A few years ago I was asked to answer questions regarding the success Alberta students have in these international PISA tests.  I said that it’s a simple answer. If NASA can take a Chimp out of his natural environment put him in flight simulators, accelerators and the like and get the poor creature to perform tasks like punching a lighted button at the right time for a banana pellet and then fire his poor soul into space, from 6Gs to weightlessness and back again, all the while getting our poor relative to replicate their training to perfection in an environment totally alien to them, I could, through excessive drill and skill training in the unnatural environment of successive high stakes multiple choice testing over 12 years train my human subjects (you know, students) to perform well at PISA tests! And that IS in fact what we do.

Now, high stakes multiple choice testing of youth in itself may not be bad as a science experiment, what is bad is that we categorise, stratify and determine policy towards our social institutions based on the results of such grotesque events. That we experiment on ‘animals’, before we venture forth ourselves is perhaps detestable enough for its callousness and cowardliness on our part, but tto experiment on our own young and then take the results and apply them to the social engineering of our educational systems and society is terrible indeed.

The question I have as an educator within this crackerjack system is where are the students in this? With such good results in international testing are more of our youth going to university than any other area/country or province? Are more succeeding in posts of advanced learning, executives in major corporate boards and leading in research to unburden the human condition? Are there more doctors, more lawyers, more engineers, more geneticists, physicists and mathematicians? Are the twenty-plus percent dropout students also included in these tests? Or are we finding that even with the super achieving high degree of education we throw at students they are still kids, are doing wonderful just to mollify us and then moving on to be whatever they would have been with or without our ‘interference’? Are they better human beings, more accepting (not tolerant), more giving, more civically and socially conscious?  Are our students better decision makers, leaders in social justice and the arts?

Is scoring well on tests a true indicator of knowledge? of worthiness? of humanity? of courage? of fearlessness? Does the number they acquire tell us what kind of person they are? Could they be a sociopath, a terrorist, a murderer or Mother Teresa, or Gandhi?

I am disappointed that school administrations the world over are so short sighted towards their children. The industrial age is long gone and yet we continue to re-trench old exhausted ideas draped in new technologies that stifle inspiration and imagination in our youth. We have deterministic outcomes/ends (of the world we adults live in and want to maintain) that leave no room for adaptive and inspirational out of the box thinking and acting in the world the students could live in if they had the freedom to create it. Instead the world over, teachers teach to an exam, they have no choice. It’s no wonder our students do so well at exams but are so lost in their lives. And yet I am sure and hopeful that one day they will wrest control from their parents and create a better world which we, through lack of courage and fear of what we may lose, have always known we should have done ourselves.