Calls to Action: Noam Chomsky on the dangers of standardized testing
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ม.ค. 2015
- “The assessment itself is completely artificial," Chomsky asserts. "It’s not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who will reach their potential . . . It’s turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank."
Video by On the Earth productions.
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I’m 17 and in high school. Somehow this 90 year old man is more in touch with my situation than the majority of people in government.
Because chomsky gives a shit unlike the state
Noam Chomsky has the best sweaters.
This guy gets it!
+rogersterlingonlsd2 I feel like this ought to be the real Guy Fawkes mask. Just wear a hearty sweater and answer no questions in sound bite format... you know, instead of blowing up parliament. That'd be a great way to stop traffic too. No chants or slogans, just a mob of people in sweaters speaking just below normal conversational volume exhaustively about topics relating to human dignity and the ideals of any sane human being opposed to oppression.
He even wore one with the UN presentation (a thin one with a suit) - lol !
Warm and cozy
Maybe he hates paying ludicrously high heating bills...i know i do.
in my own experience, the people i know who were obsessed with standardized grades in high school are the people who start flunking in college or end up have some sort of major crisis leading to questioning their entire life path
the only thing that can prepare you for an environment where professors genuinely want to teach you is having teachers who genuinely want to teach you, and not have you memorize strategies for acing tests
i am actually glad i never gave a shit about my grades and scores when i was a kid. sure, i definitely wasn't accepted into the ivy leagues, but i spent my time reading and learning about things that i was really interested in. that's what developing as a person is about.
TRANSCRIPT - please UPVOTE - slightly edited for readability *
Take what's happening in education: right now - the last recent years - there's a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers. So that you have to teach the tests.
And the test determines what happens to the child and what happens to the teacher
That's GUARANTEED to destroy any meaningful educational process. It means a teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual student's needs.
The student can't pursue things that - maybe some kid is interested in something - can't do it because you got to memorize something for this test tomorrow. And the teacher's future depends on it as well as the student's.
These are all ways of ….- you know the people who are sitting in the offices - the bureaucrats - and are designing this: Like you say they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful.
[Cut in the video]
First of all: you don't have to assess people all the time. I mean if a person is kind of doing their job, kids are getting along, things are fun - go ahead….
I mean people are not being ranked in terms of some artificial …. the assessment itself is completely artificial. It's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children, who reach their potential, explore their creative interests, and so on.
Those things can't - you're not testing. So you're giving some kind of a rank, but it's a rank that's mostly meaningless.
And the very ranking itself is harmful.
It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important
It's - it's highly destructive at the lower ….let's say elementary education. So you're training kids this way and it's very harmful, I could see with my own children. When my own kids were in Elementary School. What's called a good school, you know good quality, suburban school - by the time they were in third grade they were dividing up their friends into the dumb and smart. Your are dumb if you are lower tracked, you are smart if your upper tracked.
I mean: think what that does to the children ? Doesn't matter where they are tracked. The children who take it seriously …. like we could kind of, you know, help them not take it seriously. But if you're caught up in that, it's just extremely harmful.
And has nothing to do with education. Education is: develop your own potential and creativity. I mean maybe you're not going to do well in school and you'll do great in art. That's fine, you know, what's wrong with that. It's another way to be a - to live a fulfilling, a wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself.
The whole idea - first it is wrong in itself and it's harming. It's creating a kind of - it's kind of a system of creating something that's called "economic man".
There's a concept of economic man which is, you know, economics literature and so on - and economic man is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his own status.
And status means basically wealth. So you rationally calculate what kinds of choices you should make to increase your wealth. And you don't pay any attention to anything else. Or maybe maximize the number of goods you have, because that's what you can measure, those are things you can measure.
If you do that properly, you know, you're a kind of a rational person making informed judgments.
You can improve your- what's called your human capital. You know, what you can sell on the market. What kind of a human being is that. Is that the kind of human being you want to create ?
And the all of these mechanisms that you're describing like, you know, testing assessing, evaluating, measuring - they force people to have, to develop those characteristics. The ones that don't do it are as a considered maybe behavior problems, or some some other deviants. Maybe, something goes wrong then they drop out and maybe try to survive on drugs or something.
That's ….or take if it's in Mexico they become what is called illegal immigrants because you've driven them off the land.
These things have - these ideas and concepts have consequences, and it's not just that they're ideas. There are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them.
The public relations industry advertising and marketing and so on. It's a huge industry. It's maybe a sixth of gross domestic product. And it's a propaganda industry.
It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being. One who can maximize consumption and can disregard these actions on others. It's massive ! It starts with infants. Yeah.
In fact it was a number of study recently which made some publicity about the advertisers discovered, realized that there's a segment of the population that they're not reaching. You have to reach everyone.
But there was a segment they weren't reaching: children. Because children don't have incomes.
So the advertisers had sort of not targeted them. But some smart guy realized that you can get the children to be consumers by inducing them to nag their parents.
So a branch of psychology developed literally ! in the universities in Applied Psychology.
Psychology of Nagging: how you can nag this way if you want that thing, and you can nag the other way if you don't want the other, and so on.
