Ignition for Education

I’ve commented before on “the curse of lazy numbers” and how it births obsession with standardized test scores and psychometrics, both of which distort thinking and policy in the world of education. I’m now reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being, which suggests an origin for the curse. Bridle writes,

“The appearance of computers was so wondrous and their abilities so powerful that it convinced us that the universe is like a computer…We treat the world as something to be computed, and thus amenable to computation. We think of it as something which can be broken down into discrete points of data and fed into machines. We believe the machine will give us concrete answers about the world which we can act on, and confers upon those answers a logical irrefutability and a moral impunity” (page 178).

Schools, lessons, curriculums, and students have little in common with computers. So maybe its time to ditch our measurement fetishes.