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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Testing, Naturalness, and the Pedagogy of Failure12/17/2007 10:03:17As a teaching assistant, I am involved in giving my first failing grades this quarter. It has got me thinking a lot about what a failing grade does to a student. I have never had one, and I went to a college where a failing grade goes unreported on the official transcript. Following Foucault's logic of "delinquency" in Discipline and Punish, a failing grade sends a self-contradictory message. On the one hand, one is being told definitively that this kind of work is not acceptable. "Go forth, then, and improve!" The student then redoubles efforts. This, for Foucault's prisons, is analogous to the logic of reforming and educating prisoners. On the other hand, the failing grade stamps the student as a failure. His or her other reaction may be to take up the part more fully, to fail the rest of the classes, and so on. To take up the place society has made for failures (at least in this department - the students might instead focus their efforts elsewhere). This is what prisons do so well: create communities of "hardened criminals" who know nobody else but others like themselves. They become very good criminals, leaving little opportunity to become successfully reformed. There is no obvious escape. For Foucault, an alternative requires a whole rethinking of the structures of power. Malcom Gladwell's excellent recent article on I.Q. testing (which last night I had the chance to discuss with the article's factchecker!) is a stirring reminder of how standardized testing establishes the norms of a society while veiling them as a kind of natural law. While the test really measures, in Gladwell's terms, "not so much how smart we are as how modern we are," or how well we fit into a certain account of modernity's cognitive demands, people use the test as an objective measure of innate, natural intelligence. This is no different from common sexism and racism, which mistakes shoulds for unjust actualities - because a certain people is enslaved, for instance, that people should naturally be enslaved. Gladwell importantly insists that culture better explains I.Q. test gaps between groups than any theory of innate intelligence. This conclusion, for some reason, feels more comfortable in the current, subtle imperialism of the modern age. There are no important biological differences between races in the brain, only between cultures that are more or less open to "development." Gladwell's conclusion makes this strange logic startlingly clear: "I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in." In the Foucaultian analysis, nothing has changed. There are still successes and failures, judged by a uniform measure that helps those it was designed for and makes the rest look inferior. The failure of failures reenforces itself. I do not see the way out here. There are two models of alternative pedagogy I can think of in a large, mechanized society that wants the best for each of its parts. One is the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) model, where one standardized test is used for all. The other is a caste system (the consequence of Ivan Illich's deschooled society), where people pursue the training they are best suited for and are judged by the standards of that training. There is no question of judging different sorts against one another. Both seem to carry an inevitable hierarchy, and inevitable losers. I am beginning to tend toward the second, though. Incoherently, to think of this more, I need to go. |
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