…Equally controversial, and it would seem, even less defensible than the look-say method of reading, was the strange device known as “vocabulary control,” which is expressly designed to hold down the number of words a child may learn at any given time. Under the assumption that gulping too many new words at a sitting may give the tender young reader a case of verbal indigestion, textbooks are confined within rigidly constricted word lists which are let out an inch or so at a time from grade to grade. Does the method work, or is it a dumbing down and repression of a child potential? At the time, it was said the U.S school child had a primer of some 1800 words by grade four while the Russian child was reading Tolstoy in grade two.
Martin Mayer in his book The Schools quoted someone who said, “you can teach the same values with Edna Ferber as you can with Shakeseare.” In fact, at the time, Edna Ferber was on many secondary school reading lists.
These American educationists imposed a variety of controls, mainly born of the sensational discovery that knowledge of literature is useful not for its own sake, but because of the “positive values” it may impart. Into this realm of values, Blondie cartoons could provide the same values as say Shakespeare.
Another institution hostile to literacy was the multiple choice examination since it requires no sustained intellectual effort of marshalling thoughts and expressing them coherently in an ordered structure of language. For one thing, the phrasing of the question is often imprecise and ambiguous, and a bright student who can discern several possible answers to a question was more likely to select a wrong answer than another who has less imagination. The basic defect is that they call for choices but not reasons for choices, and by their very nature, the multiple choice tests tend to favour the pickers of choices over the doers, and the superficially brilliant over the creatively profound.
—Boy reading newspaper, New York, 1944 Photograph: The Estate of André Kertész/Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery
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The Budapest-born Kertész enjoyed a long life (1894-1985), visited many countries and was involved in several different artistic movements. But wherever he went and whatever the commission, a constant preoccupation was with people reading. —click image for source…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…This criticism of standardized tests is not new. Banesh Hoffman, professor of mathematics and former collaborator with Albert Einstein, made exactly this point in his 1962 book The Tyranny of Testing. According to Dr. Hoffman, it is the multiple-choice format that is to blame. “Multiple choice tests penalize the deep student, dampen creativity, foster intellectual dishonesty, and undermine the very foundations of education” he remarked in a 1977 interview.
What is it about multiple-choice tests that penalize the finer mind? Occasionally, individual questions are defective, with the wanted answer or all of the answers being incorrect. More frequently, questions are ambiguous so that more than one answer may be defended as plausibly being ‘the best’, and only those candidates with deep minds are likely to notice the ambiguity and be troubled by it. However, according to Dr. Hoffmann:
“It is not the presence of defective questions that makes multiple-choice tests bad. Such questions merely make them worse. Even if all the questions were impeccable, the deep student would see more in a question than his more superficial competitors would ever dream was in it, and would expend more time and mental energy than they in answering it. That is the way his mind works. That is, indeed, his special merit. But the multiple-choice tests are concerned solely with the candidates choice of answer, and not with the reasons for his choice. Thus they ignore that elusive yet crucial thing we call quality.” Read More:http://testcritic.homestead.com/files/standardized_tests.html
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