Earlier this week, ABC aired the 1997 movie “Liar Liar,” in which Jim Carrey plays a lawyer afflicted with a peculiar malady: For one day, he can speak only the truth. Naturally, this creates havoc in his personal and professional life.
Approximately halfway through the inexplicably enjoyable film (my entertainment standards plummet in the winter, when options shrink and even dramas enacted by friends wielding sock puppets can enthrall), it struck me:
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The premise of “Liar Liar” is exactly what’s wrong with President Bush’s new education plan.
Now, you angry writers of outraged Letters to the Editor can relax. I’m not calling Bush a liar.
The connection between the film and the proposed federal policy is just this: In “Liar Liar,” we discover that truth is a continuum, that truth and lies are not polar opposites. What makes life work are shades of gray and areas of ambiguity.
Bush’s plan for public education has many components, but to me the most troublesome one is the edict for federally mandated tests for, as the president proclaimed, “every student, every year.” School funding will be tied to the results, thus forcing teachers to devote an extraordinary amount of time to preparing students for these annual tests. What may be lost along the way are the concepts that can’t be recapitulated on standardized tests, no matter how carefully composed.
I am talking about, for want of a better term, cultural education.
I hesitate over the phrase only because it has a hoity-toity ring. “Cultural education” sounds like a cotillion or poetry recitation. With public school students falling behind in basic subjects such as math and science, a focus on cultural education can seem like dessert before dinner.
Yet what I mean are critical thinking skills. I mean the putting of ideas and historical movements in cultural context. What school must teach us, along with facts and figures, is how to think, how to organize ideas. An important way of doing this is through reading great literature or listening to great music, discussing it and writing about it — not through spending inordinate amounts of time preparing for an all-important test at year’s end.
There’s no question public education is in need of an overhaul. But a federally mandated annual test after every grade is not the solution. It threatens, in fact, to create a two-tiered society: The students fortunate enough to attend private schools (where no testing is required by government) will have the cultural education enabling them to think deeply and broadly, while students relegated to public schools may not.
Cultural education is a matter of nuance and suggestion, of finding the spaces between the facts where the truth lives. Most teachers I know would prefer to spend their time exploring a story’s theme and meaning in a freewheeling class discussion, for instance, than worrying about the questions on a test.
Ironically, the need for students to be more than rote memorizers of facts is greater than ever. Thanks to technology, the world changes so quickly that by the time a student graduates, many of the facts she or he learned will be obsolete. Education must promote the development of skills to adapt nimbly to change.
If we turn our public schools into versions of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” — that is, a parade of exams — we’ll end up with students ill-equipped for the challenges of the 21st Century.
Standardized tests, clearly necessary at some points along the way, already are administered in many districts. But a federally mandated one every year? That plan would require teachers and students to focus on exams instead of truths.
A dismaying scenario — and that’s no lie.
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