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There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new
immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The
government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary,
high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots.
In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders.”
A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out
that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and
should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.
The SAT, the single most important filtering device used to measure the effect of school on
each individual, is based (almost without change) on Kelly’s lower-order thinking test. Still.
The reason is simple. Not because it works. No, we do it because it’s the easy and efficient way
to keep the mass production of students moving forward.
11. To efficiently run a school, amplify fear (and destroy
passion)
School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the
masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process
that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.
And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There’s no
room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or
someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test
later. A multiple-choice test.
Do we need more fear?
Less passion?
12. Is it possible to teach attitudes?
The notion that an organization could teach anything at all is a relatively new one.
Traditionally, society assumed that artists, singers, artisans, writers, scientists, and alchemists
would find their calling, then find a mentor, and then learn their craft. It was absurd to think
that you’d take people off the street and teach them to do science or to sing, and persist at that
teaching long enough for them to get excited about it.
Now that we’ve built an industrial solution to teaching in bulk, we’ve seduced ourselves into
believing that the only thing that can be taught is the way to get high SAT scores.
Stop Stealing Dreams Free Printable Edition 13