Dope

Reader, go to the WP magazine section and read the very sad story of the "cheating scandal" in Silver Springs, Maryland. Last year, a teacher in the Silver Springs International school, a rather miraculous school in Montgomery County distinguished for using tried and true progressive methods, was 'released' for having used the questions from some inane comprehensive test before giving the test, thus breaching the 'security' of the test. Never mind that the test had no security, that copies of it float around throughout the system. Any excuse to liquidate an alternative. This is the slogan of all sclerotic bureaucracies.

Silver Springs was one of those miracles that prove that all the aims and goals of the progressive agenda are not dead, but come up, spontaneously, scattered about, seeding the future. The principle, Renee Brimfield, was trained at the Sorbonne, and came to the school, which had a considerable ethnic mix, and an income level below the D.C. average, determined to really teach her kids. Classes mixed ability levels. In the cafeteria, students were assigned seats -- "because, Brimfield said, they might segregate themselves by race and class elsewhere, but not in her lunchroom." It was an island, and islands get targetted for bombing practice. Destruction came from the Montgomery Superintendent of Education, who did not appreciate Brimfield not getting with the program -- which program consists of giving children inane tests, teaching to the tests, and in general doing the yeoman's work of distracting children, from the age of seven to the age of eighteen, from anything resembling culture.

The sad thing is, the story of compulsory, obsessive standard testing is dialectically ingenious. Who opposes it? Not the poor. For many poor schools, it is the only plan there is, the only way children are guaranteed some education. WP's Michael Sokolove does an admirable job of complicating our response to the whole testing gestalt. The devil in the testing complex, according to Sokolove, is that the more standardized tests "are used as a single measure to make sweeping judgments -- the more high-stakes they become -- the less reliable they are. Teachers and principals who operate under the threat that their school will be "reconstituted," that their career or some monetary reward hangs in the balance, or even that they will be shamed when their school's test results are disclosed to the public, will find a way to make scores go up. "

But if, like Limited Inc, one longs for the historically annointed proletariat to rise up, workers all, and join the fight against testing -- well, that isn't the vector from which resistance comes. There's a dialectical irony here:

"The public debate over standardized testing is largely an argument about how best to lift up poor children -- and, not far below the surface, an argument over whether efforts on behalf of poor children will slow the progress of higher-achieving, wealthier students. That is why protests against testing have come mainly from parents in affluent communities who fear that testing and test prep will take time away from more enriching, challenging class work. Advocates for poor children, on the other hand, often view standardized tests as a kind of backstop, a guarantee that lower-achieving schools and children won't be invisible. But Rye says no parents at Silver Spring International were calling for greater emphasis on tests. "We had only been there a year and a half," she says. "We were just starting to get scores."
Opposition to Brimfield early on came from some well-to-do parents. Ellie Hamburger, a pediatrician, was among those who initially spoke out against the school's decision to mix students of all abilities except in foreign language and math classes. "I was won over," she says. "The kids had their assumptions challenged."

And so it ends, the Englightenment dream. The idea in the eighteenth century was that affluence would lead to virtue. When, in the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw says that poverty is the only vice, he is summarizing the trend of ideas from Jefferson through Mill to, really, the early twentieth century socialists. As so often in Shaw, one feels he is writing a platitude with a lightning bolt -- but what a lightning bolt!

"In the millionaire Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty -- a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed -- is not to be poor. "Poor but honest," "the respectable poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as "drumken but amiable," "fraudulent but a good afterdinner speaker," "splendidly criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and clothe them.
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Robert Stone once said that Shaw invented fascism in Major Barbara. It is easy to see that the logic of viewing poverty as a security issue, which is not far from the bourgeois perception of the working class as the dangerous class, can run pretty far to the right. But Shaw did have hold of a basic social fact. The reason for according the monopoly of violence to the state remains that of forcing the poor man to see his children fed on cheap sugars and fats; to see his children arrested and hauled off, in large numbers, for having the entrepeneurial sense of our founding fathers, to wit, making money in intoxicants -- with the caveat that the rum upon which the good New England merchants depended was more criminal, insofar as it was whipped out of the skins of kidnapped Africans, while we know that the narco-peasantry is relatively well paid for their labors; to see all that, without the power of lifting his hand against the system, whilst idle people's children get to learn art appreciation in really good schools, from which they will go on to even better schools, from whence to get jobs in politics and the media that are wholly taken up with debasing the American mind with every possible superstition, fad, and slogan.

Education, as Americans practice it, is a sad sign that the miserable grip of four thousand years of scarcity, with the fear mongering it breeds, has not been loosened, even though the scarcity itself, from food to warmth, has been practically abolished. Matthew Arnold, not my favorite Victorian sage by a long shot, still had it right about that in which culture consists:

"...culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."

We, however, have opted, in Arnold's terminology, for Anarchy... an anarchy of standardized tests. Meanwhile, at that moment in history where we can actually move from the Victorian sentimentality of sweetness and light to a real increase of life and sympathy, what do we do? We give our kids no. 2 pencils and four choices for each question, no talking, you have thirty minutes to complete the test, if you complete the test before thirty minutes do not go to the next test, check your answers and remain quiet, remain quiet, remain quiet...