Why So Many Exams? A Marxist Response By Bertell Ollman I. The psychologist, Bill Livant, has remarked, When a swelled sees a beggar, he says the corpse isnt functional. When a Marxist does, he says it is. The same insight could be applied today to the entire argona of education. The learned journals as well as the popular media are full of studies documenting how small most students know and how fragile are their basic skills. The wawl heard almost everywhere is The system isnt working. Responding to this third estate complaint, conservativesâ"starting (but not revokeing) with the Bush Adminstrationâ" take away offered a share of reforms in which increased testing occupies the central place. The typical liberal and even radical response to this has been to demonstrate that such measures are not likely to have the desired effect. The assumption, of course, is that we all take more or less the same thing from a system of education, and that conservatives have simply made an error in the means they have chosen to attain our common end. that what if students are already receivingâ"more or lessâ"the sympathetic of education that conservatives favor? This would cast their proposals for reform in some other light. What if, as Livant points out in the case of beggars, the system is working?
The l7th century French philosopher, Pascal, noted that if you make children start out on their knees every day to pray, whatever their initial beliefs, they will end up believing in God. It seems that a practice repeat often enough, especially if it includes particular movements and emotions, can exercise an wicked effect on how and what we think. Didnt Marshall McLuhan warn us in the early years of T.V. that The medium is the message? What applies to praying and to watching T.V. applies as well to taking exams. If you make students at any round of the educational ladder take lots of exams, this will have at least as much influence on what they become as the kind of questions that are asked.... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website:
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