EDLL

For conceptual shorthand in the liberal arts, such as in the study of philosophy, history, and literature, there can be said to be two sensibilities, the romantic and the classical. The romantic is the one seeking liberation, new forms of expression, new ways of feeling and seeing. The classical is the one of traditional order, harmony, or preexisting forms and universals of thought and feeling. The creative tension and frisson of both informs the very flowering of the arts, the clashing sensibilities unleashing a tumult and clamor, an energy and passion, that arguably would not be as intense and expansive if only one sensibility were dominant.

In politics, the romantic sensibiility tends to the democratic. It is celebrated in the simultaneous liberation of the free individual and the inspiring unity of a purposeful community, the elan vital of a gathered people, in the exultations of poets like Walt Whitman. Today this sensibility sees the unprecedented promise of modern science for advancing knowledge, standards of lliving, individual freedom, civil society, and social justice. Yet it fears the equal danger of enslavement through the abuse of scientific methods and instruments.  As a romantic philosopher of the 19th century once said, "the disenchantment of nature is due not to the triumph of science but to the triumph of the scientific method."

The classical sensibility of order and universal truth, which can instill a sense of the sublime and grandeur in the political thought and relationships among people, tends to tyranny and has informed the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.  In this way, it has led to profound tragedies of unprecedented scale. It used the power of science in a mechanical and rational oppression and destruction of peoples. This potential horror of this otherwise humane sensibility is why one should have deep concern over the present corporate hegemony over thought and feeling.  This is a tyranny where possibility is confined to what will support the ruling order.  It is one where political and social enslavement is based on consent, not coercion, and hence the highest, most sophisticated form of political and cultural domination.

This classical tyranny begins with an "escape from freedom," the failure of citizens to be actively engaged in the political life of their communities and nation, which is the foundation of real freedom. It is a failure to be vigilant and vigorous in the defense and growth of their rights.  The authoritarian or totalitarian mindset actually depends on two personalities, the authoritarian leader and the deferential follower.

In the same way, the disenchantment of education, the steady erosion of the sense of magic, wonder, joy in learning, the removal of these feelings from the learning process, is being carried out by the dance of these two personas, the authoritarian and the deferential. This disenchantment is due not to the triumph of testing, but to the triumph of the testing method. The logic and dictates of the testing method -- standardization, order, discrete knowledge, conformity to technology and rules -- are infusing and transforming the rest of education. As a kind of Darwinian logic, whatever is similar to the dictates of the testing method, supportive and amenable, survives and grows; that which is resistant, the romantic, withers away.

The true science of testing, which offers a way out of this disenchantment, is that of two approaches, formative and summative. There are different types of assessment for different purposes and uses, for informing and enhancing insights and decision-making at all levels of the education enterprise.

In particular, there is a type of testing, formative assessment, or assessment of learning, that is completely crowded out by current focus on statewide standardized testing. Yet this is the only form of testing that has been shown by research to lead to significant gains in student achievement, motivation and self-efficacy. One can only think this is the great folly of our age, which the historian Barbara Tuchman described as when leaders and/or a people persist in a sustained course of action that is disastrous despite knowing of a better alternative.