Testing and a Whole-Hearted Education
Often when we, as a society, have discussions about school quality and compare urban and rural or private and public school performance, we reference test scores. The kids at my rural private school “tested well”. The kids at the urban public school I volunteered at “tested poorly”.
I'm not a trained teacher, but I have taught my own kids (is applied armchair philosopher a thing?), I read up on educational ideas when the mood strikes, and I helped to build a hybrid school.
I reference the testing metric, but I also say, as I do here, that I'm not so sure that standardized testing is all that reliable as a measure of a true education.
So let's clear this up. Educating a person is a whole lot more than skill performance….but it's safe to say it includes skill performance.
Most standardized tests measure ability to read, spell, and do arithmetic. Many add in reading comprehension and fact recall for history and science.
Tests measure a part of education. The measurable part. If a school isn't teaching at least the mechanics of reading and arithmetic, it isn't meeting the baseline of literacy and literacy is the best tool by which to continue a full and whole education. Assessing literacy to determine if education is happening makes some sense.
After all, it's unlikely that a school full of kids who are struggling to read are going to become well-read people who critically think, sympathize with the characters in the drama of history, or delve into the mysteries of science with delight.
Such a school is likely failing on both counts of literacy basics and full education.
But if education is more than skills, and skills are just the starting point, it's possible that test results make a good showing at a school, but kids still aren't wholly educated.
We do not see that only the schools with poor test results are the ones with a large segment of discontented families. Much of the drift into alternative schooling that we see in suburban areas is not because the schools are performing poorly on tests. In many districts, the kids perform just fine…but people still leave. Homeschools, charter schools, hybrid schools, private schools…they are all thriving in and near suburban districts that perform decently well on ‘tests’.
Why is this?
I have a theory that it’s a bit like Maslow's hierarchy - once the basics are covered, people are freed up to pursue the next level of existence beyond just surviving. It's hard to create great art when you are barely eeking out sustenance with all your waking hours (although apparently the cavemen still let out their artistic streak?). It could be hard to delight in music or dive into the story of history if your days are full of grammar instruction or fact memorization.
Young or old, the human soul strives for more than just survival in mind and body. It could be that the movement away from standardized schooling as measured by standardized testing is indicating that stirring discontent that life should be, as Charlotte Mason said, “all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.
Standardized testing has its place. But let's be careful that we do not make the mistake of thinking that test results are all there is to education. Children, and adults, deserve more of a life than that of producing only a skill. Interest and caring, character and wholeness, relation to not just knowing facts, but knowledge of God and mankind, these combine into a much full definition of education.
And can do we even measure that?!
