Education is Not a Race
Welcome back to Anarchist Hot Takes! Third week of a hot take in a row!
If there's one thing that I think traps us in our current, disastrous system more than anything else, it's bullshit jobs. But flowing into bullshit jobs is the meritocracy. And the meritocracy just keeps getting worse and worse.
I have kids in elementary school - one just finished third grade and one finished kindergarten - which means that my wife and I just got a barrage of paperwork about their progress in school. School progress in the US, thanks to George W. Bush, pretty much means test scores in math and reading. That's about it. Both kids got a report card which had scores of 1-4 on all the traditional school subjects (math, reading, science, social studies, etc), and then pages and pages of testing information for math and reading. Apparently, 3rd grade and even kindergarten is endless math and reading tests.
And the goal, of course, is to be at or above grade level, grade level being determined by age. So although my kids are at school for something like 180 days of the year, making friends (and enemies), playing, learning French, doing art, making music, and everything else that education could or should be, the only thing that the school is really focused on is whether or not their math and reading scores are higher or lower than an imaginary "average" student of the same age.
This is utter nonsense! All of it is nonsense. First of all, test scores may or may not do a good job measuring what they are testing, but once they become a target, they cease to be a good measure. So you can ignore the test scores.
Secondly, it's impossible to know what score a 3rd grader should get to be average. The only tool we have to determine what scores a 3rd grader should have is, well, testing 3rd graders. Even if the tests were accurate, they can't actually tell you how well a 3rd grader should be reading, and they definitely can't tell you how well any particular individual who happens to be in 3rd grade could be reading, all else being equal.
And finally, the whole thing becomes an absurd race, in which the goal is not to learn, and not even to get high test scores, but to get higher test scores than the other kids. As we are preaching kindness and cooperation to our children, and that everyone matters, and all people are equal, we are not just testing them but systematically ranking them. The most important number on all the math and reading scores isn't the score, but the percentile - how many other students that age did your kid beat? When it comes to test scores, winning really is everything! (And the best students will, sometime after college and grad school, get the best jobs - which are also most likely to be bullshit).
And the testing race is all that education professionals can see, because they have sadly internalized the metrics. Since at least the 2022 article in The Atlantic called "Redshirt the Boys," people have been trying to deal with the fact that girls are outscoring boys in kindergarten by suggesting that boys should start kindergarten later, so they'll be able to compete with the girls on a level playing field. There was a recent NYTimes article about it called "Should Boys Start Kindergarten a Year Later Than Girls" that gives all the pros and cons, except that nowhere in the article is there any suggestion that kindergarten shouldn't be a testing frenzy of all against all. None of the experts consulted suggested that the problem might lie not with the age of the boys but, you know, with the fact that kindergarten has become a test prep factory.
Luckily, this was one of the articles that the Times deigned to let internet denizens comment on. And the most upvoted comment, by a user named ksquared who identified themself as a student, says:
This article brings up some interesting points, but a universal policy of redshirting boys seems like a blunt instrument. Instead of holding boys back, wouldn't it be better to focus on making kindergarten more play-based and supportive of different developmental timelines for all children, regardless of gender? We need to look at what's causing the gap in the first place and address those issues directly.
As long as the goal of education is testing and sorting, however, ksquared's suggestion makes no sense. If different kids have different needs and abilities, and they develop on different timelines, then testing and ranking all kids makes no sense. Taking ksquared's obvious question seriously would require the educational system to first admit that it has no clothes. That doesn't seem very likely to happen.
