Students' Best Efforts Should Be Encouraged, Not Called 'Stupid'

To the editors:

Alejandro Jenkins has missed the point. In bashing the American education system (Column, Dec. 1) he forgets the point of the American dream.

I attended both high school and university in the United States and abroad. I can attest to the grade inflation here; the exact same A- paper at Harvard received a 69 percent at a university overseas. I worked extremely hard on the paper, which is why I was rewarded with an A-. The professor at the institution abroad told me my paper was unoriginal and boring.

In other words, he gave me Jenkins' "you-are-stupid." My professor, like Jenkins, missed the point--that the paper represented my best effort.

If I had continued to put that much effort into subsequent papers, I would have eventually reached his lofty ideal (one would hope). But because of my grade, I withdrew from his class. Yes, he de-motivated me, and I succumbed to my grade-inflicted stupidity. You see, intelligence is really a relative, intangible phenomenon.

Intelligence emerges through opportunity, and one cannot be deemed intelligent until one has the opportunity to demonstrate it. Jenkins writes "there is really no way to keep bad students from doing badly without lowering the standards and keeping the good students from developing their full potential."

This sounds very similiar to the South African government's justification for keeping black students out of white apartheid institutions. Bill Gates was a bad student--he never even finished school. In fact even Einstein, one of the smartest men, was a bad student at one time during his life. But does this make them stupid ?