The Myth of Mastery

Student gains, as if we are building robots ourselves out of our own posterity, missing the most important elements inherent in humanness: chaos and complexity.  So much in education rests upon the pillars of The Enlightenment, to the extent that it's cliche to say.  With the hard science, along with our great industrialized heritage, students are measured, tracked for progress, and never understood.  Understanding them doesn't register as high on the list of importance as tracking.

Data collection has replaced the need, also the incentive, to get to know students face to face--their backgrounds, home life, and complex mental makeup.  Some of our students are terrifyingly misaligned and unprepared to face the challenges waiting.  Science grants us a Pyrrhic victory: teachers feel proud to have taught a student to bubble the correct response on a test, but does this demonstrate education--let alone mastery?  As technology replaces philosophy, the quest for truth, justice, and authentic love, we make a trade off.

Students who gain "knowledge" by semester's end, will have proudly stated he/she learned something.  But how quickly is the content forgotten?  The data make it seem as though students have learned, when really this cannot be proven by assessment.  It becomes a Russian doll complex--exactly, who is collecting data on the data?  Who assesses our assessments?  Who judges the judge?  These questions are not raised because science, in all its promised objective splendor, sees to it that no meddling is involved in the process of measurement.  The complexity of human interaction, the sheer misunderstandings of a growing, expanding, maturing mind, is given into the hands of first, science--and sooner than later, autobots.  In our solution-oriented status, we gladly give over the cognitive load of complex thinking to a system with its inherent flaws.  To a system that isn't measuring a child, but a shadow.      

One of the more humorous, and not readily discussed, aspects of data collection is when a student actually performs worse on a test than he/she did from a few weeks ago.  Do you mean the student actually got worse by sitting in my classroom, listening to my instruction that I worked year after year perfecting?  How could this be?  As teachers, we quickly search comfort in other students' scores.  "Ah, yes," we say with analytic glee, "here's a couple who I taught well."