disingenuous?

So often students -- even students whom I view as motivated and conscientious -- boil their approach to writing down to grade issues: "What do I need to do to get an 'A'?"

Our typical response (whether speaking amongst ourselves or lecturing students) is to stress the relative insignificance of grades and the importance of learning. If we go a little deeper, we decry the influence of a capitalistic, consumerist, excessively quantifying culture upon our students -- an influence not mitigated by our adminstrations' fixations upon assessment and measurability. If only students could focus where they ought -- on their learning processes and intellectual growth.

Even at their best and most theoretically and politically informed, such critiques -- much as I sympathzie with them -- fall flat. In part this is because it's so difficult to imagine overthrowing or radically transforming the system or environment that produces such an approach to learning in students. But it is also because we as instructors are invested in the system -- but not just in this system, but the very existence of a system. In other words, it's hard to imagine just what the educational world would look like if students could or did act the way we say we want them to. In such a world, would schools even need to exist? Students would be self-motivated learners who could teach and learn from each other. In other words, the alternative that seems to be implied at the end of these critiques of "the system" is very difficult to imagine in concrete terms -- or perhaps I just need to read more about how such alternatives have been put into practice.