N now = 2. I tried Terry Hathaway’s exercise in a class of eleven students. All of them complied without question, and when I asked why, the first student to speak said, “Because you have power over our grades.”
I then asked, per Max Weber, whether my authority was based on personal charisma, tradition, or some rational-legal principle. Students hesitated to respond to this question. Since they had been reading about China’s Cultural Revolution, I drew a table on the board with columns titled “Chairman Mao” and “Chairman Chad” to illustrate the human tendency to do stupid things like stand on one foot with one hand on our heads, or denounce/beat/kill our neighbors, only because an authority figure has told us to.
Educational institutions, at least in the USA, function as authority figures in which grades reflect the ability to conform rather than learning. Students perceive education as a performative exercise in which intrinsic interest is irrelevant, and they behave accordingly, a phenomenon that the anthropologist and ungrading advocate Susan D. Blum calls “schoolishness.”
In an attempt to encourage student curiosity and independence, I’ve been, like Terry, experimenting with ungrading, or, as I like to put it, degrading. It’s still a work in progress. This semester, for example, I have a barbell-shaped grade distribution in one of my undergraduate courses/modules, with a quarter of the students failing and half at an A level. The students who do the work, whether it contributes to their final grade or not, are doing fine. Those who don’t are not. Maybe removing the usual mechanisms of coercion also removes the incentive to engage in schoolishness.