Earlier this year a book was published titled Childism by the eminent psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.
The subtitle is “Confronting Prejudice Against Young Children.”
Young-Bruehl argues that just as there is prejudice against other groups of people, there is prejudice against children, and she calls it “childism.”
Young-Bruehl describes the many ways in which young children are abused by parents and those who are supposedly caregivers.
Children, she writes, need protection against “child abuse and neglect,” known in the literature as CAN. (Which is why I always chuckle when I see an education “reform” group that calls itself “CAN,” as in ConnCAN, which literally means “Connecticut Child Abuse and Neglect,” if you follow the standard literature on the subject.)
What is childism? There can be too little or too much stimulation, there can be too many environmental toxins, too much exposure to domestic violence, there can be physical and sexual abuse, and so on.
One form of child abuse today, she writes, citing the eminent child psychiatrists T. Berry Brazelton and Stanley I. Greenspan, is too much exposure to standardized testing and standardized education.
NCLB, in this view, is child abuse. “Testing is about failing and being tracked according to failure. Children are shamed by such an approach, not encouraged.” Shaming “harms children; it produces anger and resentment. Standardized testing does not aim at what the authors [Brazelton and Greenspan] call mastery, which would point a child in the direction of improvement, and indicate what individualized help the child might need to improve.”
Children need “calm guidance and modeling,” not the shame of a test score that says they are not good enough.
Young-Bruehl’s book was published in January. By now, she should be on all the talk shows. She should be countering the nonsense spread by corporate reformers who want more tests, more data, more CAN.
Sadly, she died days before the publication of her book.
And her wise counsel is locked in its pages, waiting for readers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
thank you diane. my public library has a copy and i’ve put it on reserve.
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I am sorry that the author died before her book came out. I have not read the book but am skeptical of its contents. I hope it is more nuanced than it sounds.
Testing in itself does not constitute child abuse or anything close. All depends on the spirit in which it is done. We all need some measure of how well we’re doing. All measures are imperfect and should be viewed as such. Still, they have their place.
There’s nothing terrible about finding out that (according to the test results) you’re not doing particularly well in physics but are excelling in history. It may mean you need to focus on physics more, or it may mean that history is your forte or passsion. Or it may have more to do with the tests themselves than with you or your abilities and knowledge. In any case, the tests can provide useful information.
Also, there’s pride in taking on the challenge of a test and doing well. Good tests can challenge students to pull together what they have learned in new ways.
Take away the tests, and you lose that too.
The problem arises when people start defining childen in terms of their scores–for instance, when they say that “Felicia IS a 2,” or when schools think of their students not in terms of their learning, not in terms of their knowledge, but in terms of their scores (“Let’s see how many 2s we can move to 3 this year”). That’s quite different from saying, “You got a 2 on this test, which is only part of the picture; now let’s look at why.”
The problem has been severely exacerbated under NCLB, which not only elevates tests and test scores too high, but elevates crass, generic tests that have little to do with what can or should be taught.
Of course, test scores and grades might not be helpful for very young children, period. But as students advance through elementary school, tests and scores can provide information and need not carry stigma. The challenge lies in making good tests, putting them in their proper place, and interpreting them carefully.
It’s important to battle both the excessive emphasis on test scores and the notion that tests and test scores are psychologically harmful.
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I’m inclined to think that students, especially young children, learn more from qualitative comments by the teacher than from standardized tests that rank them and label them in comparison to others. Education is not a race, but a developmental process.
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When it comes to very young children, say, through grade 2 or 3, I would agree. But the qualitative comments have to be informative in that case. When I was in kindergarten, I refused to take my paintings home, because I knew they weren’t good. I remember the teachers writing “Great!” and “Wonderful!” on them. I wished someone would tell me how to paint better.
In upper elemenatary school and onward, grades can have real meaning. In my high school, it was quite difficult to get an “A” in English–so an “A” was a real accomplishment. The teachers gave us many comments as well.
Qualitative comments without grades can be frustrating. “Your opening is fascinating–what might you do build on it in the body of your paper?” Many kids want and need blunt feedback, including an overall evaluation of their work. Of course it’s important to learn to take such evaluation in stride. It is imperfect. But it’s just as important to learn how to face it.
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Sorry, I can’t agree about the value of standardized test scores. The tests are norm-referenced, and children learn nothing from their ranking.
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I wrote in my initial comment, “The problem has been severely exacerbated under NCLB, which not only elevates tests and test scores too high, but elevates crass, generic tests that have little to do with what can or should be taught.”
When I talk about the value of tests, I’m referring to good tests, tests that have to do with what’s actually taught, tests that contain interesting and valuable material. Standardized tests (particularly the ELA tests) fall far short of that. Still, some are better than others. I consider NAEP a bit better and more informative than the New York State ELA tests, for instance.
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NAEP tests have the great virtue of being no-stakes. No score is reported for individual students or schools. Also, no student takes an entire test.
But NAEP has a considerable number of multiple-choice questions no different from those on the New York ELA. The “constructed response” questions require a sentence or two. As an indicator, NAEP is good enough. As a test of individual students, not good at all.
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worth noting about how standardized tests represent child abuse: for at least some standardized high stakes tests the instructions for administration include what to do if the testee (aka the child) vomits on the test.
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Ya think?
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People, including other teachers in my own building, think I am crazy when I refer to the testing we do as child abuse. Glad to know I’m in such good company!
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I not only think this constant testing to be child abuse, I think it to be teacher abuse. Teachers are not allowed to do what they know best.
Interesting word “childism”.
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I worked at a mostly middle class suburban high school where many of the high school kids, good students, honor students really, became intensely upset, got exhausted and even cried during standardized testing week. They would come to my special ed. class where they were assistants and just sit numbed out. One of the girls said the system had destroyed her creativity by the 3rd grade. This kind of thing could not possibly be that important.
Testing is also teacher abuse because it keeps teachers from teaching. Why not confine test training to one period a day in the computer lab going over every concept taught on the test if the standardized testing has to occur and let the rest of the day be filled with education instead? The computerized materials could be designed to review what each student was weak in and address that more heavily until they responded appropriately. That would also take the teachers off the hook for test scores. Probably why the politicians don’t want to do it. They would rather blame the teachers for poor achievement.
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