalize the testing process even more. When a school’s funding goes down, it must lower the intellectual rigor and challenge of its classes.

What Do They Accomplish?

I believe that people may be dishonest in their words, but will show their honesty in their actions. So if a person claims that his goal is one thing, but all of his efforts consistently produce a different, even opposite, result, then it seems logical that either he is not in touch with reality, or that his goal is in fact the thing which he accomplishes.

Schools claim that their purpose is to teach children, to prepare them for life, to interest them in a wide-variety of subjects and academic endeavors. But they do not accomplish this, despite decades of trying, mounds of research and tons of taxpayer dollars. Are schools out of touch with reality? Most definitely! But the fact remains that they are accomplishing their goals, unstated though they may be.

• Bad grades promote a sense of failure: If a student does badly in a class, for whatever reason (he doesn’t enjoy it, the teacher is horrible, the view through the window is distracting, etc), he is punished with a bad grade. Their is no curiosity in his predicament, no interest in why, only the punishment for his “failure” to test well.
• Good grades create dependence: Most children who make good grades cannot conceive of doing badly. Their grades become their standard of value - to their teachers and parents, as well as themselves - rather than the knowledge and experience they might have gained. It becomes then more important to do well than it is to pursue your own interests or enjoy the learning process.
• Grades create unhealthy competition: Generally I am all for competition as the best means of producing the best result. But two girls fighting over one guy isn’t healthy competition, and neither are grades. Students often become obsessed with one-upmanship, again focusing on their grades rather than content. Or the opposite occurs, and grades become an unchosen authority that they fully reject, along with any activity that smacks of learning.

Teachers alone cannot control students. They cannot stand in front of them each day spewing the same boring, disconnected diatribe and expect to keep a calm house. It becomes imperative then, in order to manage kids (this is, after all, the school’s highest goal), to create an environment where students will manage each other. Fear drives some do to better on the next test, while jealousy drive others to do as well as their neighbor.

Kept in herds with children your same age, all of whom move at the same pace, you are left with very, very little choice in what you can look for in a friend. Grades become a means of categorizing ourselves, and finding others like us. And then those grades become a point of pride, a source of personal value. More than anything, they a means of keeping you calm and quiet, sitting at your desk and doing your work.