The most stressful days of
most people’s lives are the days of big tests. The days of your SAT, ACT, AP
exam, MCAT, LSAT, and many others seem like the most important day of your
life; they determine your future. School today creates a public that is set on
numbers defining us, because we are too lazy to find another way to define
intelligence.
Lazy may not be the best
word, but as a society, we have become so accustomed to technology solving most
problems for us. Technology calculates, searches, and stores information that
we just have to access at the click of a button. Schools have fallen into the
same technology trap, with public schools always using scantrons to grade tests
for the teachers, SAT scores to decide if you should be admitted to college, and
a certain GPA to determine who is smart and who is not.
Schools today aim to
create students who are well informed and prepared for college, and
furthermore, jobs. However, instead of creating well-rounded, knowledgeable
students, schools create robots of students. Students become reciters, not
learners, they know what is needed for tests and what will bring them success:
high scores. Instead of schools being learning-centered, they are
grade-centered. Postman explains how numbers cannot define how smart someone
is, “In schools, for instance, we find that tests are given to determine how
smart someone is or, more precisely, how much smartness someone has. If,
on an IQ test, one child scores a 138 and another a 106, the first is thought
to have more smartness than the other. But this seems to me a strange
conception—every bit as strange as "doing" arthritis or
"having" criminality,”(Postman 183). Postman is referring more to the
language of ‘having smartness’, but the point is still valid. People cannot really
HAVE smartness; they can act smart, make smart decisions, and answer hard
questions.
Smartness is not an
object to be obtained; it is an act that schools should teach students to
strive to do every day. Instead schools are creating false goals for students
of obtaining smartness that cannot be obtained through rote memorization and
finessing tests; smartness is an act that can be expressed when students
understand concepts and can use them effectively.
Works Cited
Postman,
Neil. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New
York: Knopf, 1995. Print.
I very much agree that there is a large emphasis on standardized tests in today's public education. Your point somewhat goes along with what I said, about how schools prepare us for college along with these tests. Standardized tests like the SAT create a public focused on perfection and grade-based feedback. I believe Postman would be upset if he saw public education nowadays because it is not following his "Fallen Angel" narrative in which we accept our mistakes. Tests create an anxious environment where students are put down because of their mistakes.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoy your post Nina and agree with the emphasis that school's of today place on standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT. Similar to my post, we talked about how the feedback of the test is simply a number. I really like how similar the excerpt you used from End of Education is to your overall idea. It was interesting how you described that smartness can not be something that is had, I did not think about that!
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