Maria Baer: Avoiding difficulty

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Finally today, WORLD Opinions contributor Maria Baer says Harvard’s undergraduate grade inflation defeats the purpose of education.

MARIA BAER: A couple years ago, my second-grade daughter left me a note. She’d drawn two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, with angry eyebrows—a reverse smiley face—and these words, with no punctuation:

“I do not like what is happening”

As many parents often must, I had to stifle a burst of laughter. It was such an earnest, understated description of a universal human experience. I wasn’t even sure what it was referring to. But I eventually traced it back in time to violin practice.

Both my daughters have been studying the violin since they were five years old, respectively. It takes a long time to see progress, which makes motivating very young ones to practice even more difficult.

But that is one of the primary reasons I want my girls to learn it. I’m starting to think that even more than playing the violin itself, this skill—building a will to master an unforgiving challenge—is going to distinguish them from their peers more and more as they grow.

Consider, for example, a new report out of Harvard University. Grade inflation there has reached an absurd fever pitch: a full 60% of marks given to Harvard undergraduates are now A’s. Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education writes: “Our grading no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission.” Harvard, in other words, has officially entered its Participation Trophy era.

In response, students at the Harvard Crimson published what can only be comprehended as unintentional self-parody. A freshman named Sophie reported her very soul was “crushed”—not by the implication that her grades, and by extension her entire education, are completely meaningless, but by the foreboding that professors might raise their standards in response. Another student named Katya said: “I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies … rather than being killed by them,”.

Their classmate Zahra felt similarly worried that she won’t be able to “reach [her] maximum level of enjoyment” if her schoolwork starts to be, like, hard. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes,” Zahra said.

Zahra, Katya, and Sophie Do Not Like What Is Happening.

When my daughters don’t want to practice the violin, I don’t plead with them to try to “enjoy” it more. Especially when the weight of what they have yet to learn is so much greater than what they’ve learned already. Instead, I tell them the truth: that learning is good by itself, that it is good despite and because of how hard it is.

I don’t know why or how young people are somehow achieving acceptance into Harvard University with the impression that the central purpose is to enjoy themselves. It shocks me that these students—supposedly the brightest minds in the country—literally cannot imagine that obtaining a degree in a subject ought to correspond to actually learning that subject.

Proverbs 9 says that Wisdom is as a woman who builds her house and then invites “all who are simple” to enter and learn. It’s a brilliantly surgical metaphor: the only price for wisdom is: 1) wanting it, and 2) admitting you don’t have it yet. If young people are heading to Harvard with no appetite for wisdom but rather to play lacrosse, join clubs, and hunger-strike from 9 to 5 for Gaza ahead of bikini season, of course they’ll bemoan whoever threatens to deflate that balloon.

As much as any of us can influence the culture around us, we should do our best to inoculate ourselves and our own kids from such a truly soul-crushing worldview. We should remind ourselves that knowledge is valuable by itself, that difficult undertakings build character, and that comfort is a temptress who will make us dumber if we worship her.

I’m Maria Baer.

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