Stuff to See!

Testing, 1...2...3...

A young woman I know who works as a teacher in a public school system told a tale, once upon a time, of the pressure she was under to have as many of her students do well on one standardized test or another (pardon the vagueness, the particular names/locations involved are ancillary to my point). The natural consequence of this would be to pay less attention to the education of her students and to pay more attention toward coaching them to do well on this test, which seemed to this young teacher to be a perversion of her profession, especially considering that the performance of her students on this test would play a role in the evaluation of her performance as a teacher.
Her point resonated with me, at first. Being a student (but not in school), I found it offensive that the state choose higher standardized test scores over the pursuit of knowledge. I am also unlikely to give much credence to standardized testing in general, mostly because it tells me very little I didn't already know (with this in mind, I took a classical IQ test and an emotional IQ test today and found the results predictable). This merely demonstrates that I have a decent grasp of how the world works, although I will say that the realization does not fill me with joy. Much the opposite, I'm afraid.
Nevertheless, the more thought I gave to my teacher acquaintance and her dissatisfaction, a discussion I had as part of a high school math class came to mind. It was snowing outside, which in Baltimore means that people fear overmuch for their lives. As a result, there were exactly four students in this math class, and one teacher. Naturally, we engaged in a philosophical discussion about teaching, whereupon I realized that out of these four students, only I had a realistic insight into the matter (which still disturbs me). One point in particular stands out: the other three students were convinced that the key to success in the classroom was keyed to what the students learned. I believed, and I still do, that success in school depends on finding what the teacher wants and delivering it. The teacher agreed with me, reluctantly, it must be said, and I would later poll most of my other teachers. They agreed as well, reluctantly.
This seems repugnant to most people. The world of teaching, of imparting knowledge, should not work that way. Most people, including myself, would say that teachers should give their students knowledge which should empower them to freely and openly discuss subjective matters, and procedural understanding of how to solve more objective problems. Most, if not all, teachers give grades in direct proportion to how their students meet their various criteria. This is what I believe these teachers mean when I hear them say success is keyed to giving teachers what they want. Of course, where these teachers succeed or fail is in selecting criteria and apply said criteria to the output of their students.
These concepts can be applied to my teacher friend's situation without much disfigurement. The administrative diktat that she mold her teaching to fit the requirements her students need to pass a standardized test or set of such tests constitute a criterion of her performance as a teacher regardless of how she may feel about the justice of the situation. She bristles at the necessities. She may choose not to toe the line as a form of protest. But there is something else at work that she may not have considered. What is the purpose of school in this society? My belief is that it is to provide a safe environment to pursue a fourfold objective: to instruct our youth in the vagaries of social interaction; to ingrain within our youth a cultural background against which and by which they evaluate each other and the rest of the world; to evaluate by standards which evolve over time the relative worth and merit of our youth; and to instruct our youth in the art of how to learn. Of course, as every teacher will agree, these objectives are not meant, nor should they be implied, to be exclusively pursued in the classroom.
I want to make it very clear that I am not concerned about judging the basis of the standards that obtain in our society, nor the faults or strong points of our society, at least right now. More likely than not, such matters are the crux of my friend's displeasure. One of the things I learned very early on in school, and in life, was that there are a lot more people in the world than just myself, and I had to account for them, since they weren't going away anytime soon.