Do not start grading children too soon

Hanging out with the right circle of friends in school, having a cool brand on your jeans, doing well in dance-classes AND figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life. These are all problems kids could be dealing with around the age of puberty nowadays. Do we really need to add more pressure on kids today? I say – do not change our grading system, since it will only cause youngsters to be even more stressed out and depressed than what they already are today.

Why is it even so important for us with grades? Do they really tell us that much about a person? Swedish schools are today using a system with parents and teachers meeting a couple of times a year to discuss the development of their children in school. This allows parents to be involved in what their kids are doing without adding unnecessary pressure on the kids. It creates a more open atmosphere and lessens tendencies of putting kids into different categories based on their grades. I would say that that would appear to be a much better way of learning about a person than looking at different figures on a piece of paper. Instead of us taking after other countries’ systems with grades at very young ages, I think people should be looking at Sweden’s system and try to follow our lead, where kids are allowed to be kids for longer.

Problems with depression among children and teenagers are increasing. One part of the problem is the stress put on kids in school. Not only the pressure to perform well in class, but also the pressure of fitting in amogst other children. Starting to grade children at an early age will only worsen this problem. The difference between doing well and excellent will be made clearer and kids will feel expectations of doing “more than okay” from parents. Furthermore, other children can also pose judgment on grades, and perhaps have other standards for what is good and not good. Good grades are not always looked at as a positive thing among the “cool kids” in school. But not being able to pass classes could also be a reason for a child to be alienated in a school class. We cannot know what will happen in specific groups of children, but grading at younger ages could definitely cause social problems for school kids as well as stress.

But would it not be good though, if children became motivated to be “more than okay?” Well, perhaps it could boost some academic results, but at what cost? Grading children when they are really young shows them that results are what matters in this world, but would we not rather teach them valuable lessons about trying your best, accepting people the way they are and that there are more skills in life than what we learn in school. Encouraging kids to constantly compete and be the best at something I think is feeding values that they will be exposed to more than enough anyways, later in life.

Our adult lives are filled with “musts” and “must nots”. Exposing kids to this is to make them grow up faster than necessary. I think we should let children be children for as long as possible and teach them more about other values than academic ones. Competing with your peers for results can wait until kids are older – there are plenty of worries in school as it is