And you take a look at …I remember watching television with my grandchildren when they were little. The deluge with propaganda that tells them: You've got to have this $400 mechanical something or other. So make your, get your parents do it, get them to understand that you're just not going to be - you're going to be miserable, and your friends will hate you, and your life won't be worthwhile unless you get this thing.
That's what our culture is designed to do, and it's a huge industry. Actually in the early days, back in the 1920s it was called propaganda. The major text of the PR industry by one of its gurus, Edward Bernays back in the 20s was called Propaganda and that's what it was.
We don't call it that anymore, the word propaganda has a kind of a bad connotation, so it's called - I don't know what, but it's exactly the same thing
Noam Chomsky sometimes starts a sentence - and than reframes the statement and jumps to the next sentence (which is then usually a complete and grammatically correct sentence) - I expressed such switches with "...." or with " - ".
I left out some filler words, or a meaningless repetition of a word, or some "you know". However, I tried to stay as true to the spoken word (especially the content) as possible.
The paragraphs have no special meaning - just to structure the text and make it easier readable.
Noam Chomsky with some food for thought - as always. (When you search with "Edward Bernays Propaganda" interesting seach results pop up. - So much for the "Free Market" where informed customers make free, informed and rational choices. (Another argument that I heard from N.C., always useful when in discussions with libertarians and "free market" zealots)
Xyz Same thanks!
You did the lord's works...thank you so much
Excellent. Chomsky's argument reinforces why the Green Party of England and Wales has an education policy that would abolish SATs, league tables and performance related pay.
Exactly my feeling. It's herd education. Shovel some 'students' in, and pump them out without much consideration over education.
I love learning and reading. I absolutely hate exams.
It took me six failed jobs(and me walking out on every single one of them) from 17-21 years of age to realise that this man is spot on...therefore leading me down the path of working for myself in Business(two businesses over thirty years..then a third).
But those first two Businesses were purely practice for what was about to happen to me creatively speaking on the third.
1. Catering Business.
2. Cleaning Business.
3. ..................................Professional Songwriter.
Good luck to anybody who discovers ABILITY....in any creative area.It's well worth the discovery.
Sonic Foxx,
SONIC FOXX MUSIC.
Be Happy is the objective in life, and spread the love.
This is exactly why I opened up a private school. This reaffirms the work I do with the kids at Oak Crest Academy! Thank you Noam Chomsky!
Orofessor Noam Chomsky is our conscience. Yes, we ought to abolish the system of education that enphasizes testing, quantifying and ranking rather than creative exploration and joy of learning.
Inspiring words for me. Thanks for the video
I remember that we learned about the homo oeconomicus in my school. But it was only described with a short text on a paper without a comment from the teacher.
Thank goodness for clear thinkers! I'm posting this on Success Parenting Facebook page.
Grades undermine peoples independence, it makes them focus on the arbitrary commands of authority for valuation and guidance, and not to listen to their own inner sense of right and wrong, true and false, sense and nonsense and so on.
In essence it is an attack on freedom and human nature it self, it is about turning us into machines, efficient machines for our corporate overloads.
Bingo -psychological slavery and blind obedience !!! This is how I have felt for the last 70 years !!!
I've always felt that advertizing to children is fundamentally immoral. These are individuals who have yet to develop what we recognize throughout all societies mostly the ability to rationally make meaningful decisions. Advertizing to them clearly is designed to override this non existent judgment. Its designed to do this to mature adults, so to do it to someone who lacks the cognitive maturity to parse this kind of attack on their self worth when you really examine its implications makes it so that the term _child abuse_ almost feels reasonable as a description.
You wouldn't hesitate to brand it this way if it were about explicit indoctrination into even fairly reasonable mainstream ideologies, so why does it end with consumerism? Well, that's the programming of the adults that makes that seem reasonable I suppose.
This man has perspective on what is happening.
Very astute. A great combination of buckminster Fuller Marshall mcluhan Bertrand Russell, etc
QUESTION: Could we support a standardized test ONLY for the basis of say, selection into schools (since they are an IQ proxy) while still reducing
the stupid and useless standardized testing used to “demonstrate”
or “measure”
learning which do absolutely nothing and make people suffer and learn less??
Does anyone have a written version of this? Would be very helpful thanks!
see my Transcript for the video clip Noam Chomsky on the dangers of standardized testing - I know it's been 3 years - well Noam Chomsky is as relevant as ever (and that applies to his older texts and speeches as well).
I scored high but I was criminalized because of my personality by teachers, cops etc....This is a weird world we live in actually 🎭
Oh Noam...I love you! Thanks for speaking out against the standardized tests that are killing our kids learning potential.
I think I love this man. 🤔
First, you cannot have a valid assessment without first having an evaluation of what is important. After you have decided what is important you must rank those items so that the most important things are in the test. It follows that what someone knows and can demonstrate are the items that should be assessed, however any assessment that is meaningful must be done en vitro - that is in context and with the subject using the tools she would naturally have. It should be obvious from this description that what has become known as standardized tests fail to accomplish this task.
Different things are important for different individuals.
