#4 Grades are important but just if given with deliberation

Grades were part of my life with the very beginning of my education. Grown up the first years of my life in former Czechoslovakia, what and this time was a communist country, the education was one of the highest aims of the Government. In this society everything had to be comparable. Factories were set by the Government to productivity contests so it's not amazing, that this attitude spared no-one, especially not the children. The children were graded already in the kindergarten. There were no real grades, I grant, but the parents were continuously informed about the development of their children compared to other children's development. Especially in the relatively small town, were I grew up, a real competition between the parents was aroused. At this time I felt no pressure, it was more like a game to me, when my parents started to teach me to read and write before I came to school. I was curios about it. Later, when I continued my education in Germany I started to understand how grades can conduct your life.

At the beginning I have to mention that grades are a superb way to prepare children for their after-life particularly in these days characterized by a competitive and globalized job market, where headhunters and staff managers are selecting their applicants in competitive assessment centers. Grading children from the very beginning of their education prepares them for all these situations. They learn to deal with the feeling of a possible fail and the tension of a competition. This skills are important to be able not to give up oneself and to audible that life is full of ups and downs, but impressionable by an ongoing process of self-improvement.

Furthermore, it is necessary to say that grades are a good possibility to compare the educational development of children in the same class. As education is an ongoing process and important for one's life there must be an opportunity for teachers, especially in big classes like we have in Germany to have a conspectus of the level of each pupil in the class. The easiest and most comparable way to get such overview are graded tests. They enable teachers and parents to improve the skills of the children and bring them to a common educational level. This is especially important in nowadays when children with different educational background are sitting together in one class. A gradings system helps thereby to find the differences between them and allows therefore a specific problem solution.

The mentioned argument against grades is that grades are setting pupils under heavy pressure to succeed. Like mentioned before I think it's easier for children to handle this pressure when they learn it from the very beginning. If they don't learn it in time the emotional stress will be much bigger in their later lives. Nevertheless I think that it's important to do the grading carefully. Because in some cases, for example when children are in a special family situation like a divorcement, the achievements of these children have a decreasing tendency which has nothing to do with their real knowledge. In such cases bad grades can indeed extend the intensity of the already existent stress.

All in all I think that grades are important in our educational system. Like mentioned before they are necessary as a preparation for the after-life and the comparative character enables affirmative actions to reach a common level of all children, never mind from which social class they're coming. Honestly, there are also some problems with grading but they have their origin in the performance and not in the idea itself.