School Without Marks

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31800, 3 October 1968, Page 8

School Without Marks

The children at School No. 10 in Tiflis, capital of the Republic of Georgia, in the Caucasus, have been serving as guinea pigs for the last four years in an experiment conducted by the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences to see how a school will run without any system of marking.

“It is hard to arouse the pupils’ interest in knowledge in general using the old methods of teaching. It is necessary to revise the pedagogical principle itself,” say those responsible for the radical changes being made. The psychologists claim that marks are bad for children. Children do their homework. for example, just with the idea of getting good marks. If the children are asked why they try hard at their lessons, the majority reply, “To get good marks.” But pupils at the experimental school answer this question differently: “To learn all sorts of new things, like how rain falls and where snow comes from;” “Because it is interesting, solving difficult problems;” or “So that I can become a teacher and teach children.”

Lessons in this school are unusually lively as the teachers encourage the child-

ren to participate in every part of the programme. A spelling class, for instance, is run as a competition. The blackboard is divided into two and boys and girls have a relay race to think up and write up lists of words obeying a particular rule. One can understand the success of such tactics with bright, alert children, but would the slow ones not get left behind entirely? Miss Dodo Makharedze says that she takes special care of the less gifted and the lazy children in her class by giving them more turns to answer than the others and by making sure that the questions are never too hard, increasing in difficulty only gradually. Most Soviet classrooms are notable for their atmosphere of quiet industry. This is not the case at School No. 10, but the noise is nevertheless kept within bounds with no illfeeling between staff and children. Each class has its own “Honesty Book.” There are entries such as: “I left my exercise book at home today,” “I didn’t learn my Georgian Grammar properly,” or “I did . not make a note of my homeiwork.” No-one punishes the

writers for their confessions. Instead, the teacher and the other children suggest ways of putting the mistakes right The success of the experiment at School No. 10 has led to the adoption of the system in 20 other town schools and in 20 rural schools. At the beginning, not only were the parents against the innovation, but also the teachers. To make sure the standard of progress was not dropping, oral examinations were held during the fourth year of the experiment

Children from the third class of the experimental school were given the same Georgian language questions as fourth-year pupils from ordinary schools; out of a possible total of 5 marks, they averaged 4.4 while the older group averaged only 3.7. The younger children did better in mathematics, too. It was not only in school work, moreover, that the experimental system had helped the pupils. Experiments by Mr Shalva Amonashvili, senior research worker in the Experimental Didactics Laboratory of the Tbilisi Pedagogical Science Research Institute, confirmed that the children had developed a stronger sense of self-control and an unusually healthy attitude towards their study.