Word: classroom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Grades serve a number of functions: they establish a system of incentives for students, they structure the nature of social relations in the educational process, and they provide needed information within the outside the university. We argue that the incentive function of grades and their effect on classroom relations are inimical to learning. Furthermore, we believe that the informational role of grades could be served through alternative mechanisms which would promote, rather than hinder, learning...
...course is developing a serious radical analysis of the workings of American society through an open and democratic classroom structure. It is also, in part, an attempt to put into practice the ideas it develops about helping to build a movement for changing society...
...Urban Violence" and offered by Visiting Professor Siegfried M. Breuning of M.I.T., is a good example. Contending that the course was designed simply to improve skills in repressing riots rather than to ameliorate the conditions that cause them, 85 black Harvard and Radcliffe students packed the classroom the first day the course met this semester and demanded its cancellation before it had even begun. Clearly intimidated, Breuning offered then and there to restructure the course. The black students went away placated, but faculty members devoted to the ancient principle of free inquiry were scandalized...
Threats from Within. An ad hoc faculty committee promptly took a half-page ad in the Crimson to remind the administration that "any intrusion upon the classroom or any effort to coerce the instructor is an infringement upon the academic rights both of the teacher and of the students who wish to take the course." The list of 108 senior Harvard professors who signed the petition read like a Who's Who of Cambridge intelligentsia, embracing figures from the political right, left and center, and including Samuel Beer, Paul Buck, Oscar Handlin, George Kistiakowsky and Seymour Lipset...
...making this argument, the Soc Sci 125 petition has demonstrated that grades can be viewed as an open intellectual issue rather than as a natural, timeless form of classroom organization. The truth of this does not depend on the validity of the petition's economic analysis of the grading system: simply by arguing their case, the Soc Sci 125 teachers have made grading a matter for debate...