Grades in primary school....not for the child’s development

It is interesting how some numbers or letters on a paper can mean so much just because they are written by a person’s teacher. I see why they are important when you are old enough to apply for schools and special programs because there want be room for everyone. They will tell the person judging you what you are good at and what you are not good at, written in single letters or numbers. But do they really tell anything about why the grades are the way they are, how you are as a person, how you have been developing or how you can grow and learn in the future. Grades are for some reason linked to a safe and secure future and your own development, my opinion is different: Grades want help the young learners development.

I say that young learners will be inhibited in their development because of the pressure that will come along with getting grades in primary school. Knowing that you will be judge, compared to what is “normal” for your age will put the learner under a pressure not healthy for a child. The grades in it self, being a B or a 3 want tell anything about what the child needs to work with to develop on neither a social, emotional, physical and psychological level. It will just put a pressure on what they need to accomplish.

Grades in primary school will lower the children’s self-confident. They will put the focus on what I believe is the wrong thing; on the result and not on the important achievement and the fact that you have learned something. Not being able to reach what is meant for a child in that age will give the child a low self-confident, and in the long run inhibited the development. The grades will if it is possible make the children compare them self to each other even more and only the highest grade will be something to feel proud about. Only that will make you feel more self-confident. Young learners need to here what they are good at, when their achievement is brilliant and when they have developed. That is what will help them develop their self-confident and that want be written on a grades paper if they still haven’t reached the grade limit.

On the other hand the centre-right alliance and Jan Björklund, the minister of education, say that grades will be a good way to give the teacher and the parent’s better control over the child’s school situation. They will be able to know more about how the child is doing because the grade system will be an accurate documentation. This is a good argument, because the documentation of today is inadequate on some levels and at some schools. So yes grades could be a better help for teachers and parents, which in the end could help the child’s development.

If we want to insure the young learner’s development I think there are better ways to keep everyone updated than giving grades in primary school. If the government instead of just deciding that grades is the best solution to what they think is a problem developed a national way of documentation. A documentation that would give the whole picture of the child and it’s learning situation, that is what I believe would benefit the child. Benefit and favour the child so it can continue developing.