The Tradition of Teaching to Test

Traditions hold great importance in the history of human life, supporting our continuing existence and serving as a solid base for progress. Yet, they can also perpetuate harmful practices and hinder human progress if we are not aware of them and ready to carefully question each one, one by one.

Social traditions are perhaps the most common and well-known. Everyone is influenced by them, even if the individual is not consciously aware of it. Take, for example, celebrations of significant events such as New Year’s Eve, birthdays, local festivals, weddings, and religious holidays, as well as greetings (which vary across different societies and historical periods), superstitions, wearing a watch on the left (right) wrist, wearing underwear, and many more.

It is clear that traditions can arise, undergo radical changes, or small modifications, and sometimes even completely disappear. There are languages that have vanished with their last speakers, and local languages that are slowly disappearing as well, similar to endangered animal species that are becoming extinct. I believe that history and cultural institutions such as museums have the important function of documenting such traditions so that they can live as ideas or facts in books and exhibitions for an indefinite long period of time. The medium may change over the centuries, but the abstract ideas should be preserved.

There are other kinds of traditions that are more subtle but equally significant. These include the tradition of handing down the English language, or the Portuguese, for example, the tradition of knowledge, the scientific tradition, and the tradition of education. In this article, I want to discuss a particular but essential case of traditions in education.

An unavoidable clash between traditions and reason

For traditionalism, the preservation of traditions is key to maintaining a steady and stable society. However, there seems to be a clash between traditionalism and rationalism, for rationalism is based on critical discussion that can lead to discarding previous beliefs in favour of what is considered better on the basis of logical reasoning. But how can one discuss something of which they are not even aware? Clearly, to be able to discuss and judge, one must first be aware of their own beliefs and traditions, at least those that are accessible to the conscious mind, otherwise they may blindly accept and repeat traditions that are perhaps not the best or even not good at all. There are two ways out of this clash: praising traditions while rejecting critical discussions or vice versa; and integrating both as different phases of a single process. The latter approach reaches a compromise that I believe is best.

Do we create traditions? It is evident that we do, but often without the explicit intention to do so. Traditions emerge from something we learn and take for granted, repeated over many times. This repetition reinforces the actions or beliefs, which are eventually handed on to the next generation. Traditions bring a degree of order and security to our daily lives at the individual level and to society at the collective level. This order serves as a convenient and safe starting point in an apparently chaotic world with an indefinite amount of complexity. The role of traditions is a valuable one. Without a firm and stable base to support us, it would be difficult to do anything in life while developing our mental faculties through interaction with the world and simultaneously learning from those experiences.

But why do traditions persist? It is not difficult to see that some traditions work well, and we have no compelling reasons to change them. However, some traditions clearly do not work well and expose our failure to act and change the situation, which keeps repeating in a suboptimal state leading to great losses. One such case I have in mind now is the tradition of teaching to test (TTT).

The Socratic tradition of critical inquiry is a precursor to science, but our education systems, even if inspired by it, have not been able to maintain that important tradition, which is a guiding principle that underpins the progress of human knowledge.

Noam Chomsky, for example, believes that the educational system’s failure to promote curiosity, the pursuit of our interests, the exploration of ideas, and inquiring is not accidental. Instead, it is deliberately designed to prevent people from liberating themselves from external control and systems of power Certainly, we can envision how a tradition of questioning beliefs and challenging other traditions may be viewed as inconvenient in the eyes of some. Institutions, being made up of individuals, are highly susceptible to economic interests. These interests exert pressure towards the maximisation of profits and the pursuit of higher asset prices, often at the expense of the pursuit of human values.

Noam Chomsky
“Education is a system of imposed ignorance”

That the issue is not new at all can be seen from the fact that various other people have raised it before. But why does it persist? Even if it is not something deliberately designed, as believed by Chomsky, it is likely heavily influenced by a much stronger tradition, the tradition of maximising financial profit and giving excessive importance to material progress instead of the search for truth, the exchange of long-lasting meaningful ideas by the concrete usefulness that brings immediate wealth.

In a fast-paced society where it is difficult to give attention to so many events and information presented to us, there is an incompatibility between being truly educated and an instrumentalist view of education that measures success by hasty applicability, and applicability to what is considered more profitable now, less risky, as if education was a financial portfolio. Therefore, any creative exploration is rejected in favour of what is an alleged path to success, a model of success that is simply handed on.

