THE CHURCH OF CORPORATE EDUCATION

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn stressed a single point throughout the
2,000-some odd pages of his "Gulag Archipelago": DON'T FEAR THE JUDGE; FEAR
THE LAW.
That's an odd statement, especially coming from someone who was
sentenced to half a lifetime in Stalinist shit pits by judges, judges, and
more judges. Crispin explicated the oddness of just such statements in his
book Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality. There, he argued that the temptation to
inflate the Law (or the State, or the System, or what have you) into a
superhuman entity that we as particular individuals are but appendages of is
not only pernicious and irresponsible, but a flat out lie.
And so it is. As long as one is going to believe in the Law's
efficacy independent of the people who instantiate and enforce it, one might
as well throw in a belief in the ghost of Christmas past who holds us
accountable for his peculiarly Christian morality. Either way, we've got no
say in the matter. We're mere placeholders in a structure that wields its
power like a God--- a God that we can but capitulate to in mindless
resignation, or else rebel against in Marxist fashion, thereby affirming its
existence and autonomy.
And yet the fact that we as individuals must be at constant pains to
dispel this illusion is telling as to the persistence and seductiveness of
that illusion. Hence we seem to be stuck in somewhat of a paradox.
If the judges defer their responsibility to the Law, then trying to
convince them of their own responsibility would be tantamount to screaming
into the ears of deaf people. If, on the other hand, we decide to play
their game and critique the Law as it stands, then we end up both granting
the judges all they need to be granted and using a lie to refute a lie.
This is like trying to convince a fundamentalist that he or she has got the
attributes of God all wrong: the question is not who's right, but what in
God's name you're doing believing in "attributes of God."

So perhaps we can reformulate Solzhenitsyn's credo as follows: "FEAR THE
JUDGE WHO BELIEVES IN THE LAW." This way, we won't be tempted to treat the
law as a free-floating monad, but rather as something always linchpinned to
individuals and their beliefs, desires, and systems of valuation.
That said, I'd like to address a closely related issue concerning
standardized testing and the pride of place it has in contemporary
educational discourse.

Standardized testing as a practice is a quite similar to the
administering of justice in courts of law. The tests are, somehow, supposed
to tap into the mysterious depths of the student mind; one who fails is
guilty before the educational tribunal, while one who passes is cleared of
all charges and allowed to adjust accordingly to society. The model is no
doubt meant to be the very noble "innocent until proven guilty," but we all
know the weight of that slogan. Just appearing in the courtroom chimes
"sinner" in the public mind. Thus I suggest that the real model of the Law,
and of standardized testing, is the Catholic notion of Original Sin.
In education, the emphasis on actually instructing and interacting
with students has taken a backseat to what are called Standards, that is,
performing well on the administered tests. Students are granted their
lion's share of innate creativity and expressiveness, to be sure, so the
Original Sin must lie elsewhere: namely, in the stain of potential
maladjustment to society that, if actualized, would make of one an outcast.
And today, the worst sin is non-adjustment.
Basically, it is assumed that, as children, we lack the right kind of
temperment and knowledge to function normally in society, so we must be
trained and inculcated in order that we function properly. The tests are
meted out like so many confessionals, where the experts can run them through
the ghost in the grading machines, determining who shall be forgiven and who
shall pay further penance.
Testing, thus attached to standards, is a convenient way for
politicians to demonstrate their holy concern for the proverbial "children."
And given our reverence for the omniscient Number, there seems no better,
fairer way to measure learning than by attaching numerals to it. Test
scores begin to work like sales figures, or votes, or public taste
tests---easily monitored and attached to the golden calves of "success" and
"failure."
Finally, as the ritual becomes ingrained in the zeitgeist, we have no
need of discussion about whether the standards and the tests are even
sensible, not to mention accurate gaugers of "learning" or whatever. Like
the Law, like Almighty Jove, their existence is set in stone, and we're left
mulling over how well or poorly we've realized the commandments. But the
commandments suck. It's easy to forget that by enshrining Standards and
numerological correspondences between intelligence and test scores, we're
still judging. And moreover: WE'RE judging. Pretensions to objectivity
don't cease to be pretensions because we call them scientific. Nor do they
cease to be religious.
And lest we forget, the politicians who crusade for these
things---such as one Gov. Jeb Bush in Florida---have vested interests in the
results of the ritual. Profits, corporate monomania, more and more
efficient market activity. Noble, yes: but a standard for learning? These
tests are manufactured by corporations, for corporations, so try to not to
say "holy shit" too loud when you read that in 1999 the industry generated
over a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues. That was four years ago,
and believe me, the industry isn't deflating. Furthermore, these
corporations show an admirable business savvy by churning out teaching
materials, and self-help books and classes for students, designed to raise
scores on their own frickin tests. Kind of like when, in olden times, the
church invented Purgatory only to charge people money to get out of it.
All of this, sad to say, pales by comparison to the gulags our
schools have become. They are inspired by a profoundly, and very
unprofound, reverence for teaching-to-the-test. Good teachers become
disillusioned; bad teachers flourish by preaching the gospel; students
become spiritual automata that walk around skimming everything for "facts"
that might exonorate them when they meet their maker. Our whole educational
environment seems like a character thought up by Kierkegaard: the madman who
walked the streets repeating "the earth is round, the earth is
round"---which is to say, just the facts, mam, just the facts.
Pretty soon, Crispin's dystopic prophesy may come true. Not just art
and creativity will be copywritten, not just love and compassion and
freedom, but knowledge, authenticity, and learning too. We've already
discovered ways to stick it to the music and film industries through
file-sharing; so maybe we can stick it to the CCE (Church of Corporate
Education) through similar means. SAT sharing? ACT exchanging? Anarchic
philosophical groups germinating throughout cyberspace?
Hey...sky's the limit. Just make sure when you get there you can say
with probity, "God is dead."

-----Chris Chrappa, 1600 SAT score.

(Reference: Alfie Kohn's brief but brilliant diatribe "The Case Against
Standardized Testing").