Education today/Steve Patchin

Beginning in 605 A.D., the Sui dynasty in China began using a national exam system to select officials to run its government. This exam, called the keju, was supposed to recruit the brightest individuals regardless of social class to run an efficient government. This system became a tool for citizens from lower classes of society to elevate up to the ruling class, bringing great prestige to their families. Imagine the pride that could be achieved by the family and the individual passing the exam, but also understand the pressure to pass the test and the accompanying disgrace for failing it.

The education system performs two functions. First, it identifies what kind of knowledge, talents and skills are useful in society. It then educates the masses, helping them acquire these needed intellectual tools. Testing is a way to measure an individual's achievement of gaining these tools. Albert Einstein cautioned us on this approach through his statement, "Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted."

In recent years, the U.S. education system has come under attack. Tests like the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have been used to compare the knowledge of children in America with children in foreign countries. In a 1995 TIMSS assessment performed in the top 21 developed countries around the world, the U.S. students ranked 19th, sounding off alarms that we were falling behind in intellectual power compared with the rest of the world.

As the U.S. education systems moves toward nationalized testing and a national curriculum, we need to note what other countries are doing with their education systems, which have been based on centralized curriculum and nationalized tests. In 1999, China implemented education reform that: abolished 'entrance exams' that students must pass to enter middle school, encouraged each secondary and elementary school to implement their own graduation examination and revised college entrance exams to measure overall (not just academic) ability.

South Korea in 2001 instituted its 7th National Curriculum. Reforms included: helping students develop leadership capacity, promote education that not only developed intellectual capacity but also creativity and expanded local control of what was to be taught in schools. Singapore, home of another leading educational system, in 1997 adopted reforms titled "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" which included strategies of: explicitly teaching critical and creative thinking skills, reducing the amount of content students had to learn, focusing on learning about topics covered in greater depth and revising assessment tools to measure not just breadth of knowledge but creative and critical thinking ability.

These countries that have long valued memorization and possession of knowledge are now focusing in on the process of thinking, critical and creative. They are looking to the U.S. education system on how to achieve this. Our talent shows and extracurricular activities encourage students to take initiative to highlight and develop their own individual talents. Howard Gardner created the idea that each of us possesses multiple intelligences, or talents. Some are craftsmen, engineers, mathematicians, teachers, athletes, entrepreneurs or a combination of many of these. An education system that helps individuals identify and develop these traits using methods other than traditional exams will produce the creative industry and society leaders of tomorrow.

As we reform our own education system, we also learn from the experience of others and make sure we understand that "... not everything that counts can be counted."

Editor's note: Steve Patchin is Director of Youth Programs Outreach and Engagement at Michigan Technological University.