Saturday, April 07, 2012

Grades Don’t Matter


So my wife and I constantly have a debate on whether grades matter or not. I stand by my verdict that good grades do not prove that a person will be a better worker. This is something that I have seen through my experience. I have seen people without a fancy degree do much better than a person who has one.





A good example of grades do not matter are of course our very own Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who were both dropouts. I do not deny that education is useless. Education is a must and it serves as a catalyst to land us in jobs. But, if you do not do well, do not worry; it is not the end of the world. I strongly believe our education system is flawed as the focus is biased towards academics and there is not much emphasis on other types of intelligence be it music, arts, etc. A lot of our talents are going down the drain except a select few who managed to make it in fields such as music and arts. This is because they realized their talents and harnessed that capability. The others however, let that talent slide because no one was there to guide them and they’re most of time being called stupid because they do not do well in academics. This is absolutely wrong and we need to have a more robust education system that caters for individuals.

There needs to be a realization that everybody is an individual, we cannot be lumped up and assumed to be able to cope with just one area of education. I regret some of the people from my school before who got pushed to the last classes because they were perceived to be not smart enough which is far from true. Some of these guys when they get their hand on a guitar, can soothe you with the melodies they play and that is very well a talent that was wasted because believe me, the perception of being a musician to the average Malaysian parent is a big no no. Every parent wants their children to be a lawyer, doctor, engineer or some sort of “professional”. Very few will actually encourage their children to do what their good at and that is a sad reality.

A point I would like to make in this article is that grades do not determine intelligence nor does it make the individual better than the rest. I honestly believe that a person needs to be “street smart” and that means that they need to be exposed to the real world and deal with the environment out there where text books cannot teach you. And this is what I mean; Just swallowing all the information from a text book and vomiting it out on a piece of paper will not help an individual. There needs to be a more practical approach. This of course happens in most colleges and Universities but not in school. This needs to be introduced in schools because it determines whether an individual qualifies for tertiary education or not. Being oppressed since school by painting a picture that an individual is not good enough because they do not have good grades will only discourage the individual to gain further knowledge. More needs to be done at the primary and secondary school levels. Educationists need to recognize talent and develop it. 

I leave you with a pole below to see what you think about grades. Thanks.

Do grades determine intelligence

  
pollcode.com free polls 







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