Mr. Illich, Standardized Tests, and the Consumer Index

Much that happens in our schools today is defined by measurable objectives. In fact, measurable objectives seem to define who we are as individuals and as a people: who has how much and how can we get more. It's difficult to know how we got started down this road as a culture, or why it's so hard to recognize the flaws in the current belief among many that the way to save our nation from economic ruin is to get more people buying things. Is it what we can measure that will save us, or those qualities that can't be measured: compassion, creativity, justice for all, and a sense of responsibility based on the welfare of all rather than special interests?

Perhaps we should rethink our approach to education where measurable objectives in the form of standardized testing have taken the humanity out of learning. In 1970, Ivan Illich wrote, "People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or "be" themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made."

Millions of dollars are spent on self-help books and motivational speakers across the social and business worlds. Perhaps, we ought to change the way we educate our children and save ourselves a lot of time, money, and personal angst. Perhaps the crisis in America is not economic but spiritual. Over the last fifty years, the arts and humanities have been so denigrated that today in many schools, more than thirty thousand years of what it means to be human have been reduced to an occasional elective. Certainly, we don't want to go back to the open classroom of the seventies where students wandered about schools defining their own courses of study. But discipline and scientific thinking not the antithesis of creativity and compassion. Or rather, they shouldn't be. The challenge is to achieve a balance so that the measurable and unmeasurable can inform one another.

How could the rejection of the unmeasurable qualities of the human spirit not have contributed to the divisiveness plaguing our political system and the greed that motivates our financial system? Where will all the social networking get us if we don't know how to work together as a people to solve the problems that threaten our wellbeing as individuals and as a people?