Culture War Goes to College

Posted on February 13, 2006 in Social Justice Thinking

The ways of the culture war aggressors are sly. Now that they have turned the nation’s schools into places for teaching students how to take standardized tests instead of teaching them to think, the new goal is to dismantle the apparatus which shows white collar citizens how to use their minds. The head of a federal committee — a business executive named Charles Miller — feels standardized testing should be imposed on the nation’s college and university students.

On one hand, I think this is nothing more than an attempt to turn the entire educational process into a production line. I recall John Ruskin’s contempt for all the perfect little teacups turned out by factory processes. Ruskin felt that the “perfection” sought by manufacturers and consumers destroyed Beauty which he believed was founded not on replication by mold but on individuality founded upon imperfection. It seems that Miller wants little robots* who he can plug into his corporate apparatus.

Another goal, I think, might be to bolster the position of those little business colleges which churn out pre-programmed white-collar-wage-laborers. You know the places that cough up accountants, computer programmers, and night-school lawyers. They score well on the tests, but they have no depth of knowledge or real ability to use their skills. The background they acquire does not give them a broad sense of what is important nor does it teach them little nuisances such as ethics or morals. (Leave those to the church, I suppose, where Miller and his ilk have already bought off the preachers.)

Finally, I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect an ulterior motive of the worst kind: in the last several elections, the college educated have not bought the Republican schemes for privatizing the federal government. They have used critical thinking skills to see through the BS. Standardized testing serves to derail the development of these abilities by replacing essays with color-in-the-blanks scoring. If Miller and his fellow blind mice have their way, this system will continue well into the graduate level. Even if it doesn’t go there, we will be seeing med students who know by rote but not by experiment and evaluation. These skills will be new and harder to master thanks to their late introduction in the pupils’ academic careers.

A real business visionary would realize that such a system undermines competitiveness. The American workforce will not be able to develop new ideas or be problem-solvers. It will also undermine our ability to make sound political choices and to maintain — at all times — a mass of thoughtful critics. In time, we will expire poorly.

The effects of the plan will not be felt for many years, long after we have passed on. But if we exist as caretakers, then we must stamp down simple-minded education-by-pulling-knobs. As Woody Guthrie said, this land is your land, this land is my land. Miller would have the land, the universities, and our minds and bodies his.

“We want a measure for excellence,” standardized testing proponents cry. Measure greatness in the freedom of the people to conceive ideas, to think for themselves, and to test change in their minds before they allow the unimagintive to lumber our herd off into national obliviousness.

Link discovered by Just Tenured.

*For those who don’t know, “robot” is Czech for “worker”.