EXAMS, INSTRUCTION, CURRICULUM & EDUCATION

Have you ever sat back to consider what exactly is an examination? What does it test? How effective is it? An examination is essentially a system for monitoring the progress of a learner by testing his retention, recall and reproduction of curricular material. Now this really is being unfair to a learner, because a curriculum essentially is a pre-specified set of conditions that must be met in order to make the grade. Failure to do so will not enable the learner to make the grade. Another interesting point that must be taken into cognizance is the fact that nowhere does this system consider testing acquired skills. Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion that others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.

Instruction is the choice of circumstances that facilitate learning. Roles are assigned by setting a curriculum of conditions that the candidate must meet if he is to make the grade. School links instruction-but not learning-to these roles. This is neither reasonable nor liberating. It is not reasonable because it does not link relevant qualities or competences to roles, but rather the process by which such qualities are supposed to be acquired. It is not liberating or educational because school reserves instruction to those whose every step in learning fits previously approved measures of social control.

Another major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them. Most people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner. Fluency in reading is also more often than not a result of such extracurricular activities. Most people, who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion.

But the fact that a great deal of learning even now seems to happen casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure does not mean that planned learning does not benefit from planned instruction and that both do not stand in need of improvement. The strongly motivated student who is faced with the task of acquiring a new and complex skill may benefit greatly from the discipline now associated with the old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught reading, or multiplication by rote etc.
School has now made this kind of drill teaching rare and disreputable, yet there are many skills that a motivated student with normal aptitude can master in a matter of a few months if taught in this traditional way.
Opportunities for skill learning can be vastly multiplied if we open the "market." This depends on matching the right teacher with the right student when he is highly motivated in an intelligent program, without the constraint of curriculum.

We must have a fair recognition of the two-faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill drill alone could be a disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program that is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task. History is tied to advancement in math, and class attendance to the right to use the playground.

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances that encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which let us reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill learning and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.

Education in the exploratory and creative use of skills, however, cannot rely on drills. Education relies on the relationship between partners who already have some of the keys that give access to memories stored in and by the community. It relies on the critical intent of all those who use memories creatively. It relies on the surprise of the unexpected question that opens new doors for the inquirer and his partner.
P.S. It is truly inspiring to read DESCHOOLING SOCIETY by IVAN ILLICH and I share with others his powerful influence upon my psyche as well. The above piece does borrow from the above mentioned text.