Comment by criddell
11 hours ago
Based on my experiences with the teachers my kids had a decade or so ago, all you would have to do is find a way to test for it and then put it on the state-mandated test that is used to evaluate schools.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
That’s a good thing.
Assessing and measuring student knowledge is very important. Impossible to evaluate and improve current teaching methods otherwise.
The one-two punch of Goodhart's law and the McNamara fallacy bites hard here, though. We only measure things we can easily quantify, and then we optimize around those measurements, destroying their efficacy as second-order indicators of the things we couldn't figure out how to measure.
For example is the purpose of educating children about history A) to give them a systemic, if somewhat cursory, understanding of the evolution of society, in order allow them to contextualize the present? or B) ensure they know a list of a hundred or so people and events that happened?
It is much easier to quantify the latter.