Rubrics and the Dehumanization of Education, Part 2

"My heart has no market value ..., for to detach it is inconceivable."—Lewis Hyde

Geraniums by Jen Hurley, acrylic on paper, 2025

To read Part 1, go here

In the early 1930s, when she was a young woman, British psychoanalyst Marion Milner decided to keep a daily written record of what brought her happiness. She felt that “public reality, what was agreed fact by the external world, did not seem able to tell me what was important for me.” Instead, she sought a “private reality” born of regular reflection. In her first book, A Life of One’s Own, she explains how daily writing made her aware of “two quite different ways of perceiving.”

The first way, “narrow attention” is the type of focused attention that “selects what serves its immediate interests and ignores the rest.” One of my students at the jail explained narrow attention perfectly when he said it’s like a horse wearing blinders. Narrow attention works well when we’re striving towards a specific goal, but, as Milner writes, “since [narrow attention] saw everything … as a means to some end, contentment was always in the future.”

Milner argues that “wide attention,” in contrast, “seemed to occur when the questing purposes were held in leash.” She defines wide attention as a state of openness to the present moment of perceiving: “To attend to something and yet want nothing from it.” Over time, she found that the very act of writing created space for wide attention. Once, on vacation in the Black Forest in Germany, she “tried to describe in words what [she] was looking at: ‘a white house with red geraniums and I hear a child crooning.’” The “simple incantation” of writing “seemed to open a door between me and the world,” and she felt “wave after wave of delight flowing through every cell in [her] body.” She writes, “I no longer strove to be doing something, I was content with what was.”

Writing as an act of opening a mental door—this must be the highest purpose of writing, the reason so many of us labor at this work, for free. If writing has this kind of transformative power, how do we as teachers help students access that power? How would education be different its purpose were to encourage wide attention? What if we could teach writing as the act of removing our blinders, of accessing bliss?

As I start my 48^th semester teaching college English, I want to write without blinders, I want to teach without blinders, I want to cut through the muck of educational bureaucracy, and I want to tear down frameworks that erect barriers between me and my students. One offending barrier is grades, but even worse than grades, in my seemingly solitary opinion, are rubrics.

The reason I speak so firmly against them is because they are part of the larger rating culture that we live in. I’m asked to rate my yoga teacher, my doctor, my Uber driver, my Door Dash deliverer; it’s gotten so that I’m shocked not to be asked to rate my friends—except, oh wait, I guess that’s what social media is. One might argue that such ratings give customers a voice, and that’s true, but in the process, ratings make us into customers. In rating culture, my doctor is no longer a member of my community, no longer someone I trust and care about, and who cares about me. Instead, she’s just like the restaurant that I gave 3 stars to for mediocre food. The logic of corporations is applied to everything, everywhere, and it’s no wonder we feel lonely, and our students feel lonely, and the whole world feels lonely. As Lewis Hyde writes in The Gift, when we treat something as a commodity, “it must be detachable or alienable so that it can be put on a scale and compared.” The very act of rating a person causes us to detach from that person. When we rate, we begin to expect dissatisfaction; our mindset becomes fixed in an evaluative mode.

We know, of course, that any rating less than a perfect 10 acts a black mark against the recipient. I always give my yoga teacher a perfect rating because I love her, but I won’t fill out any ratings that might be less than 10. I’ve been deleting the same customer service survey from Kaiser for two weeks now. It’s my small act of resistance that accomplishes nothing in the real world but makes me feel like I am keeping my humanity.

In the age when AI can write student papers and AI can give feedback to student papers, the only reason for teachers is our humanity. And yet at every turn, the education system and society at large demand things that alienate us from the very people we are serving. If I’m rating a student in comparison to other students, I must detach from that student to accomplish this. I refuse. I refuse. I refuse.

Rating culture is a product of narrow attention. Narrow attention is not always bad—we need goals, after all—but when we’re only focused on getting what we want, we can never grow. Real education propagates wide attention; it opens our eyes to worlds that were previously invisible, to parts of ourselves that were previously invisible. But we can’t see anything if someone is shouting at us to keep staring at our shoes. The system as it exists now has us staring at the ground trying to avoid tripping. I want a system, a life, that has me taking in the whole sky, asking the big questions that crop up only in expansive spaces.

Big Island by Jen Hurley, acrylic on canvas, 2024

Real writing has very little to do with how it is taught in school. Real writing is messy and recursive. We meander and wonder, think and rethink, speak potential garbage and genius into the safe void of the readerless page, assert and clarify, again and again—and in the end, if we’ve done our work, we might say one thing that is true and that others might recognize as such.

The highest value of education is not and should not be efficiency. In an essay about the importance of the humanities, Marilynne Robinson writes that the logic of capitalism is “inimical to poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought.” When writing an essay becomes an exercise in meeting the terms of a rubric, these are the things we lose. Such unexpected thoughts are what came of my own writing today.