Life is an Essay Test
Robert Herold, Northwest Inlander.
Once again, this time in his State of the Union speech, President Obama addressed the importance of education, and, once again, he began and ended with science-math, science-math, science-math. Nary a word about history, nor literature, nor philosophy, nor the social sciences, nor the fine arts....Well I respectfully dissent on all counts.
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1. By not addressing the need for anything but math and science education, he does the idea of learning and citizenship a terrible disservice.
2. Accountability? Standardized tests recall the body count in Vietnam. Embroiled in an impossible war, a war without battle lines, the military determined to measure progress through quantification, which led to the ridiculous body count. The more dead Vietcong we could count, the more progress. We all know how wrong that turned out to be.
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“Captains of erudition,” the business-minded predators who corrupted the scholarly mission of a real university by packing education into salable units, weighing scholarship in bulk and market-value, promoting the growth of a corps of bureaucratic functionaries, treating faculty as hired hands, firing controversial teachers, raiding other institutions, measuring a university by the size of its bank statement, and selling higher learning to the public by paying obeisance to the rule that the customer always knows best."
Here.
Slaves and serfs were sometimes taught a bit about numbers for the convenience of their masters, but teaching them to read and learn history and philosophy was mostly done only by those trying to encourage them to free themselves, often at the cost of their lives.
Thank you to the good history and philosophy teachers, and others in the humanities, and to those who find ways to work these into other subjects, sometimes at the risk of their job. Math, science, and business are important, but without the humanities, you, we may never see a future where we don't continue to live in servitude to the financial sector and other predators.
Steve Cohn, an education professor at Tufts, had this to say about standardized testing: "My guess is that testing improves education the same way that bombing promotes democracy."
Still one of my favorite quotes.
