Week 8: The fetishism of the report card commodity

Marx

Marx, like Freud, is someone I feel I’ve always heard a lot about but had yet to really study. Most of my knowledge of him comes from half-remembered high school history classes, so I felt I could use some brushing up. And I must say I much prefer studying him from a more philosophical than historical viewpoint. It’s less depressing, and more interesting.

Then again, it’s hard not to be depressed by this stuff on any level. Most of all Marx’s discussion in “The Working-Day.” The thing that always scares me the most in regards to the nature of capital he outlines isn’t even just the ways it impacts our health. It’s the whole idea of it cheapening the care we put into things. This is always something I find to be a personal struggle for me, just on very basic levels. I feel that the hardest and one of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn in school (and am still learning) is to meet deadlines, even at the cost of quality work. It’s something that drives me crazy and depresses me to no end. On the one hand, I am a bit of a perfectionist and really do need due dates to teach me to let things go. On the other hand, I recognize that at some level, especially in regards to systems like grading, students and workers are taught to cut corners and at some point stop caring about their work in order to reach levels of greater production.

Actually, let’s talk about grades specifically for a moment. (I admit I have more experience as a student than a worker, so it’s often easier for me to think of Marxism on the level of school life.) Grades are a lot like the exchange-value of commodities. Like commodities, in grades “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” (Marx 664). In contemplating the idea of grades, I’m often left with a disturbing kind of awe – how can one little letter sum up an entire semester, or year, of class work? That little letter can’t possibly even begin to convey all the labor that went into making it what it is, and yet it is meant to signify all that and more: it is meant to “prove” that the student has learned something. Grades, like commodities, are often sadly removed from the true labor that went into making them, even the true amount of knowledge gained in the class for which they are awarded to the student. They are often given on the basis of exchange-value – they are awarded for completed work. But who’s to say the student actually learned from this work? Conversely, a student who fails to turn in assignments receives a poor grade because they have not produced work, yet perhaps they learned much more from what they did do than a student who completed all assignments without being fully engaged in them.

I’ve had experiences on both sides over my years as a student. There were classes, usually the one hundred student ones in college where everything is determined on the basis of multiple choice quizzes, in which I received great grades but felt I learned no more than the necessary factoids I memorized to pass the tests, facts soon forgotten there after. On the flip side, there were classes in which my inability to keep up with the workload resulted in bad grades, but I left feeling as though I had learned a great deal from all the effort I put into the class.

I’d like to say these classes are in the minority however – for the most part, grades tend to at least come close to matching up with the true labor put in and the knowledge gained in a class. Most of the time, this probably happens. And yet, one can’t deny that the way grades work is on the level of exchange-value – students earn their grades by producing work and test scores. Knowledge in this way plays the role of the use-value of commodities, the actual way we interact with our course material. But grades aren’t directly related to this.

In the end, the most disturbing thing about this in regards to both grades and commodities is the ideology it promotes. The system cares only for achieving a final product – commodity, grade, capital. The focus is taken off of the desire to achieve personal fulfillment and knowledge and is only focused on the achievement of an object.

For my own part, I like to get good grades. But I like to learn more. I try to do both. (Luckily, I must say English classes tend to be quite good when it comes to the two naturally matching up.)

And, on a slightly different topic, don’t even get me started on how over-worked the average high school student is. With a school day from eight to three, and a night’s homework often four to five hours (or, at least, this is the time it can take if you want your grades to be high), that can be a twelve-hour day. What does this leave time for? Just enough for meals and hopefully the large amount of sleep necessary for teenagers (which I believe can be around ten hours). I admit this workload may vary with school, but it seems to be about what was generally true for me in high school, and my brother now, and a lot of other people I know, all attending different schools. Not to mention, similar things happen in some elementary and middle schools.

I guess we’re being groomed to enter the world of Capital…