Alfred North Whitehead on Standardized Testing, from his collection of essays, “The Aims of Education” (1929).
Give a copy to your favorite reformer.
Whitehead writes:
“In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place. This evil path is represented by a book or a set of lectures which will practically enable the student to learn by heart all the questions likely to be asked at the next external examination. And I may say in passing that no educational system is possible unless every question directly asked of a pupil at any examination is either framed or modified by the actual teacher of that pupil in that subject.”
“A common external examination system is fatal to education. The process of exhibiting the applications of knowledge must, for its success, essentially depend on the character of the pupils and the genius of the teacher.”
“The best procedure will depend on several factors, none of which can be neglected, namely, the genius of the teacher, the intellectual type of the pupils, their prospects in life, the opportunities offered by the immediate surroundings of the school and allied factors of this sort. It is for this reason that the uniform external examination is so deadly. We do not denounce it because we are cranks, and like denouncing established things. We are not so childish. Also, of course, such examinations have their use in testing slackness. Our reason of dislike is very definite and very practical. It kills the best part of culture.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With my apologies to JKR:
The Sorting Test
A thousand thoughts or more ago,
When I was newly known,
There lived four wizards of renown,
Whose names are still well-known:
Bold Billy Gates from Microsoft,
Fair Rhee from her DC stint,
Sweet Duncan from Down Under,
Lord Coleman from Vermint.
They shared a wish, a hope, a scheme,
They hatched a daring plan,
To test all children in the land,
Thus Common Core began.
Now each of these four founders
Stack ranked to find the best
They value just one aptitude,
In the ones they had to test.
By level 1, the lowest were
There just to detest;
For Level 2, the closest
But failed to be the best;
For Level 3, hard workers were
Barely worthy of admission;
And power-hungry Level 4s
Were those of great ambition.
While still alive they did divide
Their favorites from the throng,
Yet how to pick the worthy ones
When they were dead and gone?
‘Twas Coleman then who found the way,
He whipped me out of his head
The founders wrote the standards
So I could choose instead!
Now slip me snug around your brain,
I’ve never yet been wrong,
I’ll have a look inside your mind
And tell where you belong!”
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He was certainly ahead of his time and so correct in his thinking.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you. I read “The Aims of Education” years ago but had forgotten this passage. Now I want to put it up on my walls!
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I was congratulating all you public school advocates for your effective work on excessive testing, but apparently I spoke too soon!
Here’s Ohio’s new testing scheme for high schools:
“Count them up, and students are taking 29 high-stakes tests in one year. Multiply that by four years, and you have 116 high-stakes tests. This does not include the summative (shorter, lesson-based assessment) and additional formative assessments (chapter tests, end-of-quarter exams) that teachers often must use.
If you add up all this testing, at least one full academic year is lost in the name of testing.”
They have to go cold turkey. They’re addicts. They are incapable of developing a testing scheme that doesn’t get completely out of control 🙂
The funniest part of the whole thing is, there IS genuine public pressure to reduce testing, so Kasich was asked about it and he said he would “look into it”. He said this WHILE Ohio was releasing this crazy new scheme. I knew he had zero interest in traditional public schools but you’d think he’d have some low-level staffer check in occasionally just so he doesn’t sound like an idiot.
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/09/30/teacher-plus-tests-leave-little-time-learn/16516805/
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Happening in my district too. By 2018, EVERY SINGLE SUBJECT will have a standardized test. That’s between seven and ten subjects per year per student. Many subjects have a mandated standardized test every term. My subject, social studies, has EIGHT tests per year. That’s not counting the ACT, which is state-mandated for juniors, and the EXPLORE and PLAN tests from ACT, which are district-mandated for freshmen and sophomores. When will I have time to teach anything?
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Having worked with ELLs for decades, I have watched many students understand the concept of a question, but get the answer wrong due to misunderstanding the wording of a question. I spent some time teaching ELLs common wording used in standardized tests. However, if they were intermediate students and the question varied its wording, the students were not able to answer the question. For example: All but one of the following is an example of photosynthesis. The students would have been able to handle this question. All of these excluding one is an example of photosynthesis. This variation would throw a certain number of students. If I asked them to explain photosynthesis to me, they would be able to demonstrate their understanding of the concept. Standardized tests discriminate against those that are linguistically challenged. Many times they cannot fully show what they know due to the language trickery of the test.
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Among other Whitehead quotes relevant to education are:
“Above all things we must be aware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’
– that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind
without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1929, 1965) in “The Aims of Education”
“A clash of doctrines is not a disaster – it is an opportunity.”
– Alfred North Whitehead (1925) in “Religion and Science”
For more wise Whitehead quotes see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
REFERENCES
Whitehead, A.N. 1967. “Aims of Education and other essays. ” Free Press. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/fIUbXB. First published in 1929. Note the searchable “Look Inside” feature.
Whitehead, A.N. 1925. “Religion and Science,” The Atlantic, August; online at http://bit.ly/142YOk6.
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Thank you, rrhake. Whitehead like Arthur Combs’ research is so right on.
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I think I know what he means when he says tests should be built in accord with “the genius of the teacher”. Suppose the subject is the Roman Empire. The teacher has brilliant and engaging things to say about the Roman army, but has a sketchier, less-interesting fund of knowledge on Roman art. Shouldn’t the teacher then spend more time on her dazzling lessons on the Roman army? Won’t that thrill and engage students more, and leave a more indelible imprint of knowledge on kids’ brains? But if the standardized test is known not to focus on the Roman army, then those brilliant lessons have to be scrapped. The result is a diminished education.
