The Cookie Cutter Approach

Trey Smith

As I write this post (Monday), the teachers in Chicago have gone out on strike. While you might think the central issue is money, that's only a lesser part of the equation. The big sticking point concerns standardized testing and tying teacher's pay and their very jobs to the test scores of their students.

Though I am no Confucian scholar, from what I've read in the Confucian texts and various analyses of such, Confucius may well have supported this new educational strategy. Confucianism is a system of ethics brought about through education, the adherence to rituals and the following of rules of proper etiquette. Confucians feel that, with the right training, society can flourish because we will all learn what is right and wrong.

The Taoist sages, particularly Zhuangzi, bristled at this methodology. They contended that right and wrong are subjective and their values change from generation to generation and from society to society. Rather than focus on external norms, mores and rules, the Taoists suggested that the learning of virtue was more individualistic. We each must find our own path.

Needless to say, I side with the Taoists. This new fangled concentration on test scores is, in my mind, a cookie cutter approach to education. The goal seems to be to turn out multitudes of same shaped and sized cookies. Students aren't necessarily taught to think for themselves, but to regurgitate the dominant paradigm. It's a great strategy for turning out miniature robots who will not argue when they later are assigned a role as a little cog in the establishment machine.

In my view, the whole problem with a standardized anything is it pushes everyone towards a pre-defined position. In education, it discounts the notion that different people learn at different speeds and in different ways. While some students are proficient in rote memorization, others are not. Some students are more visual, while others learn better through auditory means.

For me, I learned best under those teachers and professors who taught me to look at issues and then thresh them out in my own mind. Rather than be instructed on WHAT to think, I was simply encouraged to think. Test and assignments were not graded based on "right answers," but by any answer a student submitted PROVIDED that it was well thought out and defended or documented.

While there will always be a place for some standardized testing, I much prefer an educational system that exposes students to a plethora of ideas and provides the tools to look at these ideas and concepts in a critical manner. My hope is that the students of the future will be appreciators of art (in all its various forms), knowledgeable about history (to aid society in moving forward and not repeating the same mistakes) and skilled thinkers and doers.