Our School System

I think Pirsig's writing in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance really helps the reader see the school system from a different perspective. While at first the idea of having grades may seem logical, useful, necessary, etc. Pirsig does a good job of showing us just how detrimental they are. However, they do seem to be a necessary evil. Grades are very much connected with the idea of quality; the higher quality something is, the higher grade it receives. Nevertheless, Pirsig presented the question: What is quality? I myself thought it was a simple answer at first but then I sat down to truly think about and I could come up with close to nothing. What's to say something has more quality than something else? Essentially, quality is a made up standard that we have brought out by our competitive nature. Grades do not accurately reflect someone's level of intellect or quality of work seeing as that quality is a completely subjective matter.
The idea of getting rid of grades all together sounds wonderful as a student that worries so much about her own grades. The problem with our school system (as I have realized through Pirsig's writing) is that we are taught to value grades much more than we value learning. In fact, I'm not all that sure we are even taught to value learning at all. We're really taught to value a manner of thinking that will get us to survive. When Pirsig went through the potential situation of what would happen without grades, it all seemed completely logical. However, it was extremely frustrating to see that it might take someone 10 or something years to find out that he/she actually wanted to learn. To me, it seems like a complete waste of time simply being fed up with the school system. I don't know exactly how this could be done but I think that the younger generations need to begin to be taught that learning is much more important than the one of five letters that shows up on some flimsy piece of paper. If children are taught from the start that their worth is determined by a handful of letters, I think we would get much more out of the future generations than we are now. I realize this sounds kind of strange as the wording makes them sound like some sort of robot or toy but, we would be allowing ourselves to unlock much more potential from the younger people in our world.