Life & Wisdom Quote by Rita Dove

Rita Dove’s line lands like a quiet rebuke, the kind that doesn’t need volume because it’s aimed at a system that prides itself on “objectivity.” “Unfortunate” does a lot of work here: not outraged, not naïve, just weary with the knowledge that schooling often mistakes measurement for meaning. The phrasing “there’s this need” is also strategic. Dove doesn’t blame individual teachers so much as a culture of compulsion, an institutional itch that turns learning into data because data is legible to bureaucracies, parents, rankings, and budgets.

The subtext is a poet’s skepticism toward the idea that the most important parts of education can be made countable. Poetry, after all, is a discipline where value often arrives as ambiguity, voice, risk, and the slow shock of recognition - qualities that don’t behave on rubrics. When schools “quantify,” they don’t just assess; they shape what students dare to attempt. Grading becomes an invisible curriculum, training people to optimize for approval rather than discovery, to favor clarity over complexity, safety over experimentation.

Context matters: Dove’s career sits at the intersection of art and institution (Poet Laureate, professor, canon-maker and canon-questioner). She understands why systems grade; she’s also pointing out what gets lost when evaluation becomes the center instead of a tool. The intent isn’t to abolish standards. It’s to warn that a culture addicted to metrics will inevitably underteach the unquantifiable: imagination, interpretive courage, and the ability to sit with uncertainty without rushing to the answer key.