the grading system I had both used and been subjected to had taken shape within the early-twentieth-century “social efficiency” movement in education, influenced, in turn, by Taylorism. A socially efficient curriculum meant a more vocational, less strictly academic one that would be legible to employers or the military and would help shunt people into the jobs they were going to do. As a form of evaluation, grading requires you to invoke some kind of standardized scale on which qualities can be reduced to quantities—something
