georgette🎀🎀’s Reviews > Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School > Status Update

-“we need to stop thinking that grades are equivalent and comparable - a disadvantaged pupil who gets a B may have done vastly more to achieve that grade, and be far more capable than an advantaged pupil who gets an A.” P220

-“‘Flow’- Psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi- happiness comes from being in a state of flow. The level of difficulty and your own skill are calibrated so it is difficult but you can do it.”
“Education enriches us by teaching us the joy of skill and challenge.” P214

-“rather than employing or selecting on the basis of being the best why not choose on the basis of being above a threshold: being in the group of people who would be capable of making the most of this opportunity.” P74

-“Oxbridge are not picking between one student with three Cs and one with three A*s. All of them will have combinations of As and A*s. Really the process of selection is one of trying to make the most fine grained judgements, when that simply isn’t possible. It’s like choosing the best fish at the fishmongers when they all weigh the same. I mean one might be better but you won’t know until you eat it.” P74

P69 the marshmallow test

-“the hidden curriculum. The term was coined by Philip Jackson in 1968 .” The idea that the national curriculum is responsible for the transmission of explicit knowledge. But there are also a separate set of skills, norms and assumptions that are implicitly taught by the wider environment the child is in. P52

40-43 Robinson
-“factory model that educates kids in batches and destroys individuality.”
-Rousseau’s Emile- “crystallized enlightenment views of children as ‘little scientists’” -child-centered approach, discovery learning

- “as teachers were agents of the status quo trained to weed out those who don’t fit into neat rows.” P2

-“it sprang from the fact I spent a lot of my time in the schoolyard during lunch break. This kind of thing sounds unimportant, but any teacher will tell you it’s vital. By being in the yard you become visible, approachable, invested with a kind of permanence and omnipresence that goes beyond your classroom.” P1

Keeping my record of quotes here:
- “and that in acknowledging and embracing the personal, subjective way that we perceive education, we might actually get a better understanding of the ways it can be made to serve us all”