ALBERT EINSTEIN--FAILURE

Today is the birthday of Albert Einstein. What a failure he was. Of course we know him as the creator of the Theory of Relativity and Nobel laureate. But that is unimportant. He was a failure. Many of his early teachers thought he was mentally challenged. In those days they used the German equivalent of "retarded".

Einstein didn't like to study except for those things that interested him. Albert was interested in mathematics and philosophy. He just didn't bother with the other stuff.

A high school official wanted young Einstein expelled from school. The teacher complained that Einstein never said anything. He just sat in the back of the class and smiled. At the age of sixteen Albert dropped out of school.

Albert Einstein would probably have fared even worse today in the United States than he did
in late Nineteenth Century Wurtemburg, Germany. He definitely would have been one child left behind in the era of No Child Left Behind.

The No Child Left Behind act is a dismal reflection of the low level to which pedagogical discussion has sunk in the United States today. There are innumerable things wrong with this act. For those interested in checking out some of these issues I suggest visiting www.educatorrountable.org. But let's take one aspect.

How do you quantify education. How do you measure how a student is learning. The simple (and simplistic) answer is through testing.

The work of Howard Gardner has shown that people learn in different ways. Another educator pointed out that children's learning styles are as varied as the colors of the rainbow. There are probably as many different ways of learning as there are people. but, at least, we need to recognize that someone who does well on a test might not be the most intelligent on many levels.

Testing only deals with accumulated knowledge. So a test can ascertain just how well a person has memorized required material in a course. Testing can measure how well a student can spew back what he has ingested. Digestion of this material is often not essential and can even be a distraction for the person taking the test.

Testing determines the material to be tested. And there is a time and a place for that. However, only that which can be easily tested will be included in the testing program. As Albert Einstein put it, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"

The present obsession with testing leads to an ever increasing number of teachers who teach solely for the test. Even the importance of the material itself falls by the wayside. The test's the thing. Students focus on what the "right" answers are.

Creative teaching becomes more and more a luxury for school districts that face obliteration unless certain test scores are met. It is not surprising that the poorer school districts are in the greatest bind. These are most often the ones with the greatest problems and the greatest need for innovative approaches. But how can there be innovative approaches when the universal "fix" is testing? How can these schools encourage creativity in the face of the cyclones of "test-osterone" blowing in from Washington?

Creative teachers fall by the wayside. Either that or they buckle under to meet the new "mandates."

The Advanced Placement courses have long been infested with the test virus. As an historian I was shocked to see that the Advanced Placement course in American history at a local high school was simply a prolonged preparation for the test. The vital, complex and fascinating issues of American history were reduced to multiple choices or "correct" interpretative essays.

It seems to me that one of the basic goals of education is to encourage people to think for themselves. It seems to me that one of the goals of education is to encourage people to find and develop their talents and potentials. Testing and the teaching associated with it do little if any of this.

It's bizarre. They are testing kids in kindergarten. A whole new generation is growing up thinking that education is simply a succession of tests. Not only that. There isn't any break.

Homework is the handmaiden of the testing model. Kids have to do schoolwork on weekends--even during the summer. It seems like robots have taken over the American school system. Or maybe it's just a repackaging of that old Puritan axiom: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Busy work substitutes for education. If Albert Einstein were a kid today he would probably drop out of school by third grade instead of eleventh.

Of course testing is profitable--for the testing companies and all the peripheral industries. But there are a few things that can't be tested.

You can't test creativity. You can't have a box that tests the ability of people to think outside the box. So Thomas Edison, Galileo, and e.e. cummings would simply not pass.

You can't test art. You can't test music. Oh, yes, you can test knowledge of the scale. You can test musical theory. But how about the art itself?

You can't test imagination. You can test knowledge. Once again some words from Albert Einstein. "Imagination is more important than knowledge," he said. "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the globe."

Since you can't test creativity, the arts and imagination, they have little use as part of a school's curriculum. In fact, the arts are disappearing from schools across the country. The money is all in the tests.

Where would we be without creativity and imagination? We would not exist as a species. For these are what take us beyond our limited known world. It is imagination and creativity that gave us fire and the wheel. And Albert Einstein.

Which gets me back to the beginning. Happy Birthday Albert. Maybe you were right when you said, "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." It's becoming more and more true for millions of kids.