Prof. Richard Wolff: School Grades as Capitalist Control

we've got to flush the toilet and we've got to get in talented human beings in our government that are from the poor in the middle class no more old Bloodlines no more prep in their kids to control our futures

Some of the greatest inventors, entrepeneurs and even scientists didn't go to college or even finish high school. The way we RATE people and their worth is deeply flawed.

#1 gift you can give the world is stop making your kids report card mean ANYTHING
Let them know they are exactly who they are supposed to be
You love them 100% for who they are NOW exactly as they are

creative problem solving is fun. I had very few teachers in my life who weren't frightened by thinking. is this dependence on an authority?

Education is always presented to be a something freely given to the people by benevolent governments. In actuality it is not a gift but a deal.

While you learn skills adding to your personality by expanding it's competences, your very same personality as a whole is conditioned along the way.
So you always end up getting more for yourself but having less of yourself in the end.

Is there a video of professor Wolff's Fox News apperence.

Yep. I graduated Cum Laude, and in high school I graduated with honors, got into an Ivy League school, and scored in the 99% percentile on the SATS. Getting good grades is simply a question of following rules. Period. Once you know how the game is played, how to kiss the professors ass, how to follow the rules, to conform to the teachers thoughts, and to ask questions but don't ask the WRONG questions (questions that challenge power). The grading system is a scam and rewards the priviledged who can afford tutors and SAT testing centers that can turn even the dimmest college prospect into a passable applicant.

Just had a PROUD CAPITALIST tell me:
"Yes, I remember all those questions on my math tests trying to see how subjugated I was to "the system". Question 1) 5+5=___ Question 2) My boss is always right: True or False? _ Question 3) 6+4=___ Question 4) I will always obey The Man: True or False? _ Yes, it is all coming back to me now; all those questions to "measure my capacity to follow the rules". Im sorry, but the things you leftists come up with are just flat our funny sometimes."
-bluewater454


My Answer I scrambled together from prior research (too lazy to re-include my separation, but if your interested read it. I'd rather not waste anymore time adding spaces, I have a life to live:


Well... Psychology and Neuroscience wouldn't be a science worth studying if it was obvious. Nor would anyone manipulation of another be worth doing if it was obvious. Also, I'll play devil's advocate: The right is the one the complains that the schools teach leftist propaganda. Now you flip when it suits you? Also, the right constantly flips on Identity Politics. Both the "Left' and "Right" Use it. Also, this The fact you made such an ineffective statement with high bias, a platitude, a straw man, and a talking point all mashed together in defense is evidence of your conformity and inherent denial of self-sustained manipulation. The reason you think the world is right and left is due to an established structure planted to make tribal politics, so we focus our anger on fellow Working and Disabled Americans including the addition of a common enemy, domestic/foreign. You are literally wired to not even dare question a normalized creed or you simply enter a fit of denial as a coping mechanism. For basic relation of this to Neuroscience and Evolution/Adaptation The synapses in your brain have already made an interconnecting system to deal with survival in capitalism and even a society (which is a system that was used to survival, but as humanity gained sapience, we started to use it to adapt to philosophies, ideologies, traditions, and out herd societies) but as you begin to lack neuroplasticity due to your age, you begin to doubt things you have not experienced or were manipulated to deny at a young age. The Real Battle, in any society, tends to be Top vs Bottom, Up vs Down, etc. Read Noam Chomsky's Manufactured Consent. It explains why Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, etc. Are hated by thousands of Americans. Also, if "educated" and working americans had time to do research, they would do it. Three Part time Jobs gives the Main Stream Media a chance to spit a corporate narrative. The News has been getting more and more partisan, petty, and biased every decade. Also, you seem to have limited perspective of what is on school tests... The conformity is very complex, though like any trauma or experience affects the brain. If I took your lunch every time a bell rang, the next time a bell rang you would grasp your lunch like a Pro-Wrestler grapples his opponent. (or hide it it and become paranoid that if you have it out during the ring of a bell, your lunch will be taken) Also, there is more than one type of socialism, but Social Democracy (Which is what AOC and Bernie Sanders are to the rest of the free world) is an evolution of capitalism Corporate Democrats are Republicans/Conservatives in every other free first world country, mainly ascribed to Europe. (i.e. Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and the most disgusting... Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders, AOC, etc. are literally the average center or center-left across Europe, due to their Social Democracy While Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Tim Ryan, John McCain, and Marco Rubio are American republicans, that in Europe are equivalent to center-right to a little bit authoritarian all the way to the extremity of a fascist. (Ask a European who knows their politics and American politics, maybe you will be surprised as well) ACTUAL Socialists tend to be on the the left to far left in Europe, the furthest left Heres some perspective from Far-Left Politics on Wikipedia: Luke March of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh defines the far-left in Europe as those who position themselves to the left of social democracy, which they see as insufficiently left-wing. The two main sub-types are called the radical left, who desire fundamental changes to the capitalist system yet remain accepting of liberal democracy, and the extreme left, who are more hostile to liberal democracy and denounce any compromise with capitalism. March specifies four major subgroups within contemporary European far-left politics: communists, democratic socialists, populist socialists and social populists.[3] Vít Hloušek and Lubomír Kopeček add secondary characteristics to those identified by March and Mudde, such as anti-Americanism, anti-globalization, opposition to NATO and rejection of European integration.[4] In France, the term extrême-gauche ("far-left") is a generally accepted term for political groups that position themselves to the left of the Socialist Party, such as Trotskyists, Maoists, anarcho-communists and New Leftists. Some, such as political scientist Serge Cosseron, limit the scope to the left of the French Communist Party,[5] but there is no real consensus.

