Testing times for kids

With these ubiquitous examinations upon us once more, it is a good time to ask a very unsettling question: how much learning actually goes on inside South African schools and universities?

I do not mean how many facts are memorised at short notice to regurgitate in the final exam. I mean learning, variously defined as a transformation in the meaning of a student's experience; the altering of beliefs; the changing of behaviour; the things we think we actually send our children to school for.

Sometimes seismic shifts in education take place without anyone noticing. It kind of sneaks up on you so you take what happens in school and classroom life for granted. One of those shifts, I dare to say, has been the move away from a concern for learning to a preoccupation with testing.

The next time you have a child in school, simply tick off the number of times the child writes tests and examinations. In many high schools teachers early on begin to focus on "what is required for" the upcoming examinations; this obsession takes on feverish proportions as children move from Grade 10 to Grade 12.

To understand this obsession with writing tests you have to understand what propels the school system in this direction.

There is enormous pressure on students to do well in these often mindless tests because of an often misplaced interest in the children's future.

The smartest children pick up on this cue that doing well in academic subjects is good for them and draws praise from all quarters. So what did some of them do?

They took more than a dozen subjects. I remember a child at a Pretoria school who somehow got more than 20 distinctions in what was then called "matric". Such a child is not only a danger to society, but a danger to higher education. Can you imagine the kind of stress this child must have passed through to attain this ridiculous feat?

What does this say about the overall health of a child when obviously all the time available for living was consumed in this senseless game of impressing adults? When, in fact, did learning take place?

But, of course this pressure on children to do well in school examinations is good for the school. Principals obsess with looking good in the eyes of their peers, the parents and their province.

I endlessly hear principals claiming things like a 99.3% pass rate in Grade 12. So what? Did the children learn anything? Now that would be something worth boasting about. The teachers have a stake in the results as well.

I remember how an anxious mathematics teacher told me that if she had a failure in teaching this subject, she would be "demoted" (her words) to teaching mathematical literacy. And imagine as a parent being able to boast that your Sipho or Sanna got straight As in the senior certificate examination; the genes do wonders! And there you were, thinking that this whole game was about the children or about learning. It is, let me be honest, simply a game.

Nothing demonstrates the demise of learning in our society more powerfully than what happens to poor children in serially disrupted schools and classrooms.

Somewhere around June of the school year, mindless bureaucrats and politicians decide you can cram into weekend and vacation ovens thousands of little facts that children will remember long enough to give back on the date of the dreaded examination.

You do not need to be an educational psychologist to recognise this is not learning; it is the education equivalent of force-feeding an undernourished patient on junk food.

My blood pressure rises dangerously when at the end of a semester of teaching a student raises her hand and asks that uniquely South African question: "What is the scope of the examination?"

My answer tends to be sarcastic: "Scope? In my days that was a name for a dirty magazine."

They don't get it, of course, because every other lecturer plays this game called "scope".

I make it clear to these spoilt brats that learning is not possible by selecting things to study because you try to anticipate - aided and abetted by the lecturers - what will be in the examination.

What is the point of learning complex subject matter? It is to understand the subject deeply, to probe, to inquire, and to unsettle. It requires meditation on what you learn and re-examining your most cherished beliefs. At its best, learning is transformation.

The worst measure of such achievement is a standardised test or pressure-cooker examination.