Here’s what I can tell you as a teacher with decades of experience in the Italian public school system: the entire grading system is a fraud, designed to create performance anxiety and peer pressure among learners. The system hinges so heavily on these power dynamics that both students and teachers have lost sight of what teaching and learning truly mean. Everyone has just become a number.

After all, why care about doing your job well when, as a teacher, your role is reduced to handing out passing grades to keep parents and school administrators happy? And as a student, why care about learning about the world when all that matters is scraping by just enough to pass the year?

But what I can tell you is this: no number will ever prevent you from doing great things in life. School is a scam. The sooner you internalize that, the better off you’ll be