YES! I've held this same view for so long, that "grades" are the worst way to do schooling. That the only use of a grade is only in showing who the instructor needs to do a better job of teaching. There's this odd finality to grades that simply doesn't make sense if the goal is to pass on knowledge rather than slot people into categories and try very little to actually educate.

Grades are bs. When I taught ESL students, I taught the person, not the grade. If they improved remarkably, that is remarkable. Any improvement as a student is an improvement. Everyone learns differently, and so shall they be encouraged ✌️ (literally that's what leadership is, and as a doer I never cared about grades, I cared about outcomes)

Maybe A, B, C and D weren't relevant at the postgraduate program because... they already know the basics.
I do find the value of A, B, C and D while you're in the process of achieving the mastery levels.

Time and again we learn that when teachers have more time outside the classroom to plan, and in the case of college students, time to confer with students, outcomes are better.

If you looked at my grades on a line-graph, it'd probably look like an EKG. I have ADHD. I didn't know it from elementary school through to college. I've had baffled employers look at my transcripts, and ask me why I had high 90's in some courses and 50's and 60's in others. At the time, I was also baffled and really couldn't say.

I now know that I have interest-based motivation not intrinsic motivation. I don't feel the same sense of accomplishment out of the completion of tasks I don't like, that someone else without ADHD apparently feels. If I do something I don't enjoy or care about, there's no built in reward firing off dopamine in my brain to make it feel worth it for next time. None. It feels like punishment or a chore. My brain is hedonistic. It wants what it wants. If I am interested, I knock it out of the park. If I am not, I do the bare minimum to scrape by. I am capable of learning and parroting the same information back to you but if there's no passion, that's all you get. On the other hand, if I am engaged and excited by the project or topic at hand, I learn faster and outperform most of my peers.

The world and classrooms are not set up this way. You're expected to work like ants and stay in line and always deliver regardless of where you want to be. Coincidently, that's also why many of the people like me that manage to be successful in this kind of culture are entrepreneurs.

Meritocracy only legitimises and reproduces inequality as it exists in Western society today.

Instead of saying "his or her," just say "they." It's shorter and more gender inclusive.

i'm a junior in highschool, i've always gotten good grades but i've always known that the grading system valued obedience. there are kids much smarter than me that aren't valued as much as me and i've always felt so angry about it.

Wolfe is essentially talking about Aristotelian virtue cultivation.

You guys kick ass.

System doesn't want original thinkers it wants slaves

In order for Dr. Wolff's "original thinking" to work, the U.S. would have to foster an intellectual culture. Look through any public high school yearbook and you'll see we do not foster an intellectual culture. We foster a sports culture.

