Hernan, Wayne has expressed his opinion a couple times about this. I suspect he was in school districts that were unusually grades oriented, as well as him being unusually reactive to authority.

I went to many school districts (family traveled a lot), and my memory is that most teachers were more learning oriented and less grades oriented, exactly opposite of what Wayne experienced. And of course what you said, that students goals play a big part of the experience.

@HernanLG

grades could be the purpose, or learning. I think the goal is determined by the student, no?

No. I ran the experiment. When I was in college, and I wasn't learning anything (whether it was because of "learning" gobeltygook or just doing huge amounts of busywork from which neither I nor anyone else was learning anything) and complained, I was labeled "disobedient" and "troublemaker" and treated with unbearable hostility. The notion that I had the ability to unilaterally override the system's goal of "grades" and substitute my own, "learning" (even though "learning" is ostensibly the whole purpose of the entire institution) is laughably, completely wrong. No, students do not have the ability to override the goal set by the institution, and that's grades.

If the student has a goal to get into the best possible university, then grades are the goal. If the student wants to learn new things, then learning is the goal.

If one wants to learn new things, then one should not be in a university! There are bookstores and libraries full of books. There are online open-source textbooks. There's Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias. There's Wolfram MathWorld. There's a magic search engine called "Google" (and others) one can use to find educational materials on just about any topic imaginable. There are online education systems like Khan Academy. There are apps like Brilliant.org and Duolingo, which teaches languages. If you don't know what to search for on a system like Google, you can ask a chatbot like ChatGPT what to search for. (Sounds weird, I know, but try it.) One can ask chatbots like ChatGPT to act as one's tutor (though beware of inaccuracies).

Maybe 100 years ago, if you wanted knowledge, universities were the only place you could go and everyone there (or almost everyone) was a genuine knowledge-seeker. In the world of today, if you seek to learn, why would you ever go to a university? With such vastness of knowledge available so much more cheaply? The only justification is to obtain the credential. Everyone (for all intents and purposes) who goes to university today is a credential-seeker.

If the student wants to make as much money as possible, then dropping out of school might be the goal…

Probably not. Statistics on large populations show people with college degrees make substantially more average. Sure, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you make more money by dropping out, but there's only a handful of Mark Zuckerbergs and millions and millions of regular people. For regular people, a college degree, actually not so much a money maximizer, but essential destitution insurance.

@Will

Wayne has expressed his opinion a couple times about this. I suspect he was in school districts that were unusually grades oriented

Nope. I went to Denver Public Schools for K12 and the University of Colorado at Boulder (aka CU Boulder) for university. Totally normal schools. If these school districts were "unusually grades oriented," other students would have been affected, but it was only me.

as well as him being unusually reactive to authority.

It was only me. "Unusually reactive to authority" I suppose is one way to put it. From my point of view, the question was, why are all normal people so automatically obedient to authority?

I think I told you before how about 2 years after I was forced out of the school system (for disobedience) I met this young woman who was a college student (at UC Davis), majoring in biology. And for some reason I asked her these general, open-ended questions about what her college experience was like. I expected her to describe her daily struggle to be obedient, forcing herself to do her homework, forcing herself to obey the commands that are called "assignments" or whatever but are really commands that must be obeyed. But her experience was nothing like that. There was no struggle to be obedient, and in fact she didn't even think of school in "obedience" terms. She actually liked the system. She liked how someone else had broken down a body of knowledge and figured out a system for learning it, and on Monday we do this, on Wednesday we do that, on Friday we do this other thing, and all she had to do was "jump through the hoops" and everything would work out great for her. She actually liked the "hoop jumping" system. I had never considered before the possibility that such a thing was possible before. I thought other people who did well in school were just "tougher", "grittier", better at forcing themselves to be obedient than I was. I never imagined people existed for whom the obedience struggle was entirely non-existent.

That was what led me (over the last 30 years) to develop my theory of extrinsic motivation. For people who are extrinsically motivated (or sufficiently extrinsically motivated -- their extrinsic motivation level exceeds some threshold -- and in my mind, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are independent personality dimensions, but I'm going to skip that explanation for now), they don't experience any loss of agency in school. They want to make money doing some profession, they work backwards from there -- they need a college degree in X major (ideally from a prestigious school), to get the college degree they need good grades (ideally "A"s and a high GPA) in various classes, to get their "A"s in those classes they need to do what the teacher says -- and oh how helpful it is that the teacher simply tells you what you need to do to get the "A"s, and all you have to do is whatever you're told. So people don't feeling like they're "being obedient" or like they've lost agency -- they're following their step-by-step plan to acquire extrinsic rewards ("A"s, high GPA, degree, high-paying job). People don't feel "hoop jumping" causes loss of agency because they want to jump through the hoops because they want the rewards for doing so. "Playing the game" is another expression I've heard a few people use (like my aunt who has a PhD). When I was in school, I didn't treat it like a "game". I treated it like my purpose for being there was to learn how to become a competent engineer and I took it very, very seriously. I spent my weekends in the math library while other students were getting drunk at frat parties. They have degrees and I don't. They understood they were there for the grades and the degree -- the credentials themselves are what matters (extrinsic motivation), not becoming a "competent engineer" (intrinsic motivation).

If the goal is to learn, in some classes, there won't be a problem. But in others there will be, because no learning is happening. There's some sort of imitation learning going on -- "learning" gobbeltygook or doing a lot of robotic busywork. In this situation, what you must do is STFU, do what you're told, get your "A", and go on with your life. You can't complain. You can't fight the system. You're one person, and the system is thousands of schools in hundreds of countries with millions of students and teachers and administrators, thoroughly embedded within all the other major institutions of society such as the employment system. The system is vastly bigger than you. You can't complain and change anything. You have to STFU and obey.

When you say

I went to many school districts (family traveled a lot), and my memory is that most teachers were more learning oriented and less grades oriented

to me this just sounds like, you're a normal person with extrinsic motivation levels above the critical threshold, so you didn't experience any problem.