“(Teachers in Finland) have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals.”
Our (USA) system of education is designed around the idea that teachers aren’t capable of teaching their students. That they are so incompetent their students must be regularly tested by an impartial level of standards.
There are perfectly valid reasons to have a standard test. For a properly functioning democracy the general public should be educated enough to understand and contextualize the issues they are voting for. A standardized test can give our system a baseline to target. The trouble is, that standard baseline becomes the goal when institutions use it to differentiate students.
Now, rather than serving as a snapshot to extrapolate a student’s knowledge, the standardized test is all that the student knows.
Take math as an example. It becomes a disadvantage to try and teach an entire class actual mathematical concepts, that takes serious time and effort. It’s far more reliable and efficient to teach students shortcuts and rote rules that let them to speed through the test questions. It’s faster and easier to teach students how to recognize the right answer from a list of answers, than to teach them how to derive the answer or to comprehend why the answer is what it is.
