A Mechanism of Domination

Starting the Critique

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea either while or after reading this post. At the risk of sounding like I’m blowing my own trumpet, let me just state that I have a really good test taking temperament. I have an excellent memory and am able to think on my feet. Moreover, I am rarely flustered by high pressure situations. However, I have reached a stage in life where I think that tests and exams are detrimental to student learning and health.

During my career spanning a few decades now, I have encountered students who were exceptionally brilliant. However, closed spaces and proximity to others gave them the heebie jeebies, which adversely affected how they fared during testing conditions. Someone may argue that most exam boards now have accommodations for students with special needs, be these learning needs or mental health needs. This is true. However, in many parts of the world, special needs are either not diagnosed effectively or are too expensive for the school to accommodate. If a school only has funds for one designated exam room, then expecting it to provide a separate room for each student with different needs is not just ridiculous, it is unjust.

Red Herrings

Some people may say that exams and tests help students develop time management, stress management, and critical thinking skills. I find these claims to be quite disingenuous. First, if the testing environment itself is generating the stress, then it’s not an environment that is developing stress management skills. That’s like saying that a bully helps you develop the skills to stand up for yourself! Indeed, this argument fails to address the issue of stress itself. Why are we okay with environments that create stress? After all, to say that a student must develop stress management skills in the context of exams is to say that the kind of stress developed in an exam is like what we would experience outside the exam. But this is evidently not true. I have experienced many stressful exams, but none of them were in any way helpful in managing the kind of stress that visits us uninvited in life. Indeed, in the real world, many stressful situations can be diffused precisely by walking away, something that is just not available in an exam.

Second, I do not know of any situation in the real world, apart from catching a flight or a train or making it for an interview or making an exquisite dessert, where management of time for a period of about 2 hours makes or breaks your future. Time management can be learned in many other ways. In fact, asking someone to make a batch of brownies would be a better way of teaching time management since you have to ensure that the butter is hot enough to stay melted but not so hot as to scramble the eggs when you break them into the batter! The idea of creating an artificial environment in which time management is critical is in my view only a way of exercising power over the student who has no say in the matter.

Third, exams may help people develop the ability to think on their toes. However, flying by the seat of one’s pants is not critical thinking! That is winging it. Critical thinking must include the ability to reflect on the solutions one has reached and to critique them dispassionately with the intention of discarding unrealistic solutions and improving inefficient ones, which is not possible in the context of an exam. Asking someone to think clearly while they have a gun to their head is not developing critical thinking skills, but allowing survival responses to rule the day.

Elevating Mediocrity

However, the problems with tests go much deeper. As mentioned, the environment created is artificial. Each candidate is expected to think on their own within a limited time with no opportunity of seeking the wisdom and guidance of those who have gone before them. This creates a mentality in which collaboration, which is critical in the real world, is thrown into the rubbish heap and declared to be off bounds. Further, an exam, in which no breaks are permitted, is not how anything in life works. In a day at work, most people will have time for a coffee break or lunch with colleagues and friends. These breaks rejuvenate the mind and can even stimulate it. They allow us to step away from the problem at hand, which is often essential to getting the creative juices flowing again. This is proscribed in the exam environment. However, expecting someone – even a strong introvert like me – to sit for 2+ hours on a series of disconnected tasks, is a recipe for mediocrity, not excellence, because the creative process is not allowed to develop and flourish. It conveys the idea that problems can be fixed by a single person in a matter of minutes. It is no wonder that patience and perseverance are in short supply these days. In my view, any real world problem that is worth solving requires investment of time and collaboration between humans that the exam system belies.

Choosing Conformity

Of course, we can understand that this would be the case if we just inquired about the origins of the exam system. The earliest known system of exams was the Imperial Examination, a civil examination administered in Imperial China for the purpose of selecting candidates who would serve in the state bureaucracy. A system of formal exams was introduced in England in the early nineteenth century, again with the intention of selecting civil servants. When the British took over in India, they introduced similar exams, all with the purpose of selecting civil servants.

Now, let us ask ourselves a very pertinent question: Do governments select civil servants for creativity or conformity? Quite obviously the latter. We do not want civil servants to be engaged in creative bookkeeping or flights of fancy while interpreting the law of the land! No! In such situations, we desire and demand strict conformity. And there is no denying that exams conducted by governments are good at selecting candidates who will conform.

However, human flourishing will not happen if conformity is given pride of place. Indeed, we almost certainly ensure that the creative impulses in most people are quenched when we tell them that the straitjacket of exams is the way to move ahead in life. It is no wonder that so many students emerge from high school and college completely jaded. After all, if we have killed in them what made them human, namely the impulse to create and speculate and imagine, then we should not be surprised if they emerge with a cynical view of the world.

Lipstick on a Pig

However, let us be brutally honest. The exam system was developed by governments to select people from the citizenry who would best execute and enforce what the government wanted in the nation. They were never designed to promote creative thinking or out of the box imagination. They were intended to be ways in which the nation controlled the masses, not empowered them. This is why memorization of arcane facts, accuracy with basic arithmetic, and repetition or identification of rules and regulations feature prominently in most exams.

