Holt . . . "The Underachieving School"

It may be when tests seem to work best that they do the most harm. I have had frequent discussions with my present students--able, successful, on their way to prestige colleges--about testing and grading. It is surprising how fiercely many of them defend a system that they often complain about and rebel against. They say, angrily or anxiously, "But if we're not tested and graded, how can we tell whether we're learning anything, whether we're doing well or poorly?" It makes me sad. I think of the two-and-three-year-olds I have known, continually comparing their own talk to the talk of people around them. I think of the five-and-six-year-olds I have known, teaching themselves to read, figuring out each new word on a page, continually checking what they are doing against what they have done, what they don't know against what they know. Then I think of my fifth graders, handing me arithmetic papers and asking anxiously, "Is it right?" and looking at me as if I were crazy when I said, "What do you think?" What difference did it make what they thought? Rightness has nothing to do with reality, or consistency, or common sense; Right is what the teacher says is Right, and the only way to find out if something is Right is to ask a teacher. Perhaps the greatest of all the wrongs we do children in school is to deprive them of the chance to judge the worth of their own work and thus destroy in them the power to make such judgments, or even the belief that they can.