‘Potential’ … Love and hate that word. Human potential is the great hope of mankind. And yet, who knows what a student’s potential is? I don’t, even after 30 years experience in the classroom. Can a student do better? Maybe. According to the latest conventional wisdom the high school adolescent brain can only do so much at this point in their development in any case. Boys, for example, lack judgment and empathy in their teen years and, some say, this isn’t fully developed until they reach their middle to late 20’s. This makes it easier to put young men in uniform and ship them off to idealistic battle, oops, inner voice leaking out again.
Where do we begin to determine a student’s ‘potential’? Of course the teacher presiding over each level of the student’s progress can give anecdotal advice, but this has been largely downplayed and discredited by the rationalists and this ‘unreliable’ subjective evaluation as wholly unacceptable. Empirical, dispassionate, evidence of a student’s potential is the universal benchmark these days, that means number grades. Grades made up from quizzes, tests, graded class work, all euphemistically and unemotionally called ‘assessment’, will be collected and averaged to create the benchmark. We have been indoctrinated with this for many generations now and have come to expect, know and believe this as accurate in showing what a student has done with their ‘potential’. However, this ‘grade’ does not indicate a student’s further potential into the future.
Teachers intuitively know these grades to be inaccurate so massage them with weightings and other devious methods to give the student the best advantage possible. The issue is that averages are just that, average. And within the mathematically objective process of averaging, disappears the flashes of brilliance, the disasters, the good days and the bad, the motivations and the boredom, that all of us recognize exists as something we know as life. There exists the conflict of objectification of a subject; that is, taking a vague, undefinable, action or thought, sense or feeling and turning it into a quantity, affixing a value. Put a value on love; love a little is a 1, love a lot is a 5 and sort out the other values as you see fit, make it arbitrary rather than fluid. You can’t average it otherwise.
So, what is it about ‘assessment’ then? Is it the almost arbitrary nature of objectifying subject matter, whether formative or summative, the student either gets it or not, or the over emphasis on a device that really does not measure much in regards to a students education and what goes on in their mind?
As well, collected marks, among different objectified subjects, averaged together to ‘give’ a student a benchmark of their averaged ability is completely inaccurate in determining what the ‘potential’ of a young individual human being may be for the future. If anything demonstrates that student learning cannot be addressed via an empirical rationalist means it would be here. Indeed, any attempt to claim that a prediction to a student’s potential is accurate and true is ludicrous when all known variables, let alone the unknowable, are taken into account. Yet, these averages and potentials are the stock in trade in any conversation regarding education.
All forms of assessment are isolated snapshots, orchestrated by the instructor, of a moment in time that becomes the past as soon as its done of a student’s learning or ability as it progresses forward. I hope you see the problem here. If, presumably, one learns progressively, for regressively would be to unlearn and statically would be to halt, an assessment is always about the past, never about the future. After all one cannot test for what one does not know now but may in the future. We only assess for what one has done and to what level and is really no means of an accurate predictor of what may be learned or of interest in the future. So, then, assessment and its relative importance are to be regarded with high skepticism not blind faith.
Assessments are dependent on what the instructor wants to see in the answers to the questions, which is further framed by the overall expectations of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA’s) within the prescribed curriculum as set out by government as representative of the needs of society, further framed again, by special interests, business and labour markets as well as post secondary requirements, that determine what the societal needs are for the community of their children in later life. This is social engineering for perhaps individualistic, democratic and capitalistic characteristics or as cheap, docile, obedient labour, or superior technical skills for the industrial and space races, or for patriotism, national identity and nationalism. Perhaps all of that is considered important in a societally stratified, powerful state.
In any case, test results are dependent on the emotional/rational moment in time of the student as many internal and external factors are at play at any given moment. Physiology, psychology, cause and effect, life, in other words all have an effect on a students ability to write a test at any given moment. As with the NASA training of chimps before going into space, over the years the students ‘irrational’ fears are trained out of them in order to deal with these rational tests.
No experienced teacher who has seen 10 years worth of students in their classroom puts too much stock in assessments for other than a rudimentary sample of a young persons knowledge and abilities and says nothing about what any one student may learn in the future. However, outside the experienced teacher’s classroom, assessments are used to artificially stratify students in a class system hierarchy of ability, which will supposedly mirror their place in greater society and supposedly help them, and others, make choices to fit in to those places.
Assessments are also used to ensure teachers follow the proscribed curriculum created by that greater society in order to ensure it’s self perpetuation. In fact, assessments themselves have become the means of pointing to an outcome of a minimum standard of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA’s) attainment by any student and it is this simple exposure to the KSA’s themselves that is all a state requires to maintain and perpetuate itself for many generations at a time, it is the mysterious hidden curriculum spoken about in such hushed tones in the university education classes. And in any and every case these assessments are only an average outcome that says nothing about the real significance of statistical outliers and may in fact serve to keep them ‘average’ or outcast as anomalies.
All in all it is a most unfortunate situation for all involved that normal learning development of youth cannot be allowed to naturally occur. ‘Potential’, then, would have a completely different connotation and a more positive one at that. But large society is not a ‘state of nature’, it is rather a construct of KSA’s that a community commits to. To say that students should be able to head out and learn whatever they want, whenever they want, to finally do whatever they want is far too anarchic for those older members of government, business and labour of society who have finally reached a measure of power and control over their own lives and society. Government doesn’t really want autonomous thinkers, neither does business or any other social organization of humanity. Visionary thinkers, yes, but not too visionary and not autonomous. Galileo’s experience some 500 years ago remains a cautionary tale to this very day.
It would seem it is time for the levels of society to admit finally, and clearly for once that education, as it fits in today’s society, is a process implemented upon our youth to socialize, stratify and emulate the existing society and to maintain and perpetuate it as purposefully as possible. It follows the naturalistic philosophy of classical liberalism that struggle and competition, as demonstrated by nature, makes one more able to achieve, than if allowed to develop solely by nurture in a safe, caring and sympathetic social environment. This argument is nearly 400 years old with no sign of resolution in sight.