Back in 2020, when education institutions had to ‘pivot’ to remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my team was charged with training our university’s campus faculty to deliver their on-ground courses in a remote format using Zoom and the LMS. The experience was stressful and disorienting, yet we were so proud of the dedication, compassion, and resilience of our faculty who made the continuation of education possible. We documented this work in titled Pandemic Pivot (Leslie, et al., 2023), a title that captured how casually the term pivot was moved, as if moving an entire education system online were as simple as flipping a switch.
During that time, many institutions also pivoted from traditional A-F grading to pass/fail, adopting compassion-based assessment. Most have since reverted, but a growing movement continues experimenting with ungrading and alternative grading as more humane approaches to assessing learning (Lauricella, et al., 2025). As both an instructor (Leslie, 2022) and instructional designer, I’ve found ungrading transformative – for myself, my students, and educators I support. It feels closer to what learning is meant to be: authentic, collaborative, and intellectually alive.
Now in this new “era of AI” we are once again being asked to pivot; this time to integrate AI into curriculum, teaching, and research. Faculty responses range from excitement to skepticism, influenced by pedagogical, ethical, and disciplinary considerations. I am not here to add to the AI discourse. Rather, I want to focus on something more fundamental: our education system itself. AI only amplifies what has long been true – we need a redesign.
The Industrial Legacy We Still Live In
Mass schooling was built during the Industrial Revolution, designed to prepare students for factory work. For twelve years, learners moved along a standardized conveyor belt where they were sorted, ranked, and graded much like products being evaluated for quality control. Despite decades of research in learning sciences, psychology, and neuroscience, the basic structure of school has barely changed.
Faculty innovate within their classrooms, often in remarkable ways, but they are constrained by a system optimized for standardization, not human development. Several structural shifts are overdue.
1. From Recipients of Knowledge to Co-Creators of It
The persistent idea of students as empty vessels waiting to be filled – what Freire (1970) called the “banking model”– remains deeply embedded in schooling. Knowledge flows one way, from expert to novice. Students eventually create knowledge, but typically only after years of passive absorption and, in some instances, being dragged through the ringer through academic hazing, bullying, and other inhumane rituals one goes through when entering the profession as a scholar.
This model is not sustainable for several reasons. It is a one-size-fits all solution that doesn’t take into account the students’ input into their own education and their capabilities, whether that is their personal goals, ambitions, interests, strengths, knowledge, experience, or anything else that makes them a unique human being. It is based on the flawed idea that all students can be taught and will therefore learn the same thing, the same way, at the same time, even though we know this is not the case. There is so much variation with what and how each student learns, despite being given a standardized experience, because humans learn based on what makes sense to them and their unique context. People do not upload information or knowledge into their brains wholesale like how we upload software. Ironically, the banking model more closely resembles how machines are programmed, than how humans learn. To borrow a phrase from Alfie Kohn, there should be less “doing to” and more “working with” students in partnership to design an educational experience.
2. Assessment, Not Grades
Assessment and grading are often conflated, but they serve entirely different purposes.
Assessment is a process: gathering information about learning, providing feedback, and adjusting instruction. Its purpose is to improve teaching and learning whether at the level of an individual, a class, or an entire program.
Grades are symbolic labels (letters or numbers) that communicate value judgments to many external audiences: parents, administrators, financial aid officers, and employers. These symbols carry enormous weight, even though they do not reliably represent learning (Brookhart, et al., 2016). Grades distort the learning environment in several well-documented ways:
- They increase anxiety and impair performance (Eyler, 2024).
- They encourage students to protect their ego rather than take intellectual risks (Butler, 1987)
- They shift motivation from intrinsic (“I want to learn this”) to extrinsic (“I want the points”) (Schinske & Tanner, 2014).
- They reduce creativity, complex thinking, collaboration, and agency (Evdokimova & Stepanova, 2023; Hough, 2023).
- They turn classrooms into competitive rather than collaborative spaces (Kohn, 2011),
- They undermine instructor feedback because students focus on the grade, not the guidance (Nilson, 2014; Butler & Nisan, 1986).
Grades also encourage a culture of performance where learning becomes something to prove, not pursue. As Susan Blum (2024) describes, this is “schoolishness”: learning reduced to point accumulation rather than meaning-making. Paul Dressel (1983) summarized grades as: “an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge or the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite material.”
The presence of grades can disrupt psychological safety and belonging– the very conditions that allow learning to flourish. They reinforce hierarchical, authoritarian norms that discourage democratic inquiry and critical questioning (Tannock, 2015). When the stakes are grades, students ask “Is this on the test?” rather than “How do we know this to be true?” (Kohn, 2011).
If we want students to take intellectual risks, collaborate authentically, and think critically about the world’s most pressing problems, grades are more likely to impede rather than enhance these aims.
3. The Vision: Learning as Play
Learning, at its core, is a playful endeavor. Children –and adults– learn through play, experimentation, curiosity, and exploration (Gray, 2017). Psychologists call the immersive state that emerges, flow: the experience of deep focus, challenge, and enjoyment where time seems to disappear. Flow supports skill development, creativity, and well-being (Gold & Ciorciari, 2020). Many great thinkers (Einstein, Edison, Hedy Lamarr) approached their work as play. Imagine classrooms designed to make this possible:
- where students follow ideas that matter to them
- where mistakes are treated as essential to learning
- where curiosity is the conduit, not compliance
- where learning is meaningful, communal, and joyful
Students should be encouraged to play with ideas– challenge them, dismantle them, reassemble them– without fear that a single misstep could damage their GPA or scholarship. We should want students to genuinely enjoy learning in a judgement-free environment so they can become self-actualized humans who use their creativity and imagination towards solving problems that are part of the polycrises we now live in and invent new paradigms. Our education system needs to be re-designed to make this possible. We need to let go of the idea that we can fill students’ heads with knowledge using machine-like methods. Because that is not how knowledge acquisition works. We can’t open up someone’s head and pour knowledge in. Unlike machines, humans learn by making meaning. You learn what is most meaningful to you. And what is meaningful to you is unique to your context- physical, emotional, social, cultural. It’s based on personal and shared experience and here’s an essential part, requires agency and autonomy. As learners, we can’t be force fed. We need to be able to control our learning- how, when, what, where, and most importantly, why. As humans, we crave meaning and purpose. And we want to contribute positively to the world. At the same time, we seek to develop our own unique capabilities.
