12 Practicing Freedom: Ungrading as a Pedagogy of Liberation

JUNE 2025

Scholars have long identified standardized testing, grading, and assessment practices as mechanisms that support and reproduce the structures of capitalism (Freire, 2000; Wolff, 2019). As Yarden Katz (2016) puts it, “the quest to pin down intelligence has always served imperial and capitalist institutions by producing … hierarchies of human worth.” This obsession with measuring intelligence and performance has only intensified under neoliberalism and the conditions of late-stage capitalism, particularly as the capitalist construction of merit falters under the weight of economic stagnation and growing inequality. In Canada, for instance, between 2015 and 2022, housing prices more than doubled, from $409,000 to $861,000, while average wages increased by only 23 percent, and this is without accounting for inflation (Cyca, 2023). It is no wonder, then, that the mythology inculcated in the West during the capitalist boom of the 1950s, namely, the belief in a direct causal link between educational attainment and economic success is beginning to unravel. Young people across the West are increasingly recognizing what disabled, Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples have long understood through their lived experience and systemic exclusion: that educational achievement does not guarantee economic security, especially within systems shaped by racial capitalism, colonialism, and global inequity. It is from this ideological and analytical perspective that I approach the concept of ungrading, an emerging pedagogical practice that prioritizes meaningful learning over assessments, grades, and test scores. In what follows, I argue that ungrading is a necessary pedagogical response for educators committed to justice in this moment of global crisis. As capitalism reaches its limits, educators must embrace a pedagogy of freedom, one grounded in mutuality, dialogue, and shared humanity. This is the demand of our time. Such praxis offers a pathway toward our collective liberation from the oppressive structures that have long shaped the way in which education is understood in western society.

Tearing Down the System: Grading and Its Discontents

Although conceptualized in various ways by educational scholars and practitioners, ungrading, as it is broadly understood, refers to the removal of the oppressive spectre of grades in education to allow both students and educators to focus on what truly matters: learning. Ungrading creates conditions in educational spaces where students are invited to bring their whole selves into the learning experience. Rather than being positioned as passive recipients of knowledge, students become active participants and co-creators of knowledge alongside the teacher. This approach also challenges and disrupts the traditional power binary between teacher and student, fostering a more collaborative and relational learning environment. It is important to emphasize that theorizing about ungrading is neither abstract nor utopian, nor is it detached from the lived realities of students and educators. On the contrary, the consequences of grading and assessment practices are deeply physical, with significant psychological and emotional impacts. For instance, research has shown that incidents of child abuse increase following the release of report cards (Sparks, 2020), and a growing body of literature links grading to heightened levels of stress, anxiety, and other mental health challenges (Eyler, 2022). From an educational standpoint, grades offer limited pedagogical value. In his seminal article “The Case Against Grades,” Alfie Kohn (2012) argues that grading diminishes students’ interest in learning, undermines intrinsic motivation, and ultimately erodes the joy of education. Even when grades succeed in eliciting extrinsic motivation, they do so at the expense of students’ desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn, 2012). Grading, as outlined by Kohn, also leads students to have a preference for the easiest possible task, a situation that should alarm us all in this new age of artificial intelligence where many students in higher education are relying on generative tools to meet grading expectations. Even from the faculty perspective, grading is often experienced as a tedious and bureaucratic task, one that is frequently approached with dispassion, if not outright dread, rather than as an act of meaningful pedagogical engagement (Wolff, 2019).

Who and What Does Grading Serve?