It wasn't too long into my university student career that I realized the system of grades, "required courses", the curriculum, academia in general was much more about control, conformity, plus there is the financial worries that hover over you, trying to work while a student, tuition and fees always going up; it doesn't work

Like Asian students who remembers key portions of their SAT books and then writes down what they remember on a multiple choice questionnaire test. Not really understanding the information and compile an analysis. But only remembers how to answer the multiple choice question.

Such an intelligent, enlightening discussion. Please support this guy and his channel in whatever way you can.

I would love to hear Dr. Wolff engage in discourse with the works of Paolo Freire and bell hooks. Great interview!

The idea is that if you get good grades you'll do well in life when in fact how you'll do in life is predetermined by your social class.

How come the same people always want to take down a society and then move on ? Who ? Why? The wolf in the hen house NEVER gives an alternative to replace....... except cultural suicide

Yep, and standardized tests!

The kind of education that Prof. Wolff is talking about requires a lot of love, and many people to cultivate. It seems to me that the nature of a child should be cultivated from a very early age, and perhaps, internships, or mentors should supplement classroom learning. This kind of system would probably result in a much happier society.

"If you are thinking, you are doing it wrong"

and I wonder why our schools no longer teach woodshop, home economics or cooking . Can you imagine how easy it is to make stuff with the tools we have these days...I do almost all my handy Andy work, in most cases...I'm 69 a tuff cookie from Chicago...we loved working in my environment of ethnic Americans from post ww2...Italians Greeks Germans Jews and Poles as well as Blacks from the south and whites as well...I remember everyone hanging out playing base ball or skimmer ball , a type of stairs baseball in the city..great show thanks. Richard, you are a hell of a thinker. And with humor  thx..

i could not become more angry at myself, that i started to watch this guy again. stop talking. you generate random meaningless words. prof world says something meaningful amd useful. you are random charachter generator. stop talking.

This program speaks so strongly to the problems of life. Personally, my grades ranged all over the map, but my greatest strength, creative thinking, was never nurtured. thank you.

The ONLY Marxist I've hard talk so much sence. Excellent stuff

Failing students the world over agree with this.

Very enjoyable, thank you. bang on SARM £DSARM

I would seriously love to see Prof. Wolfe replace Betsy DeVos. His input on curriculum would be priceless.

prof. wolff should get no credit for this insight, orwell did it with more style. of course, it is very likely that '1984' wasn't discussed in your high school. it's applicability to usa is obvious too many.

Terrific ideas and insights again by Prof. Wolff. But about the essay thing, I wonder how you could do that with the exact sciences, in particular on graduary school, where you have to learn the basic thing.
As a sideline, the rumour that Einstein was a poor student is bogus. What I read is that he did some examinations in french, while he was nog so good in that language.

I agree with him....depending on the area of study. Some subjects need precise measurement like maths or sciences.

Kudos to Richard Wolff for the deep knowledge, reflexive intelligence, and direct experience shared here -- and kudos to R.J. Eskow. Here's a slightly varied piece of reflection on profound originality, imagination, individuation, actualization, and alienation I posted once on Prof. Wolff's channel encompassing certain extended archetypes of the same theme presented here in this video.

Allow me to humbly add a side topic and a historical and perhaps rather philosophical footnote to this most wonderful and already comprehensive body of thoughtful illuminations and substantial emanations by Professor Wolff. Forgive this text for being somewhat a potentially boring and lengthy digression, but it has own spontaneity, momentum, and original inspiration, hopefully complementing the "history of history" (of the world's socio-political and philosophical ideologies) itself that Professor Wolff and Dr. Fraad have livingly presented on this channel and in certain other related expositional veins.

