Number One Son attends a US public school, and thus has learned that the official answer must be given to any test question, and truth or falsehood has no bearing on this requirement. School administration these days is all about punishing deviance from arbitrary rules, and any other lessons learned can generally be credited to teachers who are successfully subverting the system.
Blogger Rob Krampf, however, was dismayed to learn that the standardized tests used in the US State of Florida are completely inadequate for testing knowledge or intelligence, and only measure conformance to authoritarian stupidity. You can read about it here. I guess Mr. Krampf never read The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher.
I don’t find it at all comforting to know that Florida’s state educational system is at least as poorly run as my local public schools. I hope Mr. Krampf can make a difference… Richard Feynman didn’t have a lot of luck, and he was a nobel-prize winning physicist.
Most of the USA is still firmly in the grip of the “zero tolerance” madness that started after the Columbine schoolyard shootings became a national obsession. In California, children can literally be expelled or suspended for rolling their eyes at a school administrator. One assumes the disproportionate number of minorities targeted for such actions is because California minorities are often dark-skinned, and it’s easier to see the whites of their eyes? But it’s not just California schools that have prioritized obedience over learning:
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Six year old expelled for a hobo pocketknife
Louisiana 3rd grader suspended for drawing a picture of a knife
High school honor student suspended for accidentally picking up father’s lunchbox
The base principle of “zero tolerance” is a hatred for teaching; when presented with a “teaching moment”, that provides a perfect opportunity for increasing the intellectual capacities of the student, one must apply sufficiently harsh punishment to overcome the benefits of any learning that might take place.