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to “put my best foot forward” as a history teacher, without too much pressure to raise test scores. But I foresee the day when I will have to scrap my best lessons and try to game the test. And I can even see myself enjoying the challenge (I think many teachers are seduced into test-mania because it is a stimulating challenge and/or a sort of competition). But I agree with Whitehead that this would kill the best part of what I have to offer the students.
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yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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I often think that the test obsessed simply are not bright enough to follow the arguments against what they do. Whitehead was, of course, a genius–co-author, with Russell, of the Principia Mathematica, and developer of a version of process philosophy. For the simple-minded test makers, let me spell out for you Whitehead’s central point: teachers and learners DIFFER, and successful teaching, builds upon the unique characteristics of both.
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See Ponderosa’s beautiful comment, above. She and Whitehead nail it.
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Bob, I had a similar thought myself. It seems like some of the test obsessed think we’re the ones who are not “bright enough” to comprehend their position on testing. Unfortunately, many “reformer” types aren’t even willing to read or consider something as great as Whitehead’s writings because they already have all the answers. From past experience, I can already imagine some of the dismissive statements they’re likely to make…
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Philosophical thinking is dead, so is any historical perspective…Both when they are needed.
What a great teacher or leader of “reform” needs today is called a “value proposition,” a term borrowed from marketing and not different from an elevator pitch.
OR you need to have “a theory of action” stripped of reasoning about what should count as education…this phrase from the literature on managing a business.
OR you need a collection of thinklets, organized in play-lists, some play lists are activated when you speak to the general public, others when you speak to teachers, others are reserved for principals and so on.
If you are really savvy about education right now, you simply develop a messaging system that includes at least 12 uses of the term “impact or impactful,” 11 uses of “academic or academics,” 10 uses of the term “rigor or rigorous,” 9 uses of the phrase “raising the bar,” 8 uses of the “global competition,” 7 uses of the term “grit” (not grits), 6 uses of the term “innovation,” 5 uses of…….. and so on.
This is to say that Whitehead’s ideas, like those of any deep thinker about education, are hard to find in a cluttered landscape of hype and twits.
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A fine essay with a fantastic closing statement.
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It is the supreme irony that those who are pushing education reform either have no knowledge of what great thinkers of the past thought about education and teaching or simply choose to ignore what they thought/said.
Einstein is another such great thinker who actually despised regimented education and testing and who said the following about teaching
“Reform” has put our teachers in a position in which they can not possibly pursue those ends.
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We could learn a thing or two from a very dead and very old and very Greek guy:
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” [Socrates]
😎
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“Reformed by Fire”
Filling an urn
And kindling a flame
Education to burn
“Reform” is the name
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We don’t have to harken back to Whitehead to understand why standardized testing runs against the grain of a humanistic education. I think we we know that schools have always acted as ‘sorters’, separating those who are likely to achieve academically (and in life) from those who will not. From group intelligence testing to invidious student classifications, based on race, disability and linguistic status. Moreover, this ‘sorting’ approach is continued in the tests offered by the College Entrance Examination Board (SATs, etc. Now we have a deeply (fatally) flawed common core curriculum, assessed via fatally flawed standardized tests, which then drive sorting proficient from non proficient teachers using an invalid evaluation model.
The long tradition of sorting students has remained constant. Now, we have the added pernicious, factory, managerial concept of “jobs for the 21st Century, the privatizations of public education and destruction of public education. The purposes of standardized testing remains constant: separate and sort the educational ‘winners’ from the ‘losers’: kids, schools and teachers. The current crisis is a perverse anti human, business and factory driven and logical extension of earlier ‘accepted’ movements. The basic premises remain constant. We have moved from a more simple, easy to accept discrimination to a monster of discrimination and destruction that threatens to consume, piece by piece, all elements of public education.
In his time Whitehead was writing against the pedagogical tide. Little could he know pedagogy would evolve.
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“Standardized tests” have been dominated Educational System in Korea. It is derived from the historical heritage of Chinese Imperial Examination. For your references, I would like to introduce 2 articles as follows:
STUDENT ORIENTED EDUCATION FOR CHINA: A WHITEHEADIAN PROPOSAL
A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Education in the Department of Educational Foundations
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Canada
By Yongmei Hu
April 2009
The aim of a balanced education that includes a scientific, a literary and a technical curriculum is to cultivate a balanced, whole person through an integrated development of their mind, body and spirit. Such an education is quite different from test-oriented education. Rather than viewing students as abstract intellectual beings, it pays equal attention to their bodily feelings, spiritual cultivation, and intellectual capabilities as formative of their self-development. Rather than treating them as exam machines, it encourages students to listen to their body and heart. Rather than seeing students as passive receivers, it recognizes their creative power and potential for future discovery. Rather than misguiding students’ pure pursuit of knowledge by drawing their attention to money, fame and power, it tries to elicit their love in and for learning by making them see the beauty and power of knowledge. Rather than viewing each student as a competitor in exams, it encourages them to work with each other as companions along a journey seeking wisdom. All in all, rather than merely aiming at students’ success in exams, the aim of Whitehead’s balanced education is to obtain wisdom, that is “to learn ‘the art of life’, namely ‘(i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better.’” Ibid., p. 68.
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