The trend towards standardized testing has bothered many, including me. Our displeasure with reducing learning to easily-bubbled answers has seemed somewhat disingenuous, however. Deeply embedded in formal education is the hoop through which on jumps to indicate completion: tests, comprehensive exams, thesis and dissertation defenses all included. For educators to abandon that part of education seems to abandon much of our history.
In reading a student's analysis of a product and her choice to use education as a product, I had an epiphany. Our extreme focus on testing represents the commodification of education. Education is no longer what we gain by years of study, but it is what we package up and deliver to students. It is selected and packaged and weighed by others, and educators merely the venue for delivery. (To be more accurate, some perceive education in that way- I reject that paradigm.)
When we look at the future, no one can say for sure that one who scores well on today's test will do well tomorrow. When we loom at the future, we can be much more sure that one who can communicate and problem-solve and understand and learn will do well tomorrow.
We develop those skills through study. Reading, writing, analyzing, constructing, deconstructing, questioning, challenging, and proving. Those skills take to time to refine, one is never done honing any, any they can be applied in any field that does exist or that will exist.
Educators today should feel like cogs in a job-training system that is training for non-existent and soon to become extinct jobs. I am hoping mine was not the last generation to become educated in the liberal arts tradition. I do not think history will judge well those who dismantled that system.
-- Gary Ackerman, Ph.D.
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