When I was in high school in the mid-1990s, we were all required to swim in gym class. This was before wokeness. Since then, concerns over “accessibility,” “inclusion,” “acceptance,” and changing clothes in a locker room have all but killed physical education. The decline was already in motion, even back then. The girls and boys were required to swim on different days to avoid potential embarrassment from being seen in swimwear. At the beginning of our swimming unit, our gym “teacher” handed each of us a contract on which we indicated the grade we desired for the quarter.
To get an “A,” you had to do forty pool laps (four different strokes for ten laps each) during every swim session. Thirty laps with three strokes would earn a “B.” A “C” was twenty laps per session using two strokes. Anything less, presumably, was a failing grade. When you had completed your laps, you were allowed to play water polo in one end of the pool. I always signed up for a “B” to ensure a little more polo. Looking back though, this “contract” was a sham.
First of all, the gym teachers spent the entire class in the shallow end with the two kids who couldn’t swim, trying to squeeze blood from a stone. We knew the teachers weren’t counting laps. And they knew that we knew they weren’t counting. Thus, their real demand was to complete enough swimming that we could plausibly argue we had held up our end of the contract. Most of us did half of the laps we had promised, then got to polo. I don’t know what grades the students who couldn’t swim received, but something tells me they weren’t “Fs.” After all: that wasn’t an option in the contract.
There was no real “education” involved here because there was no teaching involved. We were all just going through the motions. A grade of “A” was as achievable for the slowest swimmers with the poorest form as it was for the members of the varsity swim team. Just (pretend to) complete your laps. The weakness of this particular curriculum is perhaps of limited importance: those of us who were already able to swim weren’t going to drown; the vast majority of us would never do any competitive swimming; and few if any of us adopt regular swimming as a part of a physical fitness regimen.
Sadly, though, the idea of “contract-grading” is nowgaining prevalence in disciplines of critical academic importance–not only in high schools, but in manyprominent colleges and universities. This development is only the latest front in a larger war on intellectual excellence, where the focus has now moved from lowering standards to eliminating them.