Exams may have changed their face today. Many do not require mere memorization and regurgitation of facts. Many include attempts at promoting creativity. Many include attempts at introducing real world application. However, creativity cannot be dictated by the clock and application often requires a good night’s sleep before the lightning bolt of an idea strikes. Of course, exams still deny the fact that we are human and can develop as humans only in collaboration with others. Expecting someone to think of a bunch of new ideas thrown at them at random in a span of a couple of hours is inhumane. However, if control is what we desire, then exams are the best way to ensure it. And so, all the sweeping changes in exams over the past decades are in reality nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig. The changes are superficial precisely because what the exams are intended to do cannot be aligned with the needs of most humans.

Control Mechanism

You may ask me what the way ahead might be. If I am so strongly opposed to exams, how do I think we should assess students? The question presupposes that assessing students is necessary. But what are we assessing them for? And what is the purpose of assessment? Why are high school students, for example, expected to write a series of exams toward the end of their program? Why is the student who just wants to become a field anthropologist expected to display competence in business or mathematics? Why is the student who wants to become an artist expected to demonstrate acumen in biology or geography? Why is the student who wants to become a hairdresser expected to show knowledge of physics or history? Why is the student who wants to undertake biochemistry research expected to indicate skill with economics or a second language? We have straitjacketed programs that do not actually serve most students. And then we complain that they lack motivation and throw up our hands in wonder.

But someone may say that kids really don’t know what they want to do in life. Hence, we must give them exposure to a wide variety of options. This is simply a way of saying that we do not actually wish to invest the time and effort to mentor each child so that he/she can discover what most motivates him/her. We only want to give them a superficial overview of a whole gamut of human knowledge, but nothing to such a depth as would actually capture their imaginations and fire up their spirits. Expecting every student to learn the same thing is simply a way of throwing in the towel and reneging on our responsibility, as the adults in their lives, of providing meaningful guidance.

However, if we devote time with each student to help them discover what drives them, we will realize that exams are precisely not the way to do it. Indeed, nothing that provides an external reward, in this case grades or college admissions or a job, can ever fire up the spirits. Our spirits, you see, are not need driven. The basic animal needs – food, shelter, clothing – do not inspire the spirit. Hence, anything that promises to put food on the table or a roof above our heads or clothes on a backs can never become something that captures our imagination. This is why most people consider their jobs just a drudgery to be endured, something that provides options for the weekend. However, what the dichotomy between the week and the weekend develops is the sense that the latter exists just so that we can ‘get away’ from what the former involves. This causes confusion because, with this paradigm, we are always unsure which our real life is, the five or six days of toil or the day or two of getting away from it.

Straitjacket curriculums culminating in exams are designed to produce people who will conform to this dichotomy and confusion. They are designed precisely to ensure that most people will spend most of their time disliking what they are doing but doing it do that they have some respite from the drudgery for one or two days of each week. In other words, straitjacket curriculums and exams are precisely parts of a system of domination to ensure that very few of us will ever be able to truly flourish by enjoying what we do day in and day out.

Breaking Free

What I advocate is a system of mentorship between a student and a mentor in which the vast majority of adults play the part of mentor to some child or the other. The mentor is not a ‘know it all’ but someone who knows of people who have expertise in a wide variety of fields. If a student wants to learn about colonialism in India, the mentor can direct her to an expert. If the student wants to learn about the physiology of a horse, the mentor points her to an expert. In this way we get the modern equivalent of “it takes a village to raise a child.”

What this means is that industry takes the onus of training the next generation of young learners. They do not merely profit from the investment of parents and teachers and schools over the years, but must actually contribute to the learning of the students who choose to be pointed in their direction. Hence, if a student expresses the desire to learn about designing cars, the mentor points her to an automobile company. And the company is expected to take the student on and show her how cars are designed. If another students wants to learn to cook Korean food then the mentor directs him to a chef who then teaches him the art of making Korean food. I expect there will be push back from many people here. Why should companies play such a role. Well, in the past, a blacksmith who hoped to expand his trade would have taken on an apprentice and shown him the ropes of the blacksmithy. The blacksmith would have invested the time and effort to pass on his skills to the apprentice. Those who hope to benefit from the skills of someone should be expected to contribute to the development of those skills in that person.

Someone may say that this is impractical. Why? Are we not motivated enough to provide meaningful guidance to the next generation of humans, the ones who will carry the torch after our candles have been snuffed out? Some may say that it makes things very complicated. Of course it does! Each child is different! How can we say that a straitjacket curriculum will ever be beneficial to most of them? However, our responsibility to the next generation cannot be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Expediency, however, is the way a system of dominance functions. Everyone has to be treated the same way. This ensures that control by the powers that be is possible. If everyone is made to pass through the same doors, then supervision of the majority by a minority is possible.

Of course, this is done, deceptively in my opinion, under the banner of equality. However, equality is not equity. Equality denies the idiosyncrasies and circumstances of each person while equity recognizes them. A unilateral decision by the powers that be that a child who wants to draw must learn his numbers or that another who wants to play with numbers must make her drawings is not equity. It is actually not even equality. It is oppression. And for too long we the masses have allowed governments, prestigious universities, large companies, and publishing houses to place us in situations of oppression whose quintessential element during our formative years is the examination.