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Standardized Tests Create Clones; Socratic Dialogue Creates Thinkers
One of the many books written by the late Oxford University professor C. S. Lewis, defender of Christianity, was titled The Great Divorce. If I recall correctly from my reading of it about 50 years ago, those who chose to go to heaven and those who chose to reside in hell were so unlike each other their differences were unbridgeable. Given day trips to heaven with the option of staying, the citizens of hell find the place so alien they take the bus back to where they feel more at home.
Reading the criticisms of my stands against standardized tests, I sometimes wonder if the gap between the pro- and anti-test people is equally unbridgeable. Because my e-mail address accompanies my columns, I get a great many reactions that don't appear as letters to the editor. I get considerably more support than criticism, but what the critics lack in numbers they often make up in shrillness.
I suspect emotions play too large a role in this issue for agreement to be reached. However, because the matter has implications for just about everything related to education, an effort should be made. Ask almost any education-related question---who should teach? how should they be trained? what kind of teaching materials work best? what's the ideal class size? who's most to blame for poor performance?---ask these and many other questions, and pro- and anti-standardized test partisans will have very different answers.
In the interest of mutual understanding, I'd like to try to surface what I believe to be the bedrock belief underlying each side's position.
In the late 1980s, Louis V. Gerstner, CEO of IBM, played a major role in kicking off the current testing fad. Educating, he felt, wasn't very complicated. His view---one he probably shares with most readers---is that knowledge is located in places like teacher's heads, textbooks, libraries, and the Internet, and educating is a matter of moving it from those places into empty space in kids' heads
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That this idea has important implications for schooling is easily illustrated. For example, if Gerstner is right, then class size isn't very important. It's about as easy to distribute information by way of lecture or assigned readings to 300 students as it is to distribute it to two or three.
There is, however, a radically different, minority view of what's involved in educating, a view demonstrated by Socrates. For him, teaching wasn't a matter of stuffing kids' heads with new information, but of pulling out and rearranging information already in their heads.
Clearly, if Socrates was right, class size (and just about everything else in the education mix) makes an enormous difference. Figuring out why a particular student always makes the same kind of mistake in arithmetic calculation can take real insight. Pack a room with students, no two thinking alike, and it should be obvious why, from the Socratic perspective, teaching is so intellectually challenging.
I have in my files a video production by the British Broadcasting Company, shot at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduation ceremony. Several students still in their caps and gowns are handed a short section of a tree limb and asked, "What's this piece of wood mostly made of?"
The usual response of the graduates? Some version of, "It's made mostly from stuff the tree sucked up out of the ground."
Well, of course, it's not. Wood mostly comes from an invisible gas in the air. Sunlight, by way of photosynthesis, turns carbon dioxide into the solid material of the tree.
The point of the video isn't to expose the ignorance of graduates from a top-flight university, but to bring attention to the inadequacy of the belief that educating is just a matter of dumping information into kids' empty heads. Almost certainly, every single one of those MIT students had studied photosynthesis in elementary school, middle school, high school and college. And, to get into MIT, it's a safe bet that they aced the photosynthesis questions on the standardized tests.
Why, then, did they give the interviewer a totally wrong theory about the origin of wood?
Too much Gerstner, not enough Socrates. The explanation they dreamed up from "common sense" never got matched up with and reorganized by books and teachers.
Gerstner asks the question most amateur educators ask: "Is this kid getting the information?" To that question, standardized tests provide accurate, satisfying answers.
Socrates asks a different question: "Is the kid understanding the information?" That's a question which standardized, machine-graded tests can't answer.
Gerstner (via standardized tests) creates clones.
Socrates (via dialog) creates thinkers.
— Marion Brady
Socrates "got it" when it came to education
Orlando Sentinel
2003-09-03
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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