Like Socrates, Immanuel Kant¹ stood up for freedom of thought. Kant believed in the Enlightenment as an emancipation of humans through knowledge, an indispensable autonomy for personal freedom and moral character. The role of education should be to facilitate that process where each individual has to become capable of using their own intelligence. And use the intelligence for what? To live freely, making rational and moral decisions.

Immanuel Kant (1794)
“Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding [= reason] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.”

I believe this emancipation is unattainable insofar as we continue to give primary importance to instrumentalist views that regard material progress, as an untamed reach for financial profit, as an end, an objective function driving and shaping our futures. That is perhaps closely related to the thesis that capitalism (or at least some features of it) is incompatible with democracy.

Tradition as source of knowledge

Traditions are, after innate knowledge, our first source of knowledge and they are arguably the most important. This is because a great deal of everything we have learned was told to us or read from the work of others, who themselves learned from previous generations. If we had to start afresh from zero every time a new individual is born, there is no reason to believe we would arrive at Newton’s discoveries within our short lifetimes. Instead, if we want to make progress in understanding nature, we need to start from where the previous generation arrived. That is the greatest importance of traditions: offering us a starting point.

The next stage involves utilising the tradition of questioning to replace these initial traditions and beliefs, where appropriate, with better ones that represent progress in our current understanding of the world, or that are considered (I am not specifying by whom here, but, even collectively, societies change and tend to consider immoral and unacceptable evils that once were considered normal; ex: slavery, serfdom and penal cruelty) more moral and respectful towards individuals, and life in general.

Isaac Newton (1675)
“If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The educational system has to impart and teach traditions of various kinds, including social, cultural, and rational tradition, because they are indispensable, and education itself is a tradition. While they normally do that, they plainly fail to cultivate the essential tradition of questioning traditions and to promote curiosity and the use of logical reasoning. Instead of facilitating the process of finding one’s passions and interests, the educational system teaches you that the topics covered in a course are important because there is a test you must pass at the end of the course, and perhaps one or a couple more in the middle, as well as another one later in the future for being admitted to the University.

At University, the story is the same: you study to take test after test, until you realise that you have forgotten much more than what you learned, if, of course, you did not give up on your learning journey long before. Here, I do not mean simply the dropout rates that the schools and universities use to measure the amount of (superficial) failure, but giving up all your endeavours to learn a subject, losing interest in the challenge of thinking, and feeling that you are not good enough to continue your informal independent studies during the course of your life or, formally, getting into a master’s degree and a PhD.

The failure is much deeper than the mere superficial dropout rates, and it can be noted by the negative effects it leaves in each student, who is compelled to study to take and pass tests. Living in this culture, it is very natural to pose the question of “what is the utility of that?”. The student is trained all the time to learn something to use, use to pass a test, use to enter University and use to get a job. Then, we are used to seeing knowledge solely from its instrumentalist point of view, to use it for practical purposes, and the most important reasons are lost. The critical question is not “what is the utility of that (concept or subject)?” but “what is the meaning of that?”. We should be primarily learning the meaning of things and ideas rather than their immediate utility. By comprehending their meaning, we can find ways to make them useful, but from a particular practical use it is hardly possible to generalise their broader and more fundamental significance.

It is my contention that promoting an educational culture that rigorously strives for error-free practices results in a hostile environment, where fertility for making discoveries is scarce, and the seeds of curiosity struggle to establish their roots. Similar to what happens in statistical/machine learning, where finite data together with a stringent optimisation trying to minimise errors results in a failure of the system to learn something (due to overfitting), the combination of our infinite ignorance with a stringent pursuit of error-free education leads to a soulless education system.

It can be claimed that tests only require a threshold, let us say seven out of ten, a minimum score required to determine whether the student failed or passed a test, and, therefore, tests are not demanding an error-free performance from the students. While there is some truth to that, this has little, if any, importance for what actually happens in practice under the TTT.

Common practices include lecturers speeding up the teaching pace, at the cost of quality, to cover more material that has to be included in the tests, and adopting objective grading criteria when marking students’ tests in a way that it is “all-or-nothing”, which is detrimental to genuine well-reasoned attempts that do not reach the correct final answer. Students are compelled to focus most of their time on what is more likely to be asked in the tests (not what interests them the most), rushing to cover all material that was delivered, at the cost of giving up time for reflecting on a concept, mulling problems over, or exploring their ideas. Funding and various good opportunities can only be offered for those with best grades. We know that money usually has a strong impact at any stage of one’s career. All kinds of pressures are on the direction of pursuing top grades, and achieving the highest possible scores.

