Test Mania: Preparing Students for Life Under Modern Capitalism
BY
The psychologist Bill Livant has remarked, “When a liberal sees a beggar, he says the system isn’t working. When a Marxist does, he says it is.” The same insight could be applied today to the entire area of education. The learned journals as well as the popular media are full of studies documenting how little most students know and how fragile their basic skills are. The cry heard almost everywhere is, “The system isn’t working.” Responding to this common complaint, conservatives in both parties have pushed through packages of education reforms — “No Child Left Behind,” “Race to the Top” and “Common Core” — in which increased testing occupies the central place. The typical liberal and even radical response to this has been to demonstrate that such measures are not likely to have the “desired” effect. The assumption, of course, is that we all want more or less the same thing from a system of education, and that conservatives have simply made an error in the means they have chosen to attain our common end. But what if students are already receiving — more or less — the kind of education that conservatives favor? This would cast their proposals for “reform” in another light. What if, as Livant points out in the case of beggars, the system is working?
The 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal noted that if you make children get on their knees every day to pray, whatever their initial beliefs, they will end up believing in God. It seems that a practice repeated often enough, especially if it includes particular movements and emotions, can exercise an extraordinary effect on how and what we think. Didn’t Marshall McLuhan warn us in the early years of T.V. that “the medium is the message”? What applies to praying and to watching T.V. applies to taking exams. If you make students at any rung of the educational ladder take lots of exams, the process of doing so will have at least as much influence on what they become as the content of the tests. In short, exams, especially so many exams, teach us even more than they test us. To grasp what it is they teach us is to understand why our system of education already “works” and in what ways conservative proposals for reform would make it “work” still better.
Tests as Teachers
Complaining about exams may be most students’ first truly informed criticism about the society in which they live, informed because they are its victims and know from experience how exams work. Students know, for example, that exams don’t only involve reading questions and writing answers. They also involve forced isolation from other students, prohibitions on talking, walking around and going to the bathroom, writing a lot faster than usual, physical discomfort, worry, fear, anxiety (lots of that) and often guilt. Students are also aware that exams do a poor job of testing what they actually know. What student hasn’t griped about at least some of these things? But it is just here that most of their criticisms run into a brick wall, because most students don’t know enough about society to understand the role that exams — especially taking so many exams — plays in preparing them to take their place in it.
In reality, exams have less to do with testing us for what we are supposed to know than teaching us what the other aspects of instruction cannot get at (or get at as well). To understand what that is we must examine what the capitalist class, who control the main levers of power in our society, require from a system of education. Here, it is clear that capitalists need a system of education that provides young people with the knowledge and skills necessary for their businesses to function and prosper. But they also want schools to give youth the beliefs, attitudes, emotions and associated habits of behavior that make it easy for capitalists to tap into this store of knowledge and skills. And they need all this not only to maximize their profits but also to help reproduce the social, economic and even political conditions and accompanying processes that allow them to extract any profits whatsoever. Without workers, consumers and citizens who are well versed in and accepting of their roles in these processes, the entire capitalist system would grind to a halt. It is here — particularly as regards the behavioral and attitudinal prerequisites of capitalist rule — that the culture of exams has become indispensable.
Well, what does sitting for so many exams, together with the long hours spent and anxiety involved in studying for them, and the shame felt for the imperfect grades obtained on them, “teach” students? Here’s the short list:
1) The crush of tests gets students to believe that one gets what one works for and that the standards by which this is decided are objective and fair, and therefore that those who do well and those who do badly deserve what they get. Students then bring this attitude to what they find in the rest of society, including their own failures later in life, and it inclines them to “blame the victim” (themselves or others) and feel guilty for what is not their fault.2) Exams are orders that are not open to question — “discuss this,” “outline that,” etc. — and taking so many exams conditions students to accept unthinkingly the orders that will come from their future employers. As with the army, following lots of orders, including many that don’t seem to make much sense, is ideal training for a life in which one will be expected to follow orders.3) By fitting the infinite variety of possible answers on exams into the straitjacket of A, B, C and D, students get accustomed to the standardization of people as well as of things and the impersonal job categories that will constitute such an important part of their identity later on.4) Because their teachers know all the right answers to the exams, students tend to assume that those who are above them in other hierarchies — at work and in politics — also know much more than they do.5) Because most tests are taken individually, striving to do well on a test is treated as something that concerns students only as individuals. Cooperative solutions are equated with cheating, if considered at all. The model implies that this is how students should approach the problems they will confront later in life.6) With the Damocles sword of a failing — or for some, a mediocre — grade hanging over their heads throughout their years in school, including university, the inhibiting fear of swift and dire punishment never leaves students. The very number of exams also tends to undermine students’ self-confidence and to raise their levels of anxiety, with the result that most young people remain unsure that they will ever know enough to criticize existing institutions, and feel physically uncomfortable at the thought of trying to put anything better in their place.7) Exams play the key role in determining course content, leaving little time for material that is not on the exam. Among the first things to be omitted in this “tightening” of the curriculum are students’ own reactions to the topics that come up, collective reflection on the urgent problems of the day, alternative points of view and other possibilities generally, explorations of topics triggered by individual curiosity and indeed anything that is likely to promote creative, cooperative or critical thinking. But then our capitalist ruling class is not particularly interested in dealing with workers, consumers and citizens who possess these qualities.8) Exams also determine the form in which most teaching goes on, since for any given exam there is generally a best way to prepare for it. Repetition, forced memorization, rote learning and frequent quizzes (more exams) leave little time for other more imaginative approaches to conveying, exchanging and questioning facts and ideas.9) Finally, multiple exams become one of the main factors determining the character of the relation between students (with students viewing each other as competitors for the best grades), the relation between students and teachers (with most students viewing their teachers as examiners and graders first, and most teachers viewing their students largely in terms of how well they have done on exams), the relation between teachers and school administrators (since principals and deans now have an “objective” standard by which to measure teacher performance) and even the relation between school administrations and various state bodies (since the same standard is used by the state to judge the work of schools and school systems). In short, exams mediate all social relations in the educational system in a manner very similar to the way money — that other great mystifier and falsifier — mediates all relations between people in the larger society, and with the same dehumanizing results.
Once we put all these pieces together, it is clear that the current craze for increasing the number of exams for students at all levels has less to do with “raising standards,” as the popular mantra would have it, than with developing more extensive control over the entire educational process. This control, which will allow the ruling class to streamline its necessary work of socialization, is the overriding aim of the government’s current passion for more exams, and it must be understood and criticized as such and not as a misguided effort to “raise standards” that is unlikely to work.
Globalization and the Classroom
The question that arises next is — why now? It is clear that while exams have been with us for a long time, it is only in recent years that the mania for exams and still more exams has begun to affect government policies. The short Test Mania: Preparing Students for Life Under Modern Capitalism | The Indypendent: