Do we NEED Grades?

In class the other day, we discussed whether schools needed numbers to strictly quantify the level of performance and knowledge a student has gained in that quarter, semester, year. Many would say "OF COURSE! IS THAT EVEN A QUESTION?! HOW WOULD YOU KNOW IF KIDS LEARN ANYTHING?!" HOW ELSE WOULD KIDS GET INTO COLLEGE AND GET RECOGNISED AND LIVE A SUCCESSFUL LIFE?!"

And then I started thinking...
Well, kids these days don't come to school to learn anyway. What are they going to do once they're on they're own after high school? School has turned into a place of mere academic competition, a place where only numbers on your report cards matter, a place where anyone would rather cheat to get a 97 than to actually pay attention in class and absorb information out of pure interest. Do you see the problem here? It just struck me a few weeks ago that this quarter, I had been slacking. So of course my report card would be terrible. What did that mean? It meant that I would go home to disappoint my parents, that my GPA would drop, that I would lose hope in my academic career, and most of all, disappoint myself. Why? simply because I wouldn't have the 4.0 GPA that all the other students would be complaining about.

The thing is, school should be a place of STUDENTS GATHERED TO PURSUE THEIR INTERESTS. If we are interested, we will listen. If we listen, we will be fascinated, and we will grow a passion for the things we learn. When we are passionate, we will take EVEN MORE INTEREST, and school will be somewhere students will WANT to spend eight hours in. We should all be excited every morning to enter the doors with a passion for the classes we take. We should WANT to seek help out of our own time and energy, because we feel frustrated of not knowing something fully. Yet from what I see everyday, this isn't the case. I blame it partially on numerical grades. I admit I am also a part of this group, it's frustrating how I am constantly dragged down by the numbers. Obviously if students get bad grades, they will think the teacher thinks of them as inadequate students. The self esteem they once had, thinking they were doing well? It'll hit the ground the minute our eyes make contact with those digits. Will students want to ask for help and carry conversations with teachers then? Absolutely not.

Then how would we know how well we're learning, or how much effort we put into our assignments? Hold conversations! Engage each other, and if we don't know something, teach each other. I don't know. but I certainly don't think numbers and percentages should be the way. Students can cheat their way out of tests, projects, even out of high school. But what happens next? In the real world, no one's going to ask me SAT questions or take interest in how well I did on that one quiz on trigonometry back in high school. When us kids apply for jobs in the future, people will want to sense passion. A genuine interest for what we want to pursue. They will want to hold conversations about current events and new findings and they will want to hear our opinions and ideas.

How is grading students out of 100... How is that even close to preparing us for the future?