The best² students are usually able to find a way to study to take tests and achieve high scores, while making sure they keep motivated and learn something important. However, they pay a high price in doing that. As a result, every course leaves a feeling of being presented with a vast amount of knowledge that you did not learn and, hopefully, you will come back sometime in an indefinite future to learn all those exciting ideas that you always wanted to learn but did not have the time for.

Authority, violence and irrationality

It seems to me that the emancipating education provides us with a set of traditions and beliefs not for blind acceptance and repetition as absolute truths, but for recognising their truthlikeness character that is part of our current knowledge, which was hard to come by and is the result of the hard work of many who came before us, and for employing the tradition of questioning all traditions and beliefs.

This type of education prepares us for continuing to question throughout our lives. We do not need much knowledge to be curious and ask questions, as children are constantly doing it. However, formal education can improve the quality of our questions, providing conditions for them to expand in both depth and scope. In fact, without science the first attempts to answer some of these questions are myths and common sense, which are starting points. However, they should never become a final accepted answer, but only a foundation that lends itself to the formulation of more new questions that go beyond previous ones. Even the answers from science are only temporary and tentative.

Any form of authority has the effect of diminishing the stimulus for formulating our questions and even preventing us from doing it at all, because it suggests that truth is discernible only by those who have authority. We shall not question the authorities of the present time, which change from time to time, and those who do not abide by the existing authoritarian answers are likely to be punished. That was the fate of many, including Socrates, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo.

Violence is certainly a more conspicuous form of punishment, now relatively³ less acceptable. Nevertheless, as overt authorities are replaced by subtler ones, punishments are only replaced but not eliminated. The virtually unnoticeable penalty for accepting authorities, however, is the subservient attitude of giving up our ideas, the forfeiture of our human emancipation, and mostly importantly, the relinquishment of our questions.

To illustrate my point, I recall a situation during my secondary education when my colleagues and I took a grammar and reading comprehension test. When the answer key was released, I found myself disagreeing with five of the answers. During the class with the teacher responsible for the test, I made my case explaining why the answer key was incorrect and why my answers to these five questions were, in fact, correct. I will never forget the moment one of the most brilliant students in mathematics in the class, who had been awarded twice at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), momentarily raised his voice, halting my discussion with the lecturer, to say: “Do you want to know more than the teacher ?!”. Of course, at that point, the sense of humour and irony was evident in the smiles of various colleagues watching the scene unfold. For him, it was a rhetorical question in defence of the teacher’s authority.

After that, the discussion was terminated and the lecture continued normally. Later, I raised my points to a very senior teacher⁴, a member of the oldest language academy in Brazil, and it turns out that six questions had their answer key modified or were simply nullified. I was not very surprised by the modifications, as I was convinced that the answer key was wrong, but I am still surprised by how even a brilliant student can advocate an authoritarian argument to cease a legitimate critical discussion.

It made me think that sometimes, when we want to question an authority on a particular matter, the only possible way is to appeal to an even higher authority, although I do not believe in (unquestioning) authorities. Why, I asked myself, are even the most internationally competitive students subject to this deficit in questioning what ought to be questioned? No amount of training for tests, even the most difficult ones possibly designed, will ensure that someone is able to question certain authorities, beliefs, and traditions. Is that an individual failure? I can hardly believe that. Instead, most of the time, we are taught to accept results, allegedly facts, and ideas almost non-critically. Thus, the individual failure is the general rule, not the exception. The main source of failure comes from a collective institutional irrationality.

Enumerated query and the rejection of questions

But what is the difference between the questions that are a product of the tradition of questioning and questions in a test?

These two types of interrogation are very distinct. For the purposes of distinguishing these two, let us denote the first by question and the other by enumerated query. The latter is a static product in its final (solvable) form, already formulated and designed by someone else, with a defined start, end, and practical purpose. The former is a dynamic process, a product of one’s own curiosity, a genuine attempt to understand something, as it is produced by the individual who is seeking truth. While questions can be well posed to others, they have a totally different nature, and a dynamic that is not necessarily heading towards a single fixed point as an attractor.

Questions are inherently entangled with the thinking process itself. They represent a movement exploring a vast landscape (apparently infinite) that is mostly unknown, even to the most knowledgeable person. Their power lies in the realisation that they can traverse and reach areas of these landscapes that no one else had access to, and, once these regions are reached, they can serve as a “stopover” for navigating even further areas. Having an answer to a question could be seen, in this landscape metaphor, as describing these areas relative to areas that are more known to us. A question is important not because it leads to a well-known area of the landscape where we have a good description, or answer to it, but because it is capable of leading us to previously inaccessible areas that become part of our map, a map of our ignorance that grows with our knowledge.

