roachboy

there is a philosophical question that ustwo raises that is interesting (filtherton raised it as well) concerning the value of standardized testing/test scores in evaluating an educational programme. that seems important enough to maybe warrant another thread....

personally i am not at all persuaded that these scores measure anything.

anyway, even if they did, they would be beside the point in a debate like this over banning books...

basically, i agree with baraka guru that the central function of education is to enable students to think independently and creatively about the world, about themselves--and to provide them with a sense that they too can make things and by making things make the world Otherwise.

history is not simply a repository of factoids: it is a relation to information, it is procedures for ordering it--but most of all it provides a set of tools for thinking *through* information, *with* information. presenting history in the history channel mode as a spectacle that in no way impacts upon the spectator is close to worthless from this viewpoint, except insofar as it provides purty pictures for the entirely passive consumer to look at.

in a democratic polity, being able to think through information is a baisc assumption behind citizenship--if you are cowed by what is simply because it is, and you do not have the tools to relativize what you encounter, then you have no hope of making coherent decisions, informed choices--no hope of being able to assess what is as over against what could be, no way of weighing alternatives, thinking in terms of strategy, etc.

it is amazing to me that conservatives want to institute passivity through education when in their politics are so much about their own solitary intellectual heroism.
it makes no sense.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite