edumacation

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2008/05/21/2008-05-21_bronx_8thgraders_boycott_practice_exam_b-1.html

Why was this not a bigger story. I'd like to also know what the outcome of it has been, should anyone be following it. When I have more time, I will look into the particulars.

While the story makes it sound like the protest was organized or suggested by a corrupting teacher, that to me actually seems like a good idea. Teaching to standardized tests has no basis on how people learn nor is it an effective method of education. People can very easily learn techniques to cram information into their short term memories and then "forget" what they learned a few minutes after. I've seen people try to cram vocabulary words for SATs for example. What's the point? What the tests were originally designed for is to measure the relative academic meritocracy of individuals who have some academic aptitude (as determined by college admissions boards that is). Not to enforce upon people a standardized means of education.

In any case, this silly notion has actually gained credibility in BOTH political parties. Meaning our education system is probably good and fucked for the foreseeable future. I realize there is importance in defining a 'bad' school district or 'bad' teachers and some reason to hold such things accountable. However, in the absence of meaningful educational choices for parents (and their children), such accountability is worthless. We have such choices in some level for college, made more flexible by the awarding of scholarships or financial aid.

Somehow this meritocracy system for college has not translated downward. Instead we are infected socially with the ideas that 1) all children are inherently capable of being academically valuable. and 2) all schools are/should be equally capable of creating this in a uniform and standardized way. The first notion is quite obviously idiotic. People are naturally different in their skills and developmental abilities, and of course, our social system is set up to repress actual academia (despite parental wishes for future Nobel laureates). And the second problem is that schools should not be uniform. It should be rather easy to compare to one another, yes. But there are methods to compare universities to one another without them using the same basic means of imparting knowledge and experience to their respective student bodies (namely that some schools are known for specific strains of academic thought). Why can't we somehow adopt a similar notion for primary education beyond the basic necessities (which ought to be done by elementary school anyway, certainly by middle school).