Education Quote by Kent McCord

McCord’s line lands like a calm dispatch from inside the system: school isn’t just failing students, it’s failing to keep up with the world they’re walking into. Coming from an actor who came of age in mid-century America, it carries a particular sting. This isn’t Silicon Valley boosterism or a think-tank manifesto; it’s a working professional saying the old script no longer plays.

The phrase “needs an overhaul” does two things at once. It sounds pragmatic, almost mechanical, as if education were a car that’s overdue for the shop. That understatement is the point: he’s framing a cultural crisis as maintenance, implying how avoidable the dysfunction is. “Courses are obsolete” targets curriculum as an artifact, not a living tool. The subtext is about relevance: students are asked to master material that doesn’t map onto current labor, civic life, or the way information actually moves now.

Then he drops the real provocation: “grades are on the way out.” That isn’t just about report cards; it’s a challenge to schooling’s most entrenched currency. Grades promise objectivity, but they also sort people, reward compliance, and convert curiosity into point-scoring. McCord’s forecast hints at a shift toward portfolios, skills-based assessments, apprenticeships, or competency models - ways of measuring learning that look more like how adults are judged in real life: by what they can do, not how well they played the classroom game.

Context matters: actors live in a results-driven economy where a transcript is meaningless next to performance. He’s arguing, in plain language, that education should stop behaving like a closed world and start acting like preparation for one.