The Progressive Magazine has posted this interview with Noam Chomsky, in which the founder of modern linguistics explains why standardized testing in k-12 education is bad. According to Chomsky “tests that determine what’s going to happen to students and what’s going to happen to teachers is guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process.” Tests give kids “a rank that’s mostly meaningless, and really ranking itself is harmful. It’s turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank. … When my own kids were in elementary school … by the time they were in the third grade they were dividing up their friends into dumb and smart.”
Well, if we were all geniuses like Noam Chomsky, maybe some of this would be true, although Noam himself has never been too shy about dividing up the world between the smart (himself) and the dumb (everyone who disagrees with him). I could also note that his “sample” (his kids) graduated from high school long before “No Child Left Behind” created the new world of standardized testing back in 2002. But let’s take a moment to imagine this pristine, non-ranking Eden that Noam imagines is within our reach, a world where
No one would laugh at you for being fat
No one would laugh at you for being dumb
No one would laugh at you for speaking with a southern accent
No one would laugh at you for not speaking with a southern accent
No one would beat you up for being black
No one would beat you up for being white
No one would beat you up for having killed Christ
No one would beat you up for having bombed the Twin Towers
Well, you get the picture. It’s called Original Sin, Noam. And it wasn’t invented by standardized testing.
