The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior

Author:John Senior [Senior, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Ihs Press
Published: 2008-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Of course we are all in favor of advanced placement in the ordinary sense. If a freshman at college already had two years of high school Latin, he should not begin again with amo, amas, amat. He should be placed in the third year course. If that is what is meant, we should all be for it. If a student has had plane geometry in high school, let him go on to solid in college. It is difficult to adjust these matters. There are differences from school to school, and overlaps from school to college; so the placement test is called upon. Certainly a student should not be forced to take the same course twice, nor should he be given college credit for a course for which he got high school credit – this would be to receive payment twice for the same work done. But once the placement test comes into use there is a strong temptation for the teacher in the senior year of high school to give up the subject in favor of a year’s intense drill in how to get high test scores. Even worse, some universities – and famous ones – are granting college credit to students passing these tests without the genuine experience of the course. This is like trafficking in indulgences; it is a selling of credit in the absence of merit and is a kind of fraud. A smart boy can run four years of college tests and call himself a Bachelor of Arts, when in fact he will be a neurotic with a talent for running tests. Do we detect an adulteration of learning in the name of economy? Credit without courses – which means without teachers, classrooms, electric lights, and heat?

A test is not the equivalent of a course. What we test is only that aspect of the experience which is testable. In some disciplines that aspect includes greater amounts of reality than in others; in none does it include the whole; and in many – especially the humanities – it includes very little. If a student cannot respond to the testable aspect of a discipline to which he has submitted for the required length of time, we infer that he has not sufficiently responded to the whole. But this does not work the other way around: If a student bones up on the testable aspects of a subject – not having submitted to the discipline – the grade he gets on a test in no way implies a corresponding response to the whole. He has not had the whole, so how could he respond? That some students are fast and some slow has no logical relation whatsoever to the selling of indulgenced tests.

Structuring downward from the graduate school to the college has resulted in the sad fact that colleges with fine old names have become marketplaces for a series of tests, with quickie courses in how to pass them taught by graduate assistants whose minds are on their PhDs. Liberal education has all but been eliminated.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.