Date: Fri, 1 Sep 1995 11:11:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan-AT-umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Standardizing education


In his book on education Neil Postman has some good comments about the
evils of standardized testing.  The most important: a society that grows
up with decimal measurements of education has no problem with the same
control of the rest of life... 
	I see a bit of this when I teach lit or comp.  My students demand 
to know the 5 or 7 mistakes they must correct to get an A on their 
papers.  Good products of the standardizing system, they have little 
sense of divergent paths to the same goal, variable strategies, revision, 
*uncertainty*.  As Hakim Bey said, the worst thing about chaos theory is 
how much of it is about deriving order.



Bryan Alexander
Department of English
University of Michigan
**********************

On Thu, 31 Aug 1995, Valerie Scatamburlo wrote:

> On Aug 31, 12:34pm, Lisa Rogers wrote:
> > Subject: Standardizing education
> > Such hideous things have been going on in public schools grades K-12
> > for a very long time.  
> > 
> > Lisa, I'm was very happy to see your post on education since this is one of
> my major areas of concern and I have in my own work drawn extensively upon
> the discourse of critical pedagogy to look at educational issues.  As for
> your suggestion that what is needed is more parental involvement - well
> currently that is part of the problem since the parents who are organizing
> around educational issues are mainly of the Christian fundamenatalist
> variety. They are very well organized and have been electing officials from
> their ranks to local school boards all across America. There was a really
> interesting expose of this a few months back in an issue of Mother Jones.
> 
> On the question of standardized testing - well there's alot of problems with
> this method of evaluation.  For one, standardized tests test logical
> reasoning but not patience, one's dictionary vocabulary but not metaphorical
> grace, one's dexterity with numbers but not argumentative power or
> scepticism, etc. etc.  Furthermore, the logic undergiriding such tests is
> rote learning, testing the ability of student's to memorize "information"
> conveyed to them by teachers -this kind of pedagoggy is referred to by Paulo
> Freire as the "banking" model of education, which does little to cultivate
> critical thinking.    Now in terms of standardized tests like the SAT - not
> only are they inherently culturally and racially biased but they are also
> inherently classist for within each racial group.  Moreover, its interesting
> to note that one of the authors of the SAT was a dude named Carl Campbell
> Brigham who championed in his "A Study Of American Intelligence", a
> classification of races which identified the Nordic as the superior race and
> in descending order locates the least superior as "Negro".  There is much
> else that could be said about the problems with standardized testing, but for
> me the issue is much broader for it is the very philosophy which undergirds
> "standardized" testing that is deeply problematical both pedagogically and
> politically.
> 
>        "Education can be either the tool of your liberation or the bars
> behind which you are enslaved" - Bernice Johnson Reagon
> 
> 
> 
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> 


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