I’ve just started reading Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, so this isn’t a review. However, I was struck by this passage from the preface:

Philosophy is not the only subject that has been ’scientized’ by the modern university: literature has been shrunk to ‘literary theory,’ music has been colonized by set theory, Schenkerian analysis, and generative linguistics, and architecture has been all but abolished by engineering. Pretended science has driven honest speculation from the intellectual economy … (emphasis added)

Of course, Scruton has a different agenda in mind than the one you can already see coming if you’ve been reading this blog lately. Nevertheless, the application/implication seems clear and relevant.

The desire to “quantify” education, championed by the standardized testing push (indirectly but undeniably driven by NCLB), seems to me a “pretended science,” to use Scruton’s words, and has had an effect similar to the one he references: driving out honest speculation.

It’s not that some “quantifications” aren’t useful, it’s that we must be careful about how we determine them, what we understand them to mean, and how we use them. Most important, we must understand that quantified information is only a part of the educational picture. Otherwise we risk concluding that the figures are “the end of the inquiry,” thereby preventing any further speculation.

I know I keep digging at this, but that’s because: NCLB looms large on the educational horizon right now; what and how we think about assessment really does matter; and as much as I support accountability in education (for students and teachers), sloppy approaches grounded in flawed conceptions of the purposes of education are dangerous and can only serve to further reduce the educational system to uselessness (i.e., irrelevance to the present and future global community).

We must think carefully about these issues, not be afraid to dig into the complexity surrounding them, and maintain a constant awareness of the implications of our thinking. We must, in a word, continue to pursue honest speculation.

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