In a typically intelligent way, Steve Sailor discusses the latest results from PISA, the educational tests which basically cover the `rich’ (OECD) countries. The article is here, PISA, Piece by Piece, and is worth reading.
They say the proof is in the pudding and I’d claim the pudding for education is the resulting culture. As stuffy as the Victorians were at times (though certainly not all of them) they kept the various cultures of the Anglo-American sphere alive and sometimes produced some serious creative works—especially in academic fields and creative writing and maybe a little less in music and other arts.
We don’t learn just to pass tests, though there can be value in tests if they are taken as indications of the rate of progress (if any) toward the acquisition of skills and attitudes and knowledge which is necessary to play our proper roles in our civilization.
It’s probably appropriate to let conformity settle down upon those who are so comfortable but when tests are used as a means of enforcing conformity upon all the students, we lose most possibilities of adapting to God’s dynamic Creation as it emerges more fully and more clearly to human minds and hearts and hands.
The world is dynamic and human being, individual and communal, is shaped in response to that dynamic reality. Human being is changing, but some parts of individual and communal human being is highly resistant to change, at least rapid change. That’s certainly not all bad. Our current educational systems, certainly in the United States, have been for a few generations or more one of the heaviest drags upon any efforts to respond to modern empirical knowledge, in the history of the ancient Hebrews as well as nuclear physics.
If we had a proper educational system, students in various tracks—straightforward textbook learning and vocational learning and advanced learning for those more energetic and talented—would probably do well on standardized tests though the advanced students might be bored and trying to head for the library or laboratory halfway through the test period. Those advanced students, and occasionally others, would be learning the new knowledge, maybe starting to acquire new knowledge, and starting to integrate that new knowledge in their cultures.
Instead, we in the United States are seeing our cultural institutions, with the notable exception of serious music, being taken over by those whose idea of adaptation is downgrading their product to reach ever larger audiences of ever more barbaric human beings, barbaric in terms of both their individual and communal being. I’ve been told by an active literary agent (thrillers and detective novels but he was an older man who’d known more literary editors and agents) and an ex-editor in a major publishing house, that the minds of workers in our publishing industry have decayed more rapidly than the minds of Americans in general. The very talented have been mostly crushed down toward the middling level but those with some lesser talents have also been crushed down. There has been some decay in the middling level itself—check for the number of successful middle-brow authors from the 1950s and earlier who produced works of some lasting interests to serious readers.
I suspect that Western Civilization is being pushed to the side and will continue to be pushed to the side, perhaps by a civilization with heavy Asiatic content. But that new civilization might be a Christian Civilization (a truer precursor to the Body of Christ) which is a meeting ground and home for a large portion of the human race, European (including the US and Canada and others) and far east—though it might be a while before other regions of the world can participate much in this new civilization.
At any rate, there is little reason to believe that the United States and Europe are producing much, outside of music and some fields of science, which will be of lasting interest to the human race. Who cares if we do badly or well upon standardized tests?
They justify a large industry and corresponding bureaucracy of obscure purpose.
They produce a lot of statistics which can be analyzed and who cares? Though I’m an advocate of the importance of the sorts of skills which can be tested accurately (such as memorization of basic facts and use of basic language skills), the Western educational systems—certainly those of the United States—are self-serving systems which are clearly not set up or run to do anything truly useful for a troubled civilization or for a civilization which is coming to life or reviving alongside its own dying organs (become self-serving institutions such as our schools).