By Mork the Orkan
I bet you
didn't think I was still around. I guess I “egged” you all on to believe I left
Earth in 1982, but I have been here all these many years masquerading as a
series of your loser presidential hopefuls. I thought I was rather funny as
Michael Dukakis. The tank looked so much like a rove ranger on my native planet,
Ork.
My apologies
for being elected president in 2000. Who knew Chad could be so important. I
thought it was a nation in Africa.
I have to
admit I still actually read print newspapers like the New York Times. It makes
me a bit anachronistic, but I like having multiple ways of accessing
information. I was trained to learn foreign languages to save my life, so I can
say I am multi-lingual, and now I can also say I am “multi-medial”.
The past few
days I read three articles that taken together add to my frustration
understanding of some issues I have noticed you attempting to deal with the
past few years. Unlike many of you, I try to read pieces from all sides of the
ideology spectrum so I have a wider range of ideas and facts to form my own
opinions. I know to some humans (what I would label myself here, I suppose, if
one must be labeled) that might be anathema, but it is what I was taught in
Orkan schools.
Richard
Atkinson and Saul Geyser’s The Big Problem With the New SAT, David Brooks' What Is Your Purpose?, and Eduardo Porter's What Debate On Inequality Is Missing and my observations of your society for the
past 37 Earth years have led me to some rather rather dramatic conclusions.
Says Porter,
“Over the
last four decades the debate in Washington about poverty and inequality has
been bogged down in a somewhat pointless, often surreal debate about the size
of government and the amount spent on behalf of the poor.”
Says
Brooks, “Public debate is now under moralized and over politicized. We have
many shows (I guess TV?) where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many
on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life.
Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers
and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data
analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in
the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.”
Practical wisdom should always
rule knowledge, not the other way around.
Finally,
says Atkinson and Geiser, “Norm-referenced”
exams [are] designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they
actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than
measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to
produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the
middle and with sharply descending numbers at the top and bottom.”
“Shazbot.” Is
that a test or a roller coaster?
“Test
designers accomplish this, among other ways, by using plausible-sounding
“distractors” to make multiple-choice items more difficult, requiring students
to respond to a large number of items in a short space of time, and by dropping
questions that too many students can answer correctly.”
That is
“Namnulicy”. (Idiocy.)
Remember, I
was sent here by the BIG GIANT HEAD to evaluate you. What did I find? Instead of understanding the best of humanity
and trying to find ways to maximize everyone’s personal potential and personal
satisfaction, you debate about power and money and as a result do exactly the
opposite. I believe one of your fine
historians called that folly. She defined that as "Pursuit of Policy Contrary to
Self-Interest."
I have to
report that you are the most foolish group of beings from another world I have
ever come across.
How odd you
are. You test children so if 10% know 95% of the information asked of on a “norm-based”
test, and they get the lowest score (say a 95), they automatically are labeled
failures. So too those who scored below an arbitrary “cut score” of, let’s say
97%.
So rather
than saying how smart these children are and how creative and innovative their
teachers, educational institutions may have been, they are all failures. These
are the results of psychometrician-developed exams. That is incredulous.
I am shocked
to learn that you grade these tests to emphasize speed and recall as opposed to
careful thought and problem solving over time as demanded by long term projects
that ask students to solve real problems.
I am more
shocked to see how fundamentally primitive you are in believing that these one
size fit all tests are suitable for everyone because I know how important it is
for all children to have what you call an Individual Education Plan for only a
very few students, and what Orkans call nurturing. Why are these plans only for
those you call “Special?”
I wonder
why, in the USA, you want everyone, everywhere, to be the same. In our most primitive
times, a hundred “krell” ago, we progressed past that point and recognized the
value of the individual. Our society learned how to bring out the best of each future
adult to ultimately succeed by stressing what they can do, not what they can’t.
Ultimately
I have to ask, why do you “American humans” exist? Why do you choose leaders that
make these asinine decisions that hold back your society? Look what happened
when you elected me. As a joke, I tried to sell you a bill of goods I called No
Child Left Behind, and you took it seriously.
Why can’t you
create laws without someone you call a corporation profiting. (I still don't
understand how your laws call them individuals with all the rights of humans.) Why
is your major concern finance and not humanity and/or morality?
You guys
crack me up. No reference to that other Orkan, Humpty Dumpty though.
Your
predisposition to think that anything futuristic (in your quest to be like us)
is based on the idea that neuroscientists, biometric specialists, economists,
and computer operators using “Big Data” should rule your world, especially in how
we educate our children is ludicrous.
We are so over
that primitive and barbarian idea.
I am totally
disgusted with your bad behavior towards each other, your ill tempers, your
inability to listen and learn from each other, and your avoidance of what
matters most: a meaningful life.
Will your
society survive, I often ponder, if you cannot interact more personally, and
ask, “Why the hell are you doing this to yourselves and your kids?”
Finally I
examined your bizarre and obviously restrictive class structure. Surely you
cannot continue to have so few exist so lavishly at the expense of so many.
Surely you must recognize what rapidly growing class inequality and inequity has
done to your society. It seems to me that this testing craze and what you call
Common Core may be at the heart of this.
·
Why aren’t
the children of the wealthy subjected to the same inhuman forms of testing and
this Common Core thing as the children of the working classes?
·
Why do you
not respect the working people on whose shoulders your society is carried?
·
Why do you
revere those who make huge amounts of money and nothing else?
·
Why do you
care more for corporate foundations than workers unions?
·
Why is
finance and real estate more important than intellect, human life, and intellectual
creativity?
“Geezba.” I
pity you.
·
Will you
not learn from your own history and not follow the path of folly?
·
Why do you
pass laws to protect the few members of your society that profit from them
while you fool the people into thinking these laws (that actually limit them) are
to maintain freedom?
·
Why do you
not pass laws to allow for regular individuals to “live long and prosper” (as
my Vulcan buddy, Spock, used to say)?
·
Why don't your
institutions pass laws to better distribute wealth rather than limit the
opportunities for 90% of you to gain it?
·
Why don't you
pay attention to truly futuristic and knowing humans like Anthony Atkinson of
Oxford University when he proposes, “strengthening unions and creating a ‘social
and economic council’ where representatives of labor and civil society could
have a say in policy, offering a counterweight to corporate power”?
Atkinson is
right when he says of your kind, “We are stuck in a narrow set of ideas.”
All I can
finally say is for you to look what you do to your own children.
Your cruel testing
schemes will only prepare your children to be robotic servants of the universe
while those barbarians among you who author Tom Wolf sarcastically called
“masters of the universe” continue to defile your society.
After 37
years I must finally leave you. My final report to THE BIG GIANT HEAD is that
unless you quickly change your ways you are not worth the effort to save until you
learn to save yourselves. “Shazbot.”
Dedicated to Robin Williams.
No comments:
Post a Comment