Human-Centered Design to Cultivate Intrinsic Motivation
A redesigned education system should be grounded in the learning sciences, especially frameworks like Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), which identifies three psychological needs essential for intrinsic motivation:
- Autonomy – having agency and meaningful choice
- Competence – feeling effective and capable
- Relatedness – experiencing connection and belonging
When these needs are met, motivation becomes self-sustaining. Learners engage because they are genuinely interested and see the work as meaningful. In practice, this means giving students real decision-making power over what, when, where, and how they learn—and doing so within communities of inquiry where feedback guides growth, not judgment. It means designing classrooms where students are partners and problem-posers, as Freire advocated, not passive recipients. Such an approach positions the university not as a certifier of knowledge, but as an incubator of ideas.
Why Standardization Fails Us
A one-size-fits-all model is inequitable by design. There are no standardized humans; therefore, standardized education can only reproduce inequity and diminish human dignity.
A human-centered system recognizes:
- each learner’s unique brilliance, context, and lived experience;
- that diversity in thinking is a strength, not an obstacle;
- that success is collective, not competitive;
- that knowledge emerges from meaning-making, not memorization.
We shouldn’t have a one-size-fits all, standardized approach to education because this is inequitable and dehumanizing by design. There are no standardized humans, so there should be no standardized education. I believe that each person has value and each person has something valuable to offer in their own right. In short, we need education to center human dignity where success is collective and each person is valued for the gifts and brilliance they each bring to the table, what some call “whole person” education. We need to instill a culture of learning and meaning, one that values the uniqueness and beauty that is human thinking. This is not the same as the current system which sees learning as performance, individualized outcomes, and externally measured products often reduced to a data point lacking nuance and complexity. Redesigning education to align with how people learn, can usher in new ways of thinking, the conduit to human progress. The university should shift from a certifier of knowledge to an incubator of ideas.
A Paradigm for Authenticity in an Increasingly Artificial World
In a world that is becoming more artificial, we need to redesign our system of education in a way that cultivates human intelligence, authentic learning, well-being, and care for each other and our common home. The sooner we can pivot to a new paradigm that centers our shared humanity, rather than one that mirrors machine logic, the sooner we can bring to life a new era of human intellect and ingenuity.
References
Blum, S. (2024). Schoolishness: Alienated education and the quest for authentic, joyful learning. Cornell University Press.
Brookhard, S.M., Guskey, T.R., Bowers, A.J., McMillan, J.H., Smith, J.K., Smith, L.F., Stevens, M.T., & Welsh, M.E. (2016). A century of grading research: Meaning and value in the most common education measure. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 803-848. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44668237.
Butler, R. (1987). Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: Effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest, and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 474-482. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.79.4.474.
Butler, R., & Nisan, M. (1986). Effects of no feedback, task-related comments and grades on intrinsic motivation and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3), 210-216. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.78.3.210.
Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self- determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Evdokimova, M., & Stepanova, A.N. (2023). Students’ propensity to innovate: Correlates, determinants, and impact on GPA. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4663283.
Eyler, J. R. (2024). Failing our future: How grades harm students, and what we can do about it. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury USA. (Originally published in 1970).
Gold, J., & Ciorciari, J. (2020). A Review on the role of the neuroscience of flow states in the modern world. Behavioral sciences, 10(9), 137. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs10090137.
Gray, P. (2017). What exactly is play, and why is it such a powerful vehicle for learning? Top Lang Disorders, 37(3), 217-228. https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/what_is_play_published.pdf.
Hough, L. (2023, May 19). The problem with grading. Ed. Magazine. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/23/05/problem-grading
Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. AlfieKohn.org. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/
Lauricella, S., Holding, R., & Banks, K. L. (2025). Beyond grades: Student insights on the benefits and challenges of ungrading in online higher education classrooms. Paper presented at the 19th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED2025). https://doi.org/10.21125/inted.2025.0498.
Leslie, H. (2023). Research on effects of grading. Digital USD. https://digital.sandiego.edu/ldc-scholarship/7/.
Leslie, H. (2022). My first time ungrading: Approach used and reflections. Feminist Pedagogy, 2(2), 1–9. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/feministpedagogy/vol2/iss2/6.
Leslie, H., Lizardo, A., & Kovacs, A. (2023). Pandemic pivot: A faculty development program for enhanced remote teaching. In L. Waller & S. K. Waller (Eds.), Higher education – Reflections from the field (Vol. 3). IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108964.
Nilson, L.B. (2014). Specifications grading: Restoring rigor, motivating students, and saving faculty time. Routledge.
Schinske, J., & Tanner, K. (2014). Teaching more by grading less (or differently). CBE—Life Sciences Education, 13(2), 159–166. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054.
Tannock, S. (2015). No grades in higher education now! Revisiting the place of graded assessment in the reimagination of the public university. Studies in Higher Education, 42(8), 1345–1357. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1092131.
Heather Leslie, DBA, MEd is an instructional designer, adjunct professor, and educational developer at the University of San Diego.
