It seldom ceases to amaze me how often I come across
arguments against some of the most damaging features in our education system
today, but that were made many decades ago. This would include one of the works
by British scholar Sir Richard Livingstone (1880-1960) written and published in
the throes of World War II. In two small books, The Future in Education (1941) and Education for a World Adrift (1943), Livingstone took exception to a lack
of education and tried to challenge his countrymen to look ahead towards a better
system of learning.
In the latter
publication, he challenged the growing use of what he calls “examinations” as a
driving force that in effect was steering education in the wrong direction.
These so-called examinations would be similar to our narrow state-mandated
“achievement” tests. The excerpts that follow were his key concerns addressed in a chapter appropriately titled, “Two Dragons in the Road”
(italics indicate direct quotations):
“The examination
system is both an opiate and a poison. It is an opiate because it lulls us into
believing that all is well when most is ill.”
On the surface, the public gets an impression from test
scores and graduation rates that “something
is clearly happening; the school is doing its job.”
“Something no doubt is
happening; but it may not be education; it may be the administration of a
poison which paralyses or at least slows down the natural activities of the
healthy mind. The healthy human being, finding himself a creature of unknown
capacities in an unknown world, wants to learn what the world is like, and what
he should be and do in it. To help him in answering these questions is the one
and only purpose of education.”
“But that is not the
prime aim of the ordinary pupil…for whom the examination becomes much more
important than seeing ‘visions of greatness,’ and ‘getting through’ excuses all
shortcomings and disguises all omissions.”
“Examinations are
harmless when the examinee is indifferent to their result, but as soon as they
matter, they begin to distort his attitude to education and conceal its purpose.
The more depends on them, the worse their effect.”
He claims that the child who is behind or may have a
learning disability “suffers most, since
preparing for the ordeal occupies more of its time and mind.” But also, for
even the student who is achieving at a higher level, “examinations become an obsession.”
“It is not only the
pupil but -- and this is far more serious -- the teacher, who finds his
energies and attention drawn from education to examination needs. No doubt
there are schools and teachers which resist the insidious pressure, teach their
subject for its interest and for nothing else and burn no incense on the
examination altar. But the pressure is hard. Most people judge a school by its
examination results. Its reputation, however well-established, is affected by
them; and a school with a name to make or competitors to face has an
overpowering temptation to commend itself to the world,” by striving
towards the highest test results and graduation rates.
“The teacher is
tempted to show his competence by securing a big list of awards, the headmaster
is tempted to demand them in the interest of the school.”
“Any evils that might
follow from the disappearance of examinations are nothing to the harm they do.
They are in fact a refined form of the old and now universally condemned system
of ‘payment by results:’ … tak(ing) the form of prestige to the school and to
the pupil.”
The examination system and its system of awards and
punishments “restrict(s) the field of
education by causing schools to concentrate on ‘profitable’ subjects….They
procure ‘far to frequently mechanical results….Subjects can have meaning only
as they are treated as aspects of active and living experience….It is as
impossible to examine in the most vital parts of education as to anatomize life
on a dissecting table, and therefore the pressure of examinations continually
pushes them into the background or out of sight. Further, it tends to restrict
education to the subjects of the examination in question…”
“Unfortunately there
is a risk of the importance of examinations increasing….And if so, education
becomes a savage competitive system. It ceases to be education and (simply) becomes a
road to a career.”