It starts with a nearly forgotten socialist: Albert Einstein. Even Einstein and his close philosopher friend Bertrand Russell -- who both were great socialists, progressive humanists, and rare polymaths, who both emigrated to America from war-torn Europe during World War Two (similar to Professor Wolff's parents' story, I recall), and who were always intellectually and culturally "autonomous-imaginative-creative odd balls, passionate incorrigibles and elegant non-conformists, and genial spirits of New Cosmism, Renaissance Individuation, and Universal-Permanent Revolution", be it in Germany, England, or the US as well as in science, philosophy, and life/the humanities in general -- suffered from the most ridiculous, nastiest, and shallowest slanderous abuse during the post-Great Depression McCarthy era of "Red/Left Purge" (in part to vapidly retaliate against those new, progressive, and wonderfully unprecedented human rights and social deals advanced by the Left and their organized Unions at Roosevelt's very threshold, as Professor Wolff says many times) in their new home country, including Einstein being put under heavy surveillance for being an open socialist (he taught workers and their Labor Unions, including their children, Special and General Relativity and cosmology -- in an amusing pedagogically inspired and simplified format -- for free once for a period of time at a pedagogical Marxist organization in Berlin and maybe also Munich from the Weimar Republic era), an anti-imperialist Gandhi-ist, and a genuine free thinker at some of the most rarefied strata of understanding (the archetypal Being-qua-Being, if you will) and in the imaginative-insightful-intuitive tradition of "thinking about thinking", which was (and ever is) a "lonely business" (as epitomized by Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Cantor, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, et al., including the young Hegel and surely Marx) and which so many academics, politicians, and every-day Americans couldn't handle with elegance, composure, and grace (today's situation is similar in America, especially with much of academia in corruption and decline, which is why I and some friends have spent a substantial period of time academically research-wise in Europe: here's from heart to heart with Professor Wolff as a fellow academic and "out-lier", plus I happen to work in the same field as Einstein, yet that is but a tip of the ice-berg as there are certain other "esoteric" and "exoteric" dimensions of philosophical knowledge, world-synthesis, and scientific creation that I deeply care about).

See for instance Einstein's legendary essay "Why Socialism?" and his various critical-visionary reflections on science and life, which include his condemning certain grotesque facets of Fascism in America as also found in certain inauthentic thought-control mechanisms coupled with a shallowest sense of careerism and intellectual unoriginality within academia and in the appalling cultural racism and its ugly racial segregation before even the civil-rights movement started. So Einstein's unique cognizance (and archetype) of both authentic autonomous individuation and universal/internationalist democratic socialism was profoundly epistemically/intellectually and existentially/psycho-spiritually (I dare say even ontologically, epistemologically, phenomenologically, and thus axiologically at once) alienated in his adopted country, and certain other American-born physicist/academic friends of his like the Oppenheimer brothers (J. Robert and Frank) and David Bohm were institutionally alienated, marginalized, and fired for being Marxist-leaning and/or being out-right Communists: such was an American phenomenon augmented in part by amazing public ignorance and certain elements of academic tyranny (Bohm fled to Brazil from Princeton when fired, even after his Magnum Opus on "Rethinking the Foundations of Quantum Theory"), which persists at large today in the form of not just "passive ignorance" but "aggressive ignorance": certain very many people "who don't even know that they don't know" much at all, who form the worst egregious category of ignorance, still dare to speak about certain things they have absolutely no original mastery or vision (let alone very first principles) about, while endlessly and mindlessly recycling and regurgitating slanderous, malignant, and shallow rubbish spoon-fed into them by certain bigoted reality-distorting sources, about the Left for instance, and yet these people did and still do vote (and even often rule in certain offices here and there as "woefully, woefully inferior-quality/reality/character pygmies on stilts, yet who play 'dummy demi-gods' and cast long shadows since it must be late during the day", to use an Einsteinian-Kuhnian-Tiplerian or even Dostoyevskian word-play). These people, trivially loud as they like to be, are ever-ignorant about true freedom and the revolutionary novelty, deep quintessence, and audacious-sacrificial nature of true ideas and ideals in any field (especially what had been born out of various visionary struggles in Europe at the time and before that, all the way back to the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Erasmus, Spinoza, et al.). The same alienation (the Kierkegaardian epistemic-existential suffering: "Sickness unto Death") was experienced by a batch of European immigrant professors and new thinkers (some were "ideationists" beyond just "idealists") at The New School and within some other novel-paradigmatic groups, such as Hannah Arendt. As Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and our good Richard Wolff have shown or can readily point out, we have Arendt's "Banality of Evil" and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" in America so clandestinely (and often plainly) institutionalized behind certain "gated" and "policed" (to the point of self-thought-policing and inter- and intra-departmental policing, ultimately amounting to obstruction of new fundamental ideas, while calling certain tiny increments of their own "progress") places of employment, fetish concoction (while often devouring huge money and engendering loud publicity via certain "copy-paste" journalists who write their narrations, without deep knowledge/understanding, exactly as funnel-fed to them by who pay them), corruption, and exploitation: even a profound thinker and visionary, and precisely especially that very genial archetype, is not so welcome there, and human zombies and flat-minded cogs are more than welcome as bosses and stooges.

