It's right to test learning by heart

Christopher Caldwell:

Professing himself an "enemy of those who would deprecate the study of French lesbian poetry", Michael Gove, the UK education secretary, told a gathering of the Independent Academies Association in London on Wednesday that education was not so much about what one learnt as how one learnt it. He wants more - and more rigorous - meritocratic tests. Mr Gove also wants more rote learning.

Examinations can indeed help merit-based power structures to topple privilege - but Mr Gove is wrong if he thinks they do so reliably. "In America," he says, "the use of scholastic aptitude tests opened up access to colleges which had in the past arbitrarily blocked minority students." That may have been true three-quarters of a century ago, when a numerus clausus kept Jews out of elite universities. Something different happens today. While the SAT has certainly helped some recent Asian immigrants, its general tendency is to decrease, not increase, diversity. Where that happens, politics usually requires that the SAT be ignored or played down.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 19, 2012 4:43 AM
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