Rubem Alves
“And the good thing was that there were no exams on those lessons. It was pure pleasure. There is a total incompatibility between the pleasurable experience of reading—a vagabond experience!—and the experience of reading in order to answer quizzes on interpretation and comprehension. It was always a sadness when the teacher closed the book…” (translated from Portuguese)

From my own personal experience, having witnessed or experienced it myself, I can say some lecturers are very proficient at using an effective practice that destroys the curiosity for learning and investigating a subject: rejection of questions (not enumerated query). This practice is more common than what we might assume. I experienced that in my secondary studies, during my undergraduate studies, postgraduate studies, in departmental seminars and general talks, although the latter with much less intensity and frequency.

How is it done? This dismissal can be done in a plainly rude manner by saying your question is ridiculous/silly or in more sophisticated ways, but the results from this depreciating practice are essentially the same. It seems to me the main reasons for such deleterious attitude are arrogance and fear of unmasking how much they do not know, exposing their lack of understanding about something, which starts to emerge and becomes apparent upon receiving a question.

Now, I believe these lecturers, teachers and speakers are not deliberately doing that because they are evil. Instead, they are just victims of the TTT who were able to obtain higher degrees, become lecturers and survive the educational system, but, in the process, they have, regrettably, lost their passion for stimulating the tradition of questioning and cultivating curiosity around them. Like in a test, questions become, for them, an attempt to measure their expertise in public. They already endured the TTT for too long, and what they cannot answer feels like failing a test, because they were trained to prove their competence by taking tests.

I understand that tests are important tools for learning and can be used in supplementary ways so that students can make the most out of them. Despite this, I believe that tests should not be given the major importance and central position they currently have in the traditional educational system. They do not have to be scrapped. While I am not discussing how this can be done in this article, as the topic is much too vast for even an entire article, I can at least mention that there are different levels at which this can be accomplished, and I think all of them are necessary even if they are gradually executed in phases.

One level of modification concerns the way tests are presented to the students. They can be viewed either as the primary measure of a students’ success in class or as a mere component that is never presented as a target standing on their way, waiting to classify them into two groups based on whether they achieve minimal marks or not. Another level of modification occurs at the execution phase, where tests can become a small project, or a concrete task. These are not mere pieces of paper allegedly attempting to prove a student’s understanding of a subject, but rather valuable tasks that crystallise effort into small, yet worthwhile, achievements. There are more levels where I propose implementing modifications. Perhaps these can be discussed somewhere else.

One difference worth mentioning is that at less advanced stages of education, such as primary and secondary education, students are neither expected to nor capable of learning anything in great depth. When I was at these stages, I used to study any main subjects such as Biology, Grammar or Physics using three or four different books simultaneously, because each one contained an extra piece of information not present in the others. For the undergraduate and graduate studies, however, with denser and more advanced topics, it was impractical to read more than two books (sometimes only one) simultaneously on a given topic.

That observation made me realise that studying to take tests is more beneficial—or less damaging—at early stages when we do not need to devote great time to reflecting on a subject. These initial encounters with tests can help develop important skills such as time management under relatively stressful circumstances. As we progress through the education system, we should be able to get more freedom to reflect and be creative in what draws our attention, an approach that is hardly compatible with the TTT.

Changing to question and questioning to change

Considering schools, one particular issue could be that most of the parents, when possible, enrol their children in the schools that are considered best. These are commonly those with higher acceptance rates into Universities or higher approval rates on national exams such as the GCE in the UK, ENEM in Brazil, Gaokao in China, and SAT in the US. Here, financial interests play an important role again. To be more profitable, most schools need to use these measurements as their optimal target, and the TTT seems to be their best option. This is first because it aligns with what is more profitable, and second, because it is simpler, less risky and more convenient as the teachers have come from that same tradition that was handed on to them, and they will continue handing it on to the next generation.

I should perhaps mention here that I hold optimistic views. I am confident that there are people trying to approach education differently. I met a few such individuals through my academic journey. One case I have in mind is my master’s supervisor, a professor at a research centre, who founded a social teaching project in 1994 and worked as a volunteer. Although free courses and intended for underprivileged students who needed the most support, their objectives included preparing students to think and reflect independently, and, as a secondary consequence, facilitating their admission to Universities without focusing on entrance examination preparation.

