Imagine that the government has just enacted new legislation that will radically change how incomes are determined. From now on, instead of working for a set salary, you will be required to attend the cinema on a given night. At the end of the movie, instead of going to a local coffee shop and chatting about it with a friend, you will stop in the theater lobby to take a multiple-choice test. You will have to answer such questions asWhat was the color of the villain's car in the second chase scene?1. Red 2. Blue 3. Taupe 4. SilverWhat was the name of the heroine's dog?1. Smudgy 2. Tiger 3. Fauntleroy 4. Rex
Your score on the multiple-choice test will determine your salary for the next week.
Each week you will be required to go to the cinema again, and on emerging from the movie, you will be faced with another multiple-choice test, and your performance will again determine your salary for the following week.
Imagine how this legislation would affect your experience of going to the movies. At present, you go when you choose and only see movies you expect to enjoy. You pay attention to the aspects of the movie that give you pleasure, and you may derive many different kinds of pleasure from different movies. But with this new legislation in place, you would be anxiously trying to remember the color of cars, the names of dogs and people, and everything else that you think might appear on the test. What had been a pleasure has become fraught with anxiety because your future salary depends on how well you do.
What does this remind you of? Yes, we call it school.
You may protest that school is not so arbitrary in what it tests. How well you can remember the color of a villain's car has nothing to do with the value of the work you do, and it shouldn't determine your salary. Someone might point out, however, that how well you remember the provisions of the Treaty of Augsburg or the proof that interior opposite angles are congruent also has nothing to do with how well you can perform your current work, yet your answers to such questions on tests have served as criteria for education decisions that have led you to your current job and salary. Such tests have determined the life chances of everyone who has traveled through modern education systems. Education's current testing situation resembles the cinema scenario much more closely than most of us are comfortable admitting.
Many people involved in schools—especially those who do the real work—argue that current testing systems undermine the main purposes of education. Those who energetically promote testing in schools are unmoved by such arguments. How else, they ask, can those who pay for schools make sure that they are getting value for their money?
The arguments between those who think that current testing methods constrain education and those who think that these methods increase education efficiency remain oddly imprecise, passing one another by. Those on each side of the issue cannot understand how those on the other side can be so blind. Why does this conflict about testing seem to go nowhere, like a battle of ancient armies flailing at each other in the night?
The explanation, and the path toward a solution, requires that we address our fundamental confusion about the roles that we expect our schools to perform. Such discussions of basic theoretical ideas are often unpopular in a realm of practice like education, but there is nothing to be gained by avoiding unpopular necessities.
Education's First Two Ideas
The oldest idea about education, which remains prominent today, is that we should teach children what they need to know to participate successfully in society. This goal of education is sometimes called socialization. The criteria that determine what to teach children in the name of this kind of education are the current values of the society and the set of skills required to survive. In the past, this meant teaching children how to hunt saber-toothed tigers and find edible roots. Today, it means that we want students to be literate and numerate enough to perform their jobs and civic duties adequately; to know about computers and the main kinds of programs available; to know enough history to understand their nation and world; and to share the basic beliefs, values, and commitments of their society. For some people, socialization is so obviously the central purpose of schooling that other ideas have a hard time making much impact.
The second idea about education, introduced most forcibly by Plato, came about through dissatisfaction with the products of the first idea. Plato argued that well-socialized people's understanding was limited to the conventions of their own time and place. The best way to use a human mind, he thought, was not to learn how to fit into society, but rather to search for the truth about our condition on this planet. Plato argued that education's proper role was to teach children to perceive truth and to pursue truth above all things, regardless of society's current conventions and beliefs and regardless of self-interest. The criterion guiding this idea of education was a view of what the human mind could become. Because Plato set up a school on the outskirts of Athens in a park sacred to the hero Academus, we call this kind of education academic.
We assume that we promote both of these ideas in our schools today. We prepare students for the practical world of work and adult leisure in the society of today and tomorrow, and we develop their minds by teaching academic material so that they can think critically about the world around them.
But can we successfully address both ideas at the same time? In one case, we want to shape students to fit into a particular society, committed to its values and conventions. In the other case, we want to teach students to question any particular set of values and conventions and strive above all to discover the truth. This contradiction doesn't bother those who think that their society and their beliefs actually embody the truth—but this common, self-satisfied dogmatism and limited vision are precisely what the academic ideal was designed to overcome.
