Why is it that avid believers in testing are so sneaky? Why can’t they just say, straight out, that they believe dumber people should get out of the way of smarter people who are on the fast track to success? Instead, they go through all sorts of intellectual machinations to argue that testing, by breaking down class privilege and elitism, leads to justice for all.
Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve, and a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute) believes in the merit of tests so passionately that he thinks they should entirely replace the college system, which, he argues, is “cruel and insane.” In his article, “For Most People, College is a Waste of Time” (in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal), he says that we have an “obsession with the BA” that has led to “a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.”
Murray argues that instead of the college system that leads to the B.A. degree, we should have tests in certification—using the model of the CPA exam that certifies public accountants. In Murray’s eyes, relying on national certification tests would clarify for employers what, exactly, a prospective employee knows. He also believes that “[g]etting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence—treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone—is one way to help us to recognize that common bond” (by which he means that we all begin employment as apprentices, and move on from there).
The outcomes assessment movement, with its stress on college and university “accountability,” is small potatoes compared to Murray’s proposals. To Murray, colleges don’t need to be improved. They’re entirely unnecessary. And in their failure to “certify” anything, they amount to no more than expensive middlemen who function as obstacles both to genuine equal educational opportunity and to employers trying to figure out whom to hire.
Like the outcomes assessment gurus, Murray thinks higher education problems lie with the variability and—therefore, to him—meaninglessness of the college degree. Unlike them, however, Murray argues that the solution lies not in improving the quality of the B.A. degree, but in eliminating it altogether.
Murray thinks that “[y]oung people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a test-based certification, not a degree.”
By replacing the degree-based system with a certification system—in which people can presumably study on their own, find their way to testable knowledge, and take a test that certifies them as masters of a body of knowledge—Murray thinks we’d replace a socially debilitating system where degrees do nothing but confer status. Eventually, we’d arrive at a society in which “it’s what you know that makes the difference.”
Here is probably not the place to list the specific benefits of what you might call “slow learning” (as opposed to “fast learning,” just as the “slow food” movement opposes “fast food”) to young people, over four years of learning in a college or university setting. Nor is there space to discuss the holistic nature of a liberal arts education. Instead, I’ll simply point out that if Murray really thinks that status, privilege and class divisions would be eradicated by an equal educational opportunity certification system, he’s a fool. Exactly what, pray tell, would prevent the certification test grade from becoming a transmogrified form of the status-conferring B.A. degree?
I propose that Murray stop thinking about tests long enough to start thinking about people. He should begin by reading Michael Young’s brilliant satire, Rise of the Meritocracy (1958). Then again, Murray would probably miss the point of Young’s book, incapable as he is of seeing that society’s interests don’t necessarily align with the interests of those who are really good at taking tests.
Young coined the term “meritocracy,” which we now use mostly when we mean something is a good system. Yet Young was fearfully prescient in seeing that “merit”-based societies lead to a class of arrogant meritocrats who lord it over a profoundly hopeless society.
Young himself was dispirited by the failure of many people to understand that his book was a satire on meritocracy. In 2001 (the year before he died), in an article reflecting on his book many years after the fact, he offered this tragic insight: “It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none.”
Unfortunately, Murray fails to see that his system would do nothing to stave off elitist privilege. More important, he fails to consider, even for a moment, that a healthy democracy rests on both the whole of the citizenry, and the citizen as a whole.
