The same day the Commission on the Future of Higher Education approved its final report, news broke of the foiled terrorist plot to bomb U.S-bound airplanes. Could there be a connection between the way we train our youth and how successful we will be in making peace with the rest of the world? If the Commission’s recommendations are carried out, the United States is in trouble.
According to the commission, universities “should measure student learning” with standardized tests. This oversimplified No Child Left Behind solution will not work to create a generation of problem-solvers and creative thinkers. Ironically, the inadequate recommendation is designed to ensure that universities produce adults capable of competing in a global economy.
As laudable as the goal is, increasing “accountability” in the form of testing will do to our higher academic institutions exactly what NCLB has done to our high schools: force teachers to teach to the test, and teach students that the goal is memorization and competence, not inventiveness and creativity.
How has the United States retained its global supremacy when some other nations have lengthened the school day and required students to pass rigorous, high-stakes test? We stay on top because we allow students to dream, to pursue idiosyncratic fields of study, to discover their inner geniuses.
Will standardized testing produce another Bill Gates? The unexpected benefit of quirky thinkers like Gates is that occasionally, after they have revolutionized an industry through sheer inventiveness, they give some of their money back. In Gates’ case, his foundation has saved millions of the world’s children through immunization.
Diligent students who do well on tests are a pleasure to have in the classroom, but are they the ones who will be able to change the world? Alter the path that has led us to our war-torn and terrorist-threatened society?
The report has many excellent suggestions: among them, additional support for low-income students, green cards for foreign students who graduate and fewer increases in tuition.
Yet Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities and former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, had it exactly right when he declared, “What is needed is something much richer, with a more nuanced understanding of the educational engagement and how it is undertaken.”
A black-and-white solution is no solution at all. If some colleges are turning out students who can’t read and write effectively, then states should find ways to attract better faculty. But uniformity never has been, and never should be, the goal of higher education.
Was your own college experience measurable on a Scantron? Weren’t the courses that made you think and question your own assumptions the ones you carry with you? How can we measure the ability of a great class to unsettle its students?
Yet that’s what higher education, at its best, should be. Producing citizens who question intelligently is not easy, but it is the only way to effectively meet the challenges placed on us by our complex world situation.
A simple-minded measure will place value on simple-mindedness. A complex, nuanced view of education will continue to create those who think outside the box.
Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