Confusing the Two Ideas
Consider the cinema scenario again. This hypothetical system combines a social aim (to distribute salaries appropriately) with an entertainment aim (to enlarge the experience and promote the pleasure of movie viewers). When we use the institution designed for entertainment to perform the social sorting role, we undercut the efficiency of both.
Something similar is happening in education. Part of our task is to sort students, leading them toward the future roles and careers that best fit their skills. We also recognize that the pursuit of truth about the world is an important human good. Our confusion becomes evident when we decide to attain the first goal by means of the second. Testing how well students perform on academic tasks is not a good way to determine their future job possibilities and prospects. It does not efficiently promote education's socializing role, and it undermines the academic role.
If we want to perform the social sorting role efficiently, we should indeed test students—but test them for the acquisition of skills related to the various roles and tasks that they may need to perform in the future. The instruments that we have developed for the assessment of relevant attributes, skills, and inclinations—including basic reading and math skills and foundational social studies and science knowledge—may not be highly developed, but they would likely sort students for jobs more effectively than would tests measuring how well students recall random historical and mathematical minutiae.
If we recognize that most of our testing should be directed to our socializing goals, we can single-mindedly work toward developing more sophisticated testing instruments that will focus on our need to help direct students toward appropriate jobs and roles in life. We should accept testing student performance in the socializing curriculum because an accurate assessment of students' ability to deal with the variety of tasks required by modern society will help ensure social efficiency, economic value, and the general contentedness of future citizen-workers.
If the social sorting role is thus taken care of, what kind of testing would be suitable for the academic curriculum? The purposes of this curriculum include imaginative engagement and delight in the world; understanding; wisdom; and a number of old intellectual virtues, such as style, honesty, and fertility of inquiry. What purposes should our evaluation of such qualities serve, and what degree of precision do we need? We will largely want to know which students we should encourage to pursue further academic study and what areas they should pursue. This purpose does not require great precision. Students' self-selection will be one indicator; teachers' educated sensitivity will be another.
When we harness students' academic performance to the social sorting role of schools, we undermine the conditions for the academic pursuit of knowledge about the world and the delight that is properly a part of this great exploration. Students' academic explorations cannot be achieved in the same way as their training in skills. In the former case, we must pay attention to individual modes of stimulating reflection and imagination and ensuring delight in understanding; in the latter case, our concern is with efficiency, definable mastery, and attaining specific objectives.
Toward a Solution
If we start thinking of education in a way that distinguishes between the socializing and academic roles of schools, we will begin to recognize that forms of testing appropriate to socializing should not be imposed on academic activity. What will that recognition mean for our current forms of teaching and testing?
Let us take mathematics as an example. We could quite easily design a socializing math curriculum and a distinct academic math curriculum. The socializing curriculum would encompass the particular math skills that students need to perform their social roles. It would include basic computations, how to use a spreadsheet, how to keep bank account records, and other math tasks derived from our analysis of the math skills that students need most today and will need in the near future. We would also recognize the importance of identifying students who show a particular aptitude for math and directing them toward more advanced work to prepare them for engineering or some other area of societal need.
The academic math curriculum would also involve numbers and their manipulation, but the whole approach would be different. In this curriculum, we might begin exploring the history of math, trying to discover why it fascinated people and why people regarded it as magical. We would explore the nature of math, learning how its patterns refer to the world. This curriculum would be altogether a more playful exploration than the utilitarian activity of the socializing curriculum.
Experts in any curriculum area, using this same distinction between socializing and academic goals, could sort out material currently jumbled together in the curriculum. In history, for example, the socializing curriculum would concentrate on the aspects of history that lead to an understanding of the student's own society and its general place in the world, whereas the academic curriculum would explore the varieties of past human experience and how particular conditions have changed that experience.
Such a distinction demonstrates that different forms of testing are appropriate to these somewhat distinct curriculums. At the moment, the education testing system applies testing methods to both types of curriculum that are appropriate only to the socializing curriculum. This approach fails to achieve the social sorting task efficiently, and in the process undermines the academic role of schooling.
A New Direction
The vast business of testing goes ahead, bounding through the education system like a bull in a china shop—which is good if you want to make radical and evident changes, but not so good if you would like to preserve the china unsmashed. The solution I am suggesting, with its distinction between an academic and a socializing curriculum, may seem difficult. But we face a choice between a hard solution and a set of impossible ones. We have been trying the latter for decades. Those who wish to continue with them will experience many more years of deep frustration, all the while smashing lots of educational china. Those who choose the former are in for some rigorous and imaginative intellectual work, but can expect some satisfaction.
