Tests represent fear-based learning, the opposite of learning based on desire. Frightened and fretting with pre-test jitters, students stuff their minds with information they disgorge on exam sheets and sweat out the results. I know of no meaningful evidence that acing tests has anything to do with students' character development or whether their natural instincts for idealism or altruism are nurtured.There are a number of good points in the essay, practical points. But as a university teacher I worry less about the vagaries of spiritual development and much more about simply what kinds of thinkers students are. College teachers see the results of the rest of the education system, albeit blind to those who never make it to college.
I have large amounts of evidence that tests promote the opposite: character defects. After having two of my high school classes read Mathews's column, I asked the students: If during a test the opportunity came to cheat, with no fear of being caught, would you? A majority of hands went up...
Standardized tests measure braininess and memory skills. American society has plenty of people who were academic whizzes in high school but were so driven by the lure of a high grade-point average that their spiritual lives remained stunted....
I've been teaching only graduate students for the past five years, so I'm a bit out of the undergrad loop. There's a significant difference between grad students and undergrads. The grad students want to be there for one thing, and they don't really require the alleged incentive system that testing, etc. provide.
But especially with undergrads, my experience was consistently having to teach students to write, how to read, how to think philosophically, and critical thinking skills as well as general intellectual agility. There are plenty of bright, well-educated students. The undergrads I taught in Intro-level philosophy courses had near-universally never read any of the philosophers prior to the class. Okay, fine, we have an education system that has always emphasized job-orientation and fitting into the economy. But the one glaring omission I see from the American education system is simple intellectual agility. Students don't question assumptions, and they don't understand the fact/value distinction and how it collapses.
Experimental inquiry always involves both fact and value. This entails constant questioning of means and ends in inquiry since factual assumptions are value-laden and values can often be taken as facts. If you don't get this as a student, you don't develop the habits of intellectual agility. This neglect is fine if the goal of education is fitting into an economy such as it is and finding a student's proper role in the economy. But it's a terrible way to educate purely and simply. Students who aren't thinkers in this sense are always going to have limited possibilities for discovering who they truly want to be and what they truly want to do. In our economy the storyline appears to be that this doesn't much matter as long as you earn a good income. Income becomes the signifier of education. Easy to measure, but an incredibly stupid sign of good education.
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Half of me sees education going to hell in a handbasket, but the other half suspects Socrates made the same laments about Plato and his other students ("Athenians these days!"). I wonder if university professors just don't realize how much smarter they are now than when they were as entering freshpersons, and/or they don't recall what dufuses they thought all their classmates were. My mom, a philosopher who taught one of those "critical reasoning" courses required at a lot of liberal arts schools, once said she thought graduate school had made me smarter. I think she just started listening to me more, but I suppose she might be right. I think styles of thinking do strengthen or atrophy to an extent depending on how much we exercise them, and are not things you simply remember or don't, like people like to say of riding a bicycle. Why do so many parents seem to have trouble helping their kids with math homework? It's not a matter of forgetting the rules, because when your fluid or fluent in math you don't need explicitly to think of the rules--it's more like riding a bicycle. I bet you'd have a lot of trouble teaching formal logic twenty years after your last A in it if all you'd been doing since was Foucault.
Oh, MT, I'll gladly grant that I was a doofus entering college. Still have a fair amount of doofusness. Even added doofusness from some of the things I learned through grad school.
The problem I thought I was speaking to is the one of teaching to the test. I would never call students dumb. And I think we do see the results of teaching to the test. The loss for students is that they learn to think to the test. So, I think we agree on the last part of what you're saying - that certain habits of critical thought or "intellectual agility" are necessary, habits that become engrained stepladders for whatever else we want to do. That's why I worry about the emphasis in the schools on test scores. Money's involved as an incentive for higher test scores, so evberyone gets in on the incentivist gig. It's a lousy system.
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