If grading is so deeply problematic, why does it endure in education? It endures as I argued in my introductory paragraph because of the capitalist system it enables and reproduces. Grades are part of the ideological song and dance, or choreography if you will, of capitalism. As Wolff (2019) put it, “Grades are Capitalism in Action” and educational institutions work to inculcate “meritocracy via the mechanism of grading”. Grading in education is a key mechanism through which hierarchies, competition, and the ideology of meritocracy are sustained and reproduced. Students are encouraged to measure their academic success through the grades they receive, thereby internalizing a system in which their value is quantified and ranked. In this way, a student’s worth becomes tied to their academic output much like a worker’s value is determined by their productivity and contribution to a capitalist enterprise. Grading erases the lived realities of students and disregards the intersecting systems of oppression, ableism, classism, racism, Islamophobia, and others, that shape their educational experiences. It operates on the false premise that all students have equal access to resources, time, and support, and that they experience education in uniform ways. Through its emphasis on a standardized system of evaluation, grading conceals structural inequalities and reinforces a meritocratic fiction that ignores the uneven terrain on which students learn and perform. But Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor peoples have always known that the educational landscape is deeply uneven, far from meritocratic, and rooted in systems that reproduce white supremacy. We felt it on our bodies and they were evident in the disproportionate push-out rates of Black youth from schools (Government of Canada, 2022), and in the unmarked graves of indigenous bodies found at residential schools (Government of Canada, 2024). Indeed, grades enable a hierarchical ordering of students, rewarding those whose ways of learning align with Western, colonial epistemologies. These students are often positioned as the “best,” while those whose lives have been shaped at the margins, culturally, socially, or economically, may struggle to succeed in such environments. Despite these structural inequities, all students are often treated as equal “competitors” within educational spaces, masking the systemic barriers that shape their learning experiences and outcomes. When these students transition into the workforce, capitalism continues this logic, demanding that they compete against one another as if the playing field had been fair all along. The structural advantages and disadvantages carried from the classroom into the labour market are erased, reinforcing the myth of meritocracy while deepening inequality. And even on the bodies of white upper-class people, grading is a system that punishes through its fueling of mental health issues, profits over people, competition, and conformity. It pressures white students, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, to compete against their elite peers within a rigged system. In this way, grading reinforces class divisions and normalizes stress even for those who appear to benefit most from it. As such, we are all better off without it! Therefore, the time is now to do away with the cognitive dissonance it engenders, a dissonance where our minds and spirits are misaligned in the teaching and learning experience, and where we are socialized to participate and reproduce a system that does not actually serve a majority of us. In this way, the move to abandon grading is not merely a pedagogical choice; it is a rejection of the oppressive tenets of capitalism and a necessary step towards a more liberatory, humanizing, and equitable educational approach, and, ultimately, a more just world.

Pedagogy of Freedom: Ungrading as a Radical Act of Co-Creation

This is where I believe Paulo Freire’s philosophies offer vital guidance. His conceptualization of education as the practice of freedom, with its emphasis on critical consciousness and dialogical learning, provides a powerful framework for understanding ungrading not merely as a pedagogical shift, but as a radical act of liberation. The practice of ungrading helps to resolve what Freire (2000) called “the contradictions between teacher and student” (p.93) by fostering a dialogical pedagogy grounded in mutuality and shared inquiry. As he asserted, education that transcends this contradiction occurs when teachers and students “address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated” (p. 93). In this sense, ungrading is not simply about rejecting grades; it is about reimagining the teacher–student relationship as one of co-creation, where knowledge is generated collectively rather than transmitted unilaterally. It challenges educators to abandon teaching that functions to deposit information and grading as a form of control, what Freire described as the “banking model” of education. To reject the banking model is to reject education as capitalism in action; it is to challenge the very mechanisms that, as Freire warned, inculcate “passivity in the oppressed” (p. 95). I believe that this Freirean approach, one that values the knowledge students bring into the classroom, encourages critical thinking, resists conformity and offers a path toward humanizing the teaching and learning relationship. It invites us to engage with students in a spirit of mutuality and dialogue, rather than reducing them to the grades they receive or how closely they align with rubrics often shaped by our own ideological assumptions. Instead of measuring success solely through standardized outputs, this approach creates space for students to express their learning in ways that are meaningful to them, through conversation, reflection, and co-construction of knowledge alongside us. In this way we leave space for authenticity, for freedom in education, for students to bring their full selves into our classrooms.

Teaching and Learning to Free Ourselves

I believe that practicing freedom in education through ungrading is a transformative approach that can help usher in the end of capitalism as it unravels under the weight of growing inequalities and deepening geographical unevenness. What we must demand is a system that privileges dialogue, nurtures critical and liberatory consciousness, and affirms our shared humanity across the globe, a system that cultivates freedom in our minds rather than compliance in our behavior and competition with each other. This is no small task I am asking us to undertake, but we are not without tools. As educators, we can equip ourselves with the skills, knowledge, and imagination that liberatory teaching demands. And we can begin this work with ungrading.