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Take out a sheet of paper. Number it one through 10. Books under your desk."
Ahhh, there it is. Now you remember. Think about all those tests you took. Remember Pip and Miss Havisham? How about the state bird of North Dakota? You can't recall them? But they were so important. They were, literally, on the test. You know, the test that your parents got you to study for by trapping you in a corner and threatening eternal summer school. Yes, that's the one.
As we nudge, herd and prod our kids toward the limestone facades or semi-permanent trailers and across the academic threshold for another school year, perhaps it is worth taking the time to consider how we evaluate our students.
First, some disclosure: I am a huge believer in education. It is in my bones and blood. Both of my parents were schoolteachers, and I went through more years of schooling than I would wish on anyone or care to disclose. I believe that educating our kids is the answer to many of the problems that the world faces today. It is the solution, not the problem. Most schoolteachers are dedicated, hard-working professionals who are committed to their students, so they are also part of the solution. The problem is the way we, as a society, think about and especially assess our kids' competence.
Using tests to assess our kids' memory of rote facts may have been important in the pre-industrial or possibly even the industrial era, but not now. Thanks to the Internet and, especially to Google, information is abundant and cheap (much like corn used to be). Facts and knowledge are easy to come by for anyone with access to a computer. As a result of this bounty, fact-based knowledge is just not that critical. What matters is not what we know but what we do with the available information. How we manage, combine and make use of knowledge is what makes the difference. Using test after test to assess students' memory for who was buried in Grant's Tomb doesn't help them and, in many cases, it scars.
As a clinical psychologist, I have seen dozens of patients who were harmed by the academic system; people who think that they are not "smart" because they did not test well in school. Many of these people have been tremendously successful in other areas of their lives but have felt inferior or fraudulent because they were not particularly good at rote memorization.