It's also the School that's graded on many of these tests. For instance, the SAGE test ranks a school first on how many students have taken the test. If less than 90 percent of students don't take the test, then a school's grade drops 50 percent. Opt-outs aren't even counted! How can smaller schools continue with a model like this? Perhaps the government doesn't want smaller schools to continue at all?
Someone knows where I can find the text version of this?
see my Transcript for the video clip Noam Chomsky on the dangers of standardized testing - and propaganda aka marketing and advertising - I know it's been 3 years - well Noam Chomsky is as relevant as ever (and that applies to his older texts and speeches as well).
chomsky has become my new hero - for the much needed big picture
I love you Noam
The problem with Chomsky is that he's usually right... And when you look at politics, business, and society overall through his eyes it can turn one into a doomer.
He has spoken eloquently om pessimism
I believe that standardized testing is good to assess in general how various schools are doing but it should not be used directly and as the main source for grading but to get insight in how good the education system works as a whole and in specific places and maybe be used as a tool to discover where a school is consistently teaching incorrectly or insufficiently.
Correct
I'm sympathetic to his point but what do you replace it with? Standardized testing has an inbuilt bias there's no doubt about that but for students who get good at them they have a chance to get into good schools and have good careers even if they come from a low social economic background(obviously luck is still involved since there's all kinds of other disadvantages when you come from a poor/working class background). Nonstandardized it self adds a lot of subjective and personal bias in terms of the teachers, university admissions and the like. How do you get rid of standardized testing but keep admissions,awards and the like fair? I'm genuinely asking not just trying to be a contrarian.
I think the argument would be that you keep it for entrance into academia (and entrance testing for any other institution where it would be beneficial), but that is likely inhibiting growth in primary and secondary education.
I did not so good in schools.
But it turns out I have a high IQ. So, I agree with him here. School should be about developing a kid's interest in something and watching it grow, that way, even if the kid is "low IQ" or whatever, he can still contribute naturally to better society. As his natural drive in the subject may help him uncover something most wouldn't have.
Noam is spot-on once again! If anyone wishes to educate themselves further on this extremely vital topic, look up "Alfie Kohn".
The sweater plays. Sam Harris cannot rock a sweater. Or tweed.
What does Sam Harris have to do with this?
Asian education intensifies
Yes, but they often report the lowest on happiness surveys, for years the US only allowed entry to Asian immigrants who were educated, and Asian males have one of the highest suicide rates relative to population.
@@timeisup3094 That was my point thou
the sad thing when a child has to go through a standardized test , it is very stressful and does not help in making the process of learning appealing to them . !!
Neil Postman had this developed in many of his books. The consequences will be there.
What does it mean to be truly educated www.goodreads.com/quotes/7360975-what-does-it-mean-to-be-truly-educated-i-think
see my Transcript for the video clip Noam Chomsky on the dangers of standardized testing - and propaganda aka marketing and advertising
Noam Chomsky is right. Rene Guenon said the same things but in different words.
I respect Chomsky a lot, and think we're blessed to have his insights, so please don't come down on me here. But what about the reality that we live in a meritocracy? Sometimes hard decisions need to be made in society, do we really want dummies in positions of decision-making power? Do we really want idiots performing brain surgery? I realize that standardized tests have a lot of limitations. But don't they at least provide us with some more or less firm idea as to who is competent and who isn't?
if that is true, then we'd only have to take a single standardized test in our lifetimes when we graduate from the public school system, and that is indeed what is done in many european countries. i (an american) remember taking standardized tests since at least 3rd grade, which is pointless... the time i spent learning how to fill in bubbles on a sheet would have been better used for some cool history lesson
Not always. Competency doesn't always correlate with how well you do on standardized tests but could also be based on a multitude of other factors such as project based learning, G.P.A/classwork, portfolios, oral demonstrations, writing, practical skills/job experience(which is rarely ever a requirement in a school curriculum for some odd reason), etc..... Just look up examples of democratic education like the Sudbury School or Ian Mirkardo: th-cam.com/video/FR0_sZtCfJ0/w-d-xo.html The point Chomsky makes is that unless you use it as a guidance in gauging progress of a student, standardized testing as a high stakes assessment only undermines the merit of the growth in learning and education but rather egotistically fuels the intellectual inadequacies of achievement-based reputation that students will anxiously feel. It's the inherent difference between education vs reputation where such tests focus on the later. In fact, plenty of the world's influential leaders and educators have done miserably on standardized tests such as Al Gore or George Bush, the man who is a proponent of NCLB ,mind you. So standardized testing has become more of a bureaucratic loop hole for status rather then simply just a way of measuring competency or meritocracy. Plus, using high-stakes standardized testing creates a harmful confirmation bias on ideological views of intelligence and those questions you asked further support that bias. The fact that it has a lot of limitations shows why shouldn't have critical importance in the state of education or someone's futuristic ultimatum.
What do you have against ranking students on performance? "If someone is sort of doing their job... it's fine, you know..." No, I don't know what you are talking about Mr. Communist professor of Linguistics who lived in a kibbutz, If someone is doing their job poorly then it is not fine.