The Beam: Season Two by Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant

half of a job correct and still pass?”  
    “It’s not my rule.”  
    “Maybe it should be.”  
    “No. I mean, I don’t make the rules. Fifty is passing.”  
    “If you could make the rules, would you allow people to pass with 50 percent correct?”  
    Dom shrugged. He didn’t want to debate. He wanted the passing grade he deserved.  
    “Let me tell you something, Dom. It wasn’t that long ago that schools in this union — well, the US, anyway; my Canadian and Mexican history is rusty — were graded on a letter system. A grade of A was excellent. B was good. C was average. D was poor. And F was failure.”
    “What about E?”  
    “There was no E.”  
    “Why? That’s stupid.”  
    Booker laughed. “It was plenty stupid. Even back then, it didn’t make sense. But then, nothing about school made sense to me. Now look at where things have gone. You either pass, or you fail, and the bar is set at half. Even back in the letter days, you had to hit the mid-60s, percentagewise, to pass. We continue to slide down the spiral. And do you know why?”  
    “It doesn’t matter.”  
    “Oh, but it does.” Booker stood then raised a single finger. “You see, there are two ways to make a piece fit a puzzle. The ideal way is to solve the puzzle correctly, and set the right pieces in their proper places. The other is to get out your scissors and cut the pieces so they’ll fit wherever you put them. Some people would call that cheating, and there are times when I think it’s appropriate — when you can change the rules rather than blindly follow them. But there are also plenty of times when it is, as you said, stupid . In some cases, cutting those puzzle pieces to fit is about willful disobedience and nonconformity, but usually — and this is certainly the case with organized education these days — it’s about adaptation. You know about adaptation, of course.”  
    Dom did. It was a cornerstone principle of biology. Dom knew all about biology. Specifically, he knew it well enough to earn 85 percent on a biology test, and hence a passing grade. He nodded, irritated that he was being dragged into a debate rather than being given the grade he deserved.  
    “In this case,” said Mr. Booker, “the individuals — that’s the students — didn’t rise to adapt. Instead, the system lowered itself, adapting to the individuals. The puzzle had to fit, see. A society — especially one still struggling to stand after it caused a catastrophic planetary collapse — must function as a unit. So the education system must pass people because that’s the only way to graduate the adults who will go on to shape the NAU’s future.”  
    Dom shrugged.  
    “Well, don’t you see?” said Booker, now sitting on the desk’s edge. “Graduations matter more than knowledge. People were distracted by the way the world changed, so we cut them a break. Made things easier. Schools lowered their standards to make it look like everything was working as it should. From the outside, it seemed like it was. Graduation rates rose. People churned through the system, duly conditioned for adult life, prepared to slot into their assigned roles. It was enough that they ‘passed,’ whatever that meant. It only mattered that they fit, not that they’d learned what they needed to know.”  
    Dom sat in the wooden chair opposite Booker’s desk. Behind the teacher, the network board was filled with the 2-D vidstreams and notes he’d written for the day’s lesson. He hadn’t turned it off yet, despite its irrelevance. An image of the board was still the default view on every student’s tablet.
    “I don’t see what any of this has to do with my grade.”
    “You, Dominic Long,” said Booker, pointing, “are better than that grade.”  
    “But I only missed three.”
    Booker shrugged. “Which questions were they, Dom? Did you look? They were the deductions. You got all of the factual answers correct, sure, and you proved you