I believe these changes have to be made locally by individuals wherever they are until the issue about the TTT reaches the public opinion, which can influence political actions and the educational system as a whole. It is unlikely that the required adjustments will come first from top-down, and the best we can do is act locally, hoping the changes will propagate from the parts to the whole.

Many of the aspects I discuss here are highly variable, depending on the educational stage of a student, from primary education to a PhD. Other sources of variation include the institutions attended, the availability of useful support and academic mentors, and financial circumstances. It is not my intention to delve into these here, but only to briefly mention the existence of such important factors that can substantially impact the learning process, potentially transforming it from an enjoyable experience to an exceedingly challenging one.

Whatever actions we take to address the problem of the TTT, we need to acknowledge that, being contrary to what should be a truly emancipating education, the TTT causes significant damage to the individuals and, consequently, to the entire process of human development within society.

Instead of unrealistically expecting students to be able to cope with this without giving up their own journey through the mazes of knowledge and the creation of ideas, we should act here and now by insisting on raising these issues, openly speaking about the models of education we adopt as a society, making people aware of this tradition of teaching to take tests, and implementing ourselves, whenever possible, the changes that will contribute to the promotion of this important individual right, as well as the duty, of being truly educated.

Final thoughts

Traditions are everywhere and have an undeniable importance in many aspects of our lives. Education, by itself, is a great human tradition. However, when it transitions from concept to practice in the real world, it is subject to being trapped by irrational practices, just as any other human tradition, insofar as we fail to question them. In particular, education as a system is vulnerable to institutional irrationality. Some traditions are, more than merely preserved, imposed and kept immutable by authorities. Any elected authority necessarily takes a position in direct opposition to what is perhaps the greatest human tradition: the tradition of questioning. In such a position, authorities risk an unavoidable clash that, throughout history, has often resulted in brutal violence. Collectively, we humans have been decreasing, albeit very slowly, brutality and barbarism, but not defeating them. These clashes involve other forms of violence that are more subtle, as they are less about physical violence and more about violence against human nature.

What is the meaning of education if not a way of ameliorating our precarious condition (we still risk destroying ourselves in many ways) and liberating us from all kinds of violence?

This attempt at liberation is unattainable when education becomes a system of imposed ignorance. And how can education impose ignorance? It does so precisely by suppressing our innate need to pose questions to our beliefs, traditions and to ourselves. One way in which that can be accomplished is by maintaining certain traditions as unquestionable common sense, convincing us that education is merely a boring pathway to getting a job⁵ to earn money, thereby usurping the truly emancipating education with an education that is based on the TTT.

---

The following quote from a former grammar teacher of mine resonates to a great degree with the ideas expressed in this post.

Sousa Nunes
“Whatever problem humanity faces today, whether on an individual or collective level, it has its roots in Kantian immaturity. The inability to lead the learner from immaturity to maturity is the great problem of our time, and one cannot understand the myriad of other problems derived from this except in the light of this failure in education, which has been merely cosmetic and not dialectical, producing great material progress, but little human growth, allowing the material wealth of a few to coexist with the misery of millions, without dismantling the foundations of the inexorability of selfishness or ‘white blindness’, which threatens the human condition and makes us strangers and enemies within the same country or planet, as narrated by Saramago in his famous essay.

Thus, violence of all types, levels, and degrees will always be the expression of the man still not enlightened and freed from the illusion of himself, because, without genuine education, which provides Kantian maturity, empathy, love, and respect for others, the problems will persist, in the form of wars, preventable diseases, prejudices, contempt for the elderly, child sexual exploitation, corruption, misinformation, inequality, unemployment, destruction of nature, racial hatred, depression, suicide, because the roots of these problems have not been shaken.

Man, says Immanuel Kant, is nothing more than what education makes of him, and as long as parents, teachers, governments, and world leaders do not make this truth a reality, we will be no more than mere extras in the allegory of the cave.”

(translated from Portuguese)

1. Who completed 300 years when I was writing this article on 22/04/2024. ↩

2. Best here is a combination of talented, interested, hard-working, diligent, resilient. ↩

3. Unfortunately, it is still acceptable, as long as they have an alleged justification for using it. ↩

4. Who inspired me with the name of my webpage: “Learn While Live”. ↩

5. Recently, for some years already, university education is losing importance among younger generations as it is no longer delivering the promised job. The reasoning goes like this: If its function is providing a job, and the recently graduated are struggling to find their jobs, what is the point of wasting time and, sometimes, money on that? ↩