Cynicism is the New Reality, Education edition

 I recently found myself in the position of defending standardized tests. Well, once I take a step into that slide to the depths, I might as well start exploring. I have been thinking about education and the educational process so allow me to think out loud. If you don't allow me, I will type more quietly.

a few underlying questions -- 

why is college important

why is any formal education important or useful

how do we measure intelligence or success

I started with the issue of the random college's needing to compare students from 2 disparate locales and high schools and contended that only through their taking the same exam can they be stacked against each other. However, I realize that we are moving into a post-mandatory-standardized test era. More and more schools are making standardized tests either optional or useless (test optional vs. test free admissions) which means that the one tool through which a school can "objectively" judge and compare students is being done away with. Then I heard about this story. NOTE -- I am not linking to or invoking that story to comment on the question of quotas or affirmative action. I'm simply pointing out that high grades and standardized test scores are becoming less of a factor in college admissions. I don't know anything else about the student (recommendations, extra or co-currics, essay or whatever) just that, clearly the testing and formal education part of the record is not necessarily persuasive. [See here for a question and some stats about being rejected even with perfect scores]

Let's go back to the ending -- what do we think the role of college is. What do students ever need to learn? The three general categories are

1. skills

2. facts

3. methods

Pre-professional tracks should be hallmarked (which is now a word) by number 1 mostly and number 2 secondly. I find too many programs that are heavy on 2 and less so on 1 but I'm beyond complaining about that. Liberal arts programs are all about 3 ("critical thinking" seems to fall in that category -- the content is secondary but the approach is valued). This is not to say that critical thinking (that is, a process of questioning to develop ideas instead of memorizing ideas) is absent from other programs, but the practice of questioning is less vital in those disciplines. 

Now we have a bunch of topics to address. First, what are the skills that we want students to have when they get into the workforce, and how can we best prepare them for that. If we think that comfort relying on technology, or a sense of collaboration is important then we should train them for that and assess their competence in that area. If we think that they need to know how to compute the area of a prism, then, heck, let's teach and test that.

For the most part, workers today need the skills of a very limited set of disciplines and the only reasons we have a broad high school curriculum is either because we figure that students don't know what they want yet so they need a foundation in a variety of areas, or because the act of learning and thinking is independently important and exportable to any field. Otherwise, why did I have to take chemistry? I knew from a young age that, come hell or high water, I wasn't going into any field that required the sciences. But I had to go through 3 years of science classes in high school. And I did poorly. My college admissions chances were tainted by the lower GPA impacted by poor science skills but none of that had any effect on my success or lack thereof after college. I didn't learn any thinking skills in history class either, so even though I learned facts and names and dates, unless the need is for me to dredge up a memory of a piece of history, my time was wasted once I got into the workforce.

Am I advocating dismantling the established curriculum? Well, once we come to terms with what students need the curriculum for, we can determine whether our current approach is relevant. With the advent of various technologies, it seems less useful to force students to read books or write most anything. Does anyone discuss Pride and Prejudice on the daily? Are we jamming poetry down their throats because we want a culturally literate population or isn't that just self-fulfilling as we are requiring that they know things because other people know those things even if the things have no inherent value! I mean, what's the point of so much of what we teach if not to require that students grapple with the unfamiliar and prepare for tests and learn to communicate what they understand clearly? If it is just to be useful workers, then let's just teach skills. If it is to be thinkers, then let's value learning as a process and assess whether students can think and produce ideas. Yes, this requires memorization and immersion and a rigor which goes beyond "doing" but if that's what matters, then great.

But what do colleges want? With the elimination of mandatory standardized tests, and the knowledge that local school curricula and grading policies make comparing number grades perfectly useless, how can a college know if an applicant has whatever the "it" is that that college is looking for? Unless the college creates a local assessment, checking whether a high school student can succeed in a very particular way, what does the school use? Does playing an instrument, learning a sport, or participating in some other club really give insight into a student's ability to succeed in any school or later in life, at a job? I think not. Plenty of students pretend to be in the Finance Club or to have glamorous summer jobs to make themselves attractive but few, if any of these claims are tested by schools or the 4 years at college. The application essay is, as often as not, written by committee and the recommendations make each student out to be Gandhi, Einstein, Michael Jordan and Shakespeare. Every kid is perfect, angelic and brilliant and if the teacher can't say that, ask a different teacher or tweak the recommendation to make it so.

So let's recap. Most curricular classes in high school (and, honestly, college) are useless in that they don't generally prepare one for the real world situations that will be encountered. (the guild/internship system is more effective) The criteria by which students gain entrance to "elite" colleges are useless -- they don't really tell anyone anything about the student and are often dishonest, not comparable between applicants and not relevant. Sure, there will be a need in the future for a few highly specialized and skilled people but that cream can rise to the top in any setting. If we want students to follow their passions, and we want them to gain what they will need in the real world then we either have to take the rough and tumble approach and say that they need to learn to persevere, struggle and vanquish, so having them face rigorous classes with the specter of failure is important, or we think that they will spend their lives aided by technology, reliant on their support network and an internet of friends (look -- a new collective noun!) then we need to teach them how to succeed at that and we shouldn't hold them accountable to the base skills of foundational thinking and facts acquisition.

So either we need to double down on tradition and demand excellence in all areas, or we need to reinvent the entire educational system into either a highly focused set of courses which include real-world practice and an ignoring of anything not geared to ultimate real-world professional success or a system of courses leveraging all technology to the hilt, abandoning classical disciplinary (foundational) content and based on collaboration and general market skills that rely on the outsourcing of anything not deemed advanced enough to be worth the human's time.

And what will this do to the established system of higher education? Right now, firms and institutions hire students from Harvard not because Harvard has the best education which best prepares the students, but because Harvard started by admitting the best students in the first place. If Harvard has no way of judging the "best" anymore, then there is no reason to strive to get our children into it or other similarly selective schools, or even value a college education/degree. 

In the meanwhile, we are perpetuating a series of lies. We start children at a young age learning stuff that ultimately they won't need, so that they can get into schools that will get them into the next set of schools by teaching things they don't need and assigning high enough numbers to ensure that their reputation for warehousing excellence remains unmatched. Then the students get into and through the right colleges and into the firms that will give them the most money even if the students are not necessarily the best at what they do -- they just work at the right place and haven't gotten fired yet.