The Test MessCRLF
James Traub,
New York Times,
Apr 08, 2002
CRLFIt's not just about Islamic education in Afghanistan, either. Education is in most societies about much more than merely teaching Johnny and Jane how to read and write. It's about instilling a wide set of cultural mores, values and propositions: for some people, it's even about patriotism (which is the 20th century nationalist version of chanting verses from the Koran).
CRLFThus we turn to the present link, a detailed analysis of the push toward standardized testing in the United States. The movement reflects a growing homogenization of education, a reflection of the fact that we live in a connected age, a statement, even, of the idea that a child's education in California ought to be at least roughly similar to a child's education in Des Moines (or Barcelona? the implications of internationalization - a natural outgrowth of online learning and general testing services - are staggering).
CRLFThe author of this piece has some sobering conclusions: "At the bottom of the conundrum of testing is a problem in the nature of policy, and underneath that a problem in the nature of human understanding. The policy problem is that, for political reasons, you cannot go around making exceptions for people who feel they can do without some given reform.... The problem of human understanding is that people do not readily grasp a reality radically different from their own. It is, for example, taken for granted among activist Scarsdale parents, as it is among the crusaders at CARE, that testing is even more harmful for disadvantaged children than it is for their own, that 'drill and kill' can only crush young minds, that the real problem is money, et cetera. I asked a group of 13 Scarsdale mothers who had gathered to evangelize me if any of them had ever spent a significant amount of time in an inner-city school. There was an embarrassed silence; they hadn't. The truth was that they simply couldn't imagine a school where eighth graders didn't know the meaning of 'foe' and hadn't acquired the skills that their children had acquired unconsciously."
CRLFI have written elsewhere that the trend toward testing is inevitable as we move toward a greater diversity of educational opportunities, a diversity accelerated by the rise of new learning technologies. This prediction remains, in my mind, sound, but with it comes an increasing question: how do we test, test fairly, and at the same time view learning - and what should be learned - with something other than our localized understanding of what constitutes a Good Citizen.
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