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Or consider the dramatic increase in recent decades of standardized testing in U.S. public schools. Critics argue that these tests are ill-suited for giving a comprehensive account of students’ learning; that they incentivize “teaching to the test” instead of developing thinking skills and encouraging real understanding; and that they transform public schooling into a factory-like system of mass instruction detrimental to freedom and creativity. In Ellul’s way of thinking, once the technique of standardized testing is in place, the primary concern for everyone involved becomes improving the means of learning so as to meet the standards, while the ends of learning — the ultimate purposes of educating our young — move out of sight. (Neil Postman, influenced by Ellul, made a related argument in his 1996 book The End of Education.) Also, the tests help create a large complex of interrelated forces and technologies that are autonomous of families, teachers, and students: political initiatives and laws, bureaucrats, test producers and publishers, test scoring technologies, test data analysis and statistics.

Confronting the Technological Society

audreywatters

via xkcd

audreywatters reblogged

robertogreco

Calvin and Hobbes, October 18, 1989 (more C&H)

audreywatters reblogged

robertogreco

“Let’s just say that with respect to education, the SAT is not just the tail that wags the dog. It has reshaped the dog’s breed, its appetite, its surroundings, and the lives of all those who care for it and feed it. It’s a striking example of colonization. A set of powerful quantitative observations, once again, create something of a Heisenberg Principle in which the scramble to make the grade utterly transforms the observational field. “Quantitative technologies work best,” Porter reminds us, “if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their own image.” It’s a fancy way of saying that the SAT has so reshaped education after its monochromatic image that what it observes is largely the effect of what itself has conjured up.”

—James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism (via Casey Gollan)

audreywatters

Gene Simmons in an OLPC ad (via Brian Lamb)

audreywatters

"Late"

The mist is blowing across the yard like smoke from a battle. I am so tired of the women doing dishes and how smart the men are, and how I want to bite their mouths and feel their hard cocks against me. The mist moves, over the bushes bright with poison ivy and black berries like stones. I am tired of the children, I am tired of the laundry, I want to be great. The fog pours across the underbrush in silence. We are sealed in. The only way out is through fire, and I do not want a single hair of a single head singed.

~ Sharon Olds

audreywatters

by Susie Cagle

audreywatters

via xkcd

audreywatters

Clown and cop: ridicule as protest

boingboing.net

audreywatters

Every aspect of industrial societies has become part of a larval system for escalating production and increasing the demand necessary to justify the total social cost. For this reason, criticism of bad management, official dishonesty, insufficient research, or technological lag distracts public attention from the one issue that counts: careful analysis of the basic structure of tools as means.

- Ivan Illich. Tools for Conviviality