This is the deeper reality of institutionalized tyranny (what may be termed "Hyperbolic-Operant Neo-Skinnerian Tyranny" with all its duplicity and duality-politics mirrors/mazes to hide the deep "Classical Elliptic Tyranny" at its core) behind the slogan "We Can't Breathe!": the "knee" or "jack-boot" upon our necks as experienced by a very wide spectrum of archetypes from the stubborn autonomous genius of Einstein to Emerson/Walt Whitman-like artists of thought and imagination (beauty and truth) to all the long-suffering good workers and especially the young (and younger still) minds inheriting an absolutely infernal brokenness and irreversibly deep wounds of the world (also staring in the face of various kinds of human hypocrisy, stupidity, and hubris), a severe pain and burden manifest all the way from the Noosphere to the Atmosphere, Biosphere, and Geosphere (a great micro-meso-macroscopic, and even "metascopic", deal of "Ecosophical Reality" has thus been hijacked and corrupted).

Some young revolutionary "progressors" have indeed been born and self-ignited (it is no coincidence that the archetypal "Agni", let alone profound Genius and daring novelty, is being reborn, rediscovered, and advanced further individually and collectively among a "non-zombified" and "non-fossilized" portion of the young at this hyper-critical junction of history, even when so much of humanity and youth has been severely corrupted and dumbed-down: dumb and numb, and dumber and number still), and some even fragrantly martyred (like Aaron Swartz in the advancement of "Open Society" and a fully "Open-Source and Open-Access Internet" bypassing certain corrupt mechanisms and life-sucking pay-walls) while in full blossoming radiance: as Pablo Neruda would have said, they (and their guiding light in the form of good seasoned mentors, those as rare and rarefied as the Wolff-Fraad family in our midst) are part of what the spring season of pure thought, self-discovery, and activism (dialectics and praxis) can do unto cherry trees (and what autumn, among the seasons, can quiveringly and shiveringly, i.e. rhapsodically and ravishingly, do unto vineyards and the choicest grapes).

I'm finishing up my masters in teaching and I've worked out a system to get "the grade" (here in Australia it's distinction/high distinction) ... No matter what the rubric says I write down which ever educator is marking my papers favourite key terms and which academics they like and just pepper references to them through my paper ... This has worked every time without fail (when there's a subject I'm passionate about I write my own thoughts). The only time this didn't work for me was recently when a marker quit the course mid year and I didn't realise someone else would be grading. The feedback I got was "I need more of you personal voice in your writing" 7 years of University study and this was the first time I had been pulled up for it. I'm interested in my next mark because I did actually write my own thoughts but I'm curious if what she really meant was "this should be tailored to me".

If you were intelligent and persistent enough to get the highest grades in class. You would be intelligent and persistent enough to think for yourself.

Sadly, that is not always the case for every proud "top of the class" kid I knew in my high school and college years.

Such an amazing piece of higher reflexive intelligence and direct discernment (cognizance and synthesis). That incisive, insightful, and powerfully original, dynamic, and autonomous intellect capable of truly "thinking about thinking" and "doing about doing". One may call Professor Wolff, who comes from a very rare one-of-a kind "noosphere speciation", an "ergodic-eikonal thinker" who sees the singularly and multiply twisted and intra-, inter-, and contra-unfolding inner and outer dynamics, ergonomics, and archetypes of involution, convolution, evolution, and revolution at once. That novelty (which includes transcendence, immanence, and imminence in one intellection) alone imaginatively and freely (and yet practically) is capable of denuding and creatively transcending all sorts of perverted inverse-linear and inverse-hyperbolic projections (including perverted social-behavioral Darwinism, Freudianism, and Skinnerianism, and ultimately "Fetid Neo-Fascism", if you will). In the realm of both individual scientific creation and collective cultural revolution, Einstein (unlike most academics, no matter the typical false hype, hubris, and popular misconceptions given to the public at large about them -- I'm an odd-ball and lone-falcon academic myself, yet at times perhaps I'm also a "cultural-academic coward") was archetypally very similar to this, a true universal polymath containing a very singular, unique, and solitary degree of authentic Renaissance individuation (not just shallow yet bloated "individualism" and hubristic "freedumb") capable of ontologically, epistemologically, and phenomenologically unifying singularity and multiplicity at an ontically higher and noetically (eidetically) freer and yet also epistemically deeper and existentially more grounded (and varied) level. When this archetype (and a confluence of such archetypes) is very courageously (singularly) and dynamically (dialectically) present, self-determined, and active near (or at) the "tectonic-rim end-stage" of history and philosophism (including the roles played by all strands of Marxism, libertarianism right and left -- statist and anarchist -- and beyond, hermeneutics, post-modernism/"post-post-modernism", and ecosophism), it does unto pure thought (eidetics) and praxis "what spring does unto cherry trees and what autumn does unto vineyards" (a-la Pablo Neruda).

The current system is a joke. I've had hypoglycemia since I was maybe 10, and I found out last week at 21, because teachers wrote me off as faking sickness and being melodramatic.

It had me removed from a college-level special education course because I was being "lazy" when I felt like I was barely able to stand on my feet. I will never forget the teacher that did that to me, who was allegedly supposed to be working with special-needs kids.

“useful markers for an employer who wants a docile employee”

How about an employer who wants a competent employee. Someone who actually has learned the foundational skills for developing higher level skills. This is going to get more and more important as jobs become more complex.

Creativity, for its case, is pretty useless if it is not paired with a foundation from which useful innovations can sprout. Anyone can throw shit up against a wall until something sticks. The economy suffers tremendously from lack of tangible skills. Our collective wealth us not sustained by good-guessers.

I think school grades can also be described as Communist Control, here's why:

Grades have nothing to do with learning or student development, neither of which is a competition.The grading system has everything to do with relative performance/comparison, judgment, coercion and conformity. I am in favor of doing away with the traditional grading system and replacing it with objective, detailed evaluations because employers don't hand out report cards to their employees, they give them evaluations and if schools truly desire to 'prepare' students for the work environment, then doing away with it is not a bad start.

Students are placed in honor roll assemblies where the 'high achievers' are paraded around in front of the non-achievers, both groups of which were forced to partake/assemble against their will by a school schedule. By forcing students (both the achievers and non-achievers) to place their own self-esteem in the form of public esteem or 'pleasing' the grown-ups, they are sending a subliminal message to both groups: you only matter to us if you live up and conform to our brazenly subjective and superficial opinions of what constitutes a 'model student'. Honor roll should either be done away with, or at least it should come from a competitive event that is purely voluntary (i.e. spelling bee, creative writing contest, trivia contest, mathletes, science fair, etc).

Some of my critics who read this comment may label me as the communist, but I beg to differ. A system that enforces blind, passive conformity, a system that labels students as 'assets' or 'liabilities', a system that values collectivized prosperity (i.e. standardized test scores), a system that 'rewards' or gives preferential treatment to select students for making the system structures into which they are being 'molded' look good, all of that sounds a helluva lot more like a communist society to me.

On the other hand, a system that ceases to pit/compete students between each other against their will (where the only competitive events that take place, athletic or academic are strictly voluntary), that is flexible to each individual students' learning styles and encourages individual (not relative) prosperity, creating an environment of critical thinking, application of knowledge, innovation, imagination and creativity (not memorization/regurgitation and conformity), sounds a helluva lot more like independence (the true American way).

Stunt creativity for years through this BS school system so you won't have confidence in yourself to possibly start a company with other like minded people. Grades condition you to compete with others, not cooperate.