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Ahh, Sunday morning. Time for the paper, a hot cuppa and a deep investigation into the central tension plaguing our educational system. What motivates this, you ask? Well, when proctoring standardized tests, ones mind wanders to loftier topics than ovals and number 2 pencils.

When I was in grad school (mark 2) I learned about a field of literary interpretation which was based in identifying "binary oppositions" - those ideas which stood against their polar counterparts, "good and evil" being the obvious example. At the time, young and naïve as I was, I resisted this as reductionist and simplistic. "The world," I insisted, "is subtle and complex, filled with shades of gray, and possibly also polka dots." Well, now I'm old and naïve and I know that the opposites exist, but not to the mutual exclusuon of each other, but paradoxically, in some sort of symbiotic and even simultaneous coexistence. Layers upon contradictory layers create the texture of life. You can tell how boring proctoring is by the vocabulary I'm willing to use even though I'm writing this on the Blackberry.

This opposition is typified by standardized tests. They are meaningless and useless and yet necessary and even conveniently useful. They stress multiple choice test taking skills and short timed writing neither of which either reflects student intelligence, skill or ability or reflects college and life assessments. They level the playing field so colleges can judge students from different schools who transcripts may not be comparable even if their grades were honest and accurate. But the test prep industry springing from the (true) student perception that these scores will determine college acceptance simply replaces the home grown school-based dishonesty of grade inflation with an external (and economically biased) dishonesty which turns performance into a "how well you can take a test" exercise further invalidating any comparison or even educational integrity of the test.

We crave simple predictors and concrete measures because we understand innately that the world is a messy place. We blind ourselves to the truth that neither a subjective judgment nor an objective one is likely to provide any real insight. We buy into a system which confers authority on the brand name colleges and thus makes them the objective to the detriment of actual learning, but those "top" colleges (also a statistic which is both useless and invalid) din't provide any "better" education than another. Their name creates the job market demand and the system is perpetuated - not because it represents a real stratification intellectually but because a presumed stratification which already exists feeds into itself.

So we have this tension - between knowing and not knowing, between thinking and doing, between objective and subjective. And yet we know that all of our systems don't succeed OR fail, but somehow succeed AND fail.

Solutions? I have no idea. Do we change the entire culture, workforce and socio-economic-educational system around the entire country? Maybe, for a start. But it won't work. And yet